Yu-Gi-Oh!/Headscratchers

See also the GX and the 5D's Headscratchers pages.

• Okay, this happened in GX, I know, but it pertains to Yugi and the end of Yu-Gi-Oh!, so I figured it fit here better: It's blatantly hinted at that "Yugi" in GX looks like a lot like Atem, both from the time Judai got Winged Kuriboh and when he challenged Judai to a duel in that... alternate world/time/whatever the hell it was. But I swear I saw Yugi looking and sounding a lot like he did in Yu-Gi-Oh when he was on the boat to give Duel Academy his deck–you know, during that arc with that one kid on a serious mind-trip thinking he was "Yugi"/Atem. So, what the hell? Did the anime team just screw up, or was that a hint at Atem having come back at some point?
• Why did Yami play the Seal of Orichalcos against Rafael? If he hadn't, he would've lost the duel but nothing was at stake. If neither player uses the seal, the loser can just walk away, soul intact. For that matter, why didn't he just rip up the card to prevent it from being used on anyone?
  • That was the point Rafael was trying to make. Yami was so obsessed with winning (not to mention really pissed off) that he played the Seal even though he didn't have to.
• Why is it in the English dub, the events of Ancient Egypt took place 5000 years ago, instead of 3000? Was it an actual accident on the part of the translators, or is there a reason they changed the years?
  • I'm no expert on Japanese, but I have long suspected it was for similar reasons as why the infamous "over 9000" line is 9000 in English, but 8000 in the original version: 5000 matches up with the speaking animations better than 3000.
    • Original poster here: thank you!
  • I personally suspect that it's because 5000 years ago would be 3000 BC.
  • According to Wikipedia, there was a pharaoh called Seth-Peribsen that ruled in the 2nd dynasty, which started around 2890, approximately 5000 years before the events of the current series (give or take a couple hundred years). Translation Correction, maybe?
• Is there any particular reason Yami can't create his own Shadow Game before Bakura, Marik, Pegasus, etc. create theirs? I assume the rules say that anyone with a Millennium Item can turn a duel into a Shadow Game so long as the rules are fair to both players. And why would one Shadow Game overwrite another?
  • Yami kept on pumping out Shadow Games against random people in Season Zero (the Toei anime before the one more widely known), but he stops doing this when the 'real' Yu-Gi-Oh anime starts. In that anime, his sadism magically vanishes, and seeing as the stakes are quite high in Shadow Games, he really doesn't have a reason to.
  • Yugi kind of pulled the leash on Yami after killing to many people. He grew a pair, slapped him on the nose and told him No.
  • Who says Shadow Games have to be sadistic? If you know your opponent will invoke a "loser dies/is banished to the Shadow Realm" Shadow Game, why not invoke your own and make it a bit less painful? Keep the consequences of losing, but nothing else.
  • I'm pretty sure that the entire idea around Shadow Games is that they're sadistic. In order for a Shadow Game to be played I believe players have to pay up something dear to them. If a bet placed in a Shadow Game would be something like loads of cash or anything, they could just as easily play a normal game with the same rules.
  • Also, in the manga, he still continues to mind crush people, and he plays a bunch of Shadow Games during the Duelist Kingdom arc. While mind crushing kinda existed in the anime, it was quite toned down.
  • As previously stated, in the manga Yami Yuugi was quite fond of mindfucking people, but that diminished as he spent more time with Yuugi. So what I think happened is that Yami still has the ability to create Shadow Games, but he chooses not to use it because either Yuugi asked him to stop it (the consequences are sometimes worse than death, after all, and Yuugi was probably horrified off-screen when he found out what happened to Yami's previous victims), or because Yami doesn't want to endanger Yuugi, seeing how the latter almost died when they dueled against Pegasus and was also used as a sacrifice in their duel against Marik.
    • Don't be so sure about Yuugi being horrified. This is manga-only, but anybody remember those collectable fighter monsters that the bully was beating everyone up for? It's pretty early in the series, and before this there's effectively no evidence to suggest that Yuugi knows that the other Yuugi exists other than that weird series of blackouts - which says nothing. However, in this arc, after he gets his toy stolen, he asks a classmate if he can borrow his, and goes looking for a fight. Effectively he's asking the other Yuugi to come out and lay the smackdown out on the bully, and has noticed that Bad Things happen to people a lot of the time in these situations.
      • Actually, that was in volume 6 of the manga, and it was in volumes 4-5 during the DEATH-T arc that Yuugi admited to Jounouchi and Anzu that he suspected the existence of his other self/the Pharaoh's spirit^[1]. Also at the end of the DEATH-T arc Yuugi remarks that, for once, he can remember everything that happened. So by the time the Monster Fighter chapters happen, Yuugi is having fewer blackouts and seems to have some idea of what his other self/the Pharaoh's spirit is capable of. In fact, several chapters in volume 6 almost give the feeling that Yuugi is indirectly asking his other self/the Pharaoh's spirit for help when he finds himself in over his head, as both a demonstration of the growing trust between them and as Yuugi's fulfillment of his declaration in volume 5 that he "won't be afraid of the Other Me anymore."
  • To go further into detail, he was still dishing out Penalty Games in Duelist Kingdom that were as equally "sadistic" as the first seven volumes of the manga, but stopped after Pegasus said that the Millennium Puzzle had an evil will, and if he continued to do so, he would have proved Pegasus's words correct. Most of the confusion regarding the shift between the personalities of early Dark Yugi and the one seen in the second series anime is the result of Adaptation Decay and Fan Dumb regarding the supposed connection between the Toei series and Duel Monsters series. Unfortunately, a lot of people have only seen the anime and never gave the manga a chance, which is why confusion like this occurs.
  • Because Shadow Games are generally equal in terms of punishment for losing, Yami Yugi probably figured he could just win the Shadow Game his opponent created, rather than wasting any of his own magic or effort summoning his own Shadow Game.

• Why does Mokuba call Seto "Kaiba" in the translated manga? I don't know if it's JUST the official version, but it's pretty awkward to call your older brother by your shared last name.
  • I think at one point he calls "Kaiba" Seto in the anime.
    • I think it's because using your surname is more respectful, and Mokuba has a lot of respect for his big brother. Maybe? Also, if you think about it, Seto earned that name. He might have hated his adoptive father, but he's proud of his company and he's proud of the work he's done with it. If you look at it that way, "Kaiba" would be like a badge of honour.
      • Actually in Japan you never call anyone who shares your family name by it. (don't know if it applies to people who have the same last name as you but are too distant to be part of your family)
      • Well, I understand that, but it's still..awkward I guess. Maybe it's translates better over in Japan because of the differences in languages? Personally, I like how the anime did it with the whole "Nii-sama" thing.
  • It was a mistranslation by Viz. Mokuba Kaiba never calls his brother "Kaiba", because frankly, that's extremely silly.
• Why are Yugi and co. so quick to befriend and/or help Kaiba? Following the manga, the majority of their early encounters with him involved kidnapping, theft and/or attempted murder. Even if we assume that they were willing to start over after Yami Yugi 'cleansed Kaiba's darkness' or whatever that still doesn't explain why they're so comfortable with Mokuba. Have they completely forgotten that he tried to poison Jounouchi/Joey and Yugi? Or that he forced Yugi into a game as part of Death-T where the loser might be terrified into a heart attack?
  • Joey himself points this out in the manga when they arrive at the place where the Duel Tower was, thinking something along the lines of "Well, if you're such a nice guy, why'd you try to kill us with a giant themepark of death?!" I think it's because Yugi is quite a forgiving kid, and his friends just follow his example. Still sucks, though.
  • Also, recall that Mokuba saved Honda's life during Death-T, and called off his older brother's gun-wielding thugs.
• In the flashback sequence where Pegasus tells the kid how to beat Bandit Keith...what was Pegasus trying to prove? The kid beat Keith in one move, meaning one of two things: one, the implications of the mind reading were useless, as the victory was a simple matter of playing the right card after Bandit Keith's turn (and that the kid wouldn't have known what to do without Pegasus' note), or two, Bandit Keith clearly wasn't beaten by the kid himself; he was just doing what Pegasus told him to do. Either way, part of that sequence becomes a little superfluous.
  • Even worse, this was an actual case of cheating. Not only did Pegasus replace himself with another player (which is outright against the rules in almost every single one on one match in tournaments), he also gave that player a note that told him exactly what to do. That right there is a blatant example of cheating in front of millions of people and was caught on camera. People get banned from tournament play for far less than that in RL.
  • Well, Pegasus was running the tournament and created the card game itself, so he makes the rules.
  • And it's not technically cheating: there's no rule against having a player take your physical place on the field and giving him commands, and odds are there weren't any traps or spells to stop the kid, Pegasus was just humiliating Keith by showing that he was so much better that he could tell someone exactly what to do, the child part was just for extra humiliation, and win that easily.
    • That would still be cheating if only because Keith himself pointed out that asking for help wasn't permitted in the tournament. Even ignoring the ludicrous idea that the audience would accept some kid being thrown into the last match when dozens or hundreds of them lost in early rounds Keith still should have pointed out that Pegasus giving the kid instructions is a case of the kid cheating.
    • The point is not that he exchanged places with the kid, that is technically "substitution" but then he told the kid what to do and even wrote it down, which is "helping".
    • Remember though, the match in question was an Exhibition Match, Bandit Keith had already won (and retained) the title of Intercontinental Champion, so the match between him and Pegasus was just Fan Service, there was actually nothing at stake. As such, yes, what Pegasus did was cheating by having a proxy take over, but he's the creator and owner of Duel Monsters, and since the match was superfluous anyway, I doubt anyone really cared enough to lose their job over it.
    • And in the manga, it wasn't a tournament at all; Keith explicitly challenged Pegasus, and Pegasus accepted (he set all the other conditions: a million dollars were at stake, and the entire thing was broadcasted nationwide).
• Let me make this simple: How the Hell can holograms cause explosions, knockback, wind, etc. outside of Shadow Games?
  • Hard Light?
  • GX and onwards refer to the holograms as "Hard Light", a fictional technology that adds a slight level of physical depth to the holograms. Also 5Ds explains this with "Momentum" ("Ener-D" in the dub, "Feel" in the manga, and "Sense" in the English translation of the manga), which is an energy that is emitted when dueling that carries over your emotional intent in the impact, creating a type of sensation over the opponent.
  • Probably because the anime is over-the-top. I think in the manga version, the holograms are not as dangerous as the anime version. In fact, in Yugioh GX manga, it is implied that the players just act it up. In the manga, when Manjoume collapsed after getting direct attacked, his schoolmates (who were unaware that Manjoume was playing a shadow game instead of a regular duel and thus felt the pain) were surprised because Manjoume was not the type of person that "acted during duels". Note that the manga Manjoume is stoic and quiet, basically a total opposite to his loony anime counterpart.
  • Rule of Cool. Would you rather watch 30 minutes of players going "*fingersnap* Awww, nuts" when they lose life, or going "OH SHIT!!" as they see an explosion coming to knock them off a rickety rope bridge into a giant pit of rainbow anti-matter? In-universe, though, the explanation seems to be that Solid Vision's name comes at least in part from the fact that the holograms are, in fact, somehow related to actual matter.
  • It probably has something to do with a minor form of gravity manipulation through light. Light is made up of photons, which have properties of both a wave and a particle at the same time. Space and time are relative, and the closer to light speed a particle travels, the greater the distortion is. Einstein's theories of relativity state that gravity is nothing more than a distortion of the fabric of space-time. Thus, if light particles can distort time, they also distort space, and can potentially alter gravity. It seems reasonable then, that the explosions, knockback, wind, and other various effects produced by the "Solid Vision" holograms may be caused by minor gravity fields generated by the holograms.
    • Holograms do not work that way (and light in general doesn't work that way either).
      • When you say light doesn't work "that way" do you mean that light doesn't distort space-time? Because if that is your meaning, I think this guy would like to have a word with you.
  • This Troper had always assumed it was some little fan thingy built into the duel disk itself. Take damage and you get a face full of air.
  • Forget explosions - how can holographic suits of armour allow two 17 year olds to jump 30 feet in the air, punch each other, and have one fall back to the ground unharmed while the other flies down?
    • The Seal of Orichalcos makes everything in the game real.
      • No, all the Seal did was allow them to summon monsters from the other realm in place of their monsters. Joey and Vallons armour, though? Those were advanced machines that would have no counterparts back then. So unless they had highly advanced computers fighting in the Dragon war as well....
      • And that doesn't explain how Valon could do it when he went 1-on-2 with Rebecca and Duke without the Seal.
        • And how about Pegasus' toon monsters, for instance? A good guess would be that Dartz, with his money and power, had the initiative to create any card he or his minions desired, which is the only logical explanation for all of the Orichalcos related cards.
• Why do people continue with these tournaments even though you have people going into comas when they lose matches? Is there no regulatory committee for this sort of thing?
  • That only happens when some damn supervillains up. And they only go after people with some connection to Millennium items and the associated plot devices. The average player doesn't seem to have a problem worse than run-of-the-mill cheating.
• In the manga (possibly not in the anime), it is revealed that Seto cheated to win the chess match against Gozaburo which led to his and Mokuba's adoption. Which begs the question: HOW DOES ONE CHEAT AT CHESS??? The only two ways I can think of (performing an illegal move and switching pieces around when one's opponent isn't looking) would never succeed against a player of world-class skill, which Gozaburo is clearly stated to possess. Did he read his mind?? HOW DID HE DO IT?? (The cheating was probably put in to illustrate Seto's desperation to get himself and Mokuba out of the Orphanage of Fear and his determination to win at all costs, as well as to provide the moral Cheating Is Bad ("Now remember kids, if you cheat, you will be subjected to years of constant and systematic child abuse..."), but STILL. Has Kazuki Takahashi ever played chess??)
  • That's why the dub pulls a Woolseyism on this scene: instead of being claimed to cheat at his chess game with Gozaburo, Seto instead won simply by studying Gozaburo's chess strategies, which is much more reasonable.
  • Even though I believe that Takahashi really wrote cheated (as it appears in the German version too, unless it's a translation of the American version), it's possible that he meant "tricked him", as in "tricked him into thinking that he was a weak opponent when he actually wasn't".
  • There are ways to cheat in chess. If Gozaburo underestimated Seto, the later could've pulled an illegal move (like intentionally put his own king in check) without Gozaburo noticing. It's all about psychology.
  • There actually is a way to cheat at chess: Have an AI decide your moves. Not implausible with an accomplice and modern communications equipment and there has been at least one professional player accused of it. Note that Espa Roba shows the communications part is trivial to do in this universe.
• Here's the big question: Why don't they just shoot Yugi and get over it?!?
  • Because of the Puzzle, basically.
  • Apparently the Puzzle can produce some sort of protective shield- in an early manga chapter, using its power caused a die thrown at his forehead to break in half, and there's also what happened in his duel against the Player Killer of Darkness in Duelist Kingdom.
  • That was fast. Then would the puzzle had protect Yugi from the spinning saws in the case he lost?
    • Atem was a bit of a Reality Warper back when the shield happened. It was probably either a temporary thing, or an illusion to fuck with his opponent's head. He loves doing that.
    • Actually in that manga chapter the die made a cracking noise, like it hit something solid, and once it fell away it was revealed that Atem had actually used the Millennium Puzzle to block the die. The die cracked because it hit the tip of the puzzle.
  • Because even if they did just shoot Yuugi and try to take the Puzzle, the Puzzle would not let them. It's shown (in the manga at least) that Atem is capable of creating illusions/hurting people/generally using magic even inside the Puzzle. For whatever reason, I don't think he'd be willing to go happily with someone who murdered Yuugi.
  • In the manga, there's at least two instances of Atem being able to take control of Yugi's body even if Yugi's soul has been trapped in something else. One instance was a soul eating jar, the other was Bakura's lead miniature. And in both the manga and the anime, Atem is perfectly able to stand up and continue the duel with Pegasus even after the strain of the Shadow Game caused Yuugi to collapse. So unless the gunshot physically crippled the body they share, shooting Yuugi would probably do nothing more than bring the wrath of the Pharaoh down upon your head. Even then I'm not sure how safe you'd be from a crippled and pissed off Atem...
  • Also, there's the one chapter with that "medium" who wanted to rape Anzu. He sends off Yugi to the library, where he has planned a trap for him. In the last second, Yugi deciphers the meaning of the "premonition" the guy told him earlier. The bookcases fall, but Yugi (or rather Yami Yugi) stands in the exact same spot, thinking that this was close, and if he had noticed only a little bit later... IMO, this implies that he can shield his body with his puzzle, but maybe only outside of games? Or when the plot demands it?
    • I was always under the impression that Yami just calmly sidestepped the bookshelves at the last possible moment, since Yugi was standing near the end of one of the falling ones. Although in the anime's version (sub and dub) of the duel with Panik, Yami DOES use the puzzle to shield himself from the flamethrowers.
  • I believe this is because the puzzle has to be 'won', not stolen. So if even if you get past the pharaoh and the magic of the puzzle and manage to kill Yuugi, you wouldn't be able to harness its power because it was not won in a proper battle (I think Marik explained this once), you stole it instead from the cold fingers of a dead boy.
    • This is canon according to (at the very least) the English Duelist Kingdom anime and Millenium World manga, as well as the Duelist Kingdom callback episode somewhere around the time of Battle City where Bandit Keith tries to kill Yugi only after he fails in winning the puzzle for his puppeteer.
• This wasn't in the manga, but it was in the anime and it pissed me off: When Bakura stole the Millennium Eye, Shadi turns up, thinks Yugi did it and went in his mind. Thing I don't get is, when he realised it wasn't Yugi who did it, why didn't he stick around and keep looking for the culprit? If he'd have just followed Yugi for a bit, he'd have seen Bakura and realised that he was the only one who could have committed the crime. Instead, he just buggers off back to wherever the hell he came from, having achieved nothing. Also, if he's meant to be so creepily all-knowing (they showed earlier in that episode that he knew stuff about Pegasus that he shouldn't have been able to know), why didn't he know it was Bakura anyway? I know they were trying to fit a "season 0" plot into the series so we'd know who Shadi was, but it still irritates me.
  • • I'm guessing that after Shadi went into Yugi's mind, he realised that it wasn't a simple matter of the Millennium Eye being stolen, but of destined events playing out. Similar to the Toei anime and manga where his initial reaction to Yugi having the Millennium Puzzle is to try and take it from him. When he realises that Yugi can use its power, he understands that it is meant to belong to him.
  • Same troper as above, and this is another adaptation of season 0 that annoys me. During the duel against Bakura in Duelist Kingdom, they make a big thing about one of the heroes having to be sacrificed to get rid of the Man Eater Bug. Incredibly sad, I'm sure. But then, it's Yugi's turn. Why doesn't he just summon another monster and sacrifice that?
    • Did we see his hand? Perhaps he didn't have another monster?
    • The actual text of Man-Eater Bug allows the owner to destroy any of their opponent's monster cards on the field when Man-Eater Bug is flipped. Even if Yugi had played a crap monster to attack Man-Eater Bug, Bakura would have chosen to take out any of the other monsters in play anyway. The effect doesn't apply to whatever monster attacks Man-Eater bug.
    • The sacrifice wasn't so much as too attack the Man-Eater Bug, as it was a sacrifice to activate the Horn of Heaven card, which in the real game at least requires a sacrifice in order to activate. Though that still leaves the question of whether or not Yugi had another monster card in his hand.
    • At that point, he had already put four of his friends into the game. He was probably worried that he might accidentally play himself if he played another monster.
    • He had a Magician of Faith face down. If any of his other friends were sent to the graveyard, he could revive them by using Magician of Faith's effect to bring Monster Reborn back from the graveyard and play it. However, if Magician of Faith were destroyed, there would be no way to get Anzu back. Whether he let the Man-Eater Bug activate its effect or played his Horn of Heaven, he'd lose a monster either way, but by playing the Horn of Heaven, he got to choose the monster instead of Bakura, insuring that it wouldn't be Magician of Faith.
  • Regarding the same situation as mentioned above, this troper was always confused as to why Pegasus never forewarned Yugi and co. about Bakura. I know he dies in the manga, so there they have no way of knowing, but in the anime, he is very much alive and could have contacted Yugi privately at any given time to discuss the whole deal. I suppose it was all just really irresponsible writing on part of the animeAdaptation Decay, but hell, would it have been so hard to slip that in at some point? If they can go the whole fucking DOMA arc with directions and clues to defeating Dartz and Paradias and whatnot, then at some point Pegasus can say, "Oh yeah, Yugi-boy, by the way, your pale-skinned, sometimes-evil, antisocial friend tore my Millenium Eye out and then went on his merry way. Take care!" It wouldn't really make much sense, but at least there'd be consistence of some sort. This troper is forced to believe that either the writers of the anime wanted to imply that the shock of having an eye torn out of its socket for the second time in his life caused him enough trauma to forget what led to the event, or they thought we'd all be stupid and forget that little detail.
    • Bakura had demonstrated before the ability to erase people's minds using his Millennium Ring.

• What irritates me is this: Yes, Joey is a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, and yes he acts like a dumbass most of the time. But why does everyone keep insisting that he's weak and that they'll be able to beat him easy peasy? He came second in Duelist Kingdom and he was a Semi-Finallist in Battle City. Surely that actually means that maybe, just maybe, he's actually a really good player? Aside from whatever arc it is' Big Bad, Kaiba or Yugi, he never lost a single duel, Despite this, he got a reputation for being a loser somehow. Why is this?
  • Wait, do you mean canon-wise or fandom-wise? Anyway, I think (at least within the fandom) it's because he's not a wielder of a Millennium Item nor has he held a Egyptian God Card (He did held one of the legendary dragons, but that was in a filler arc). Plus he's not as big as Kaiba and Yugi. His continuing decline in rank doesn't help at all, especially since he uses a gamble deck that makes it very easy for detractors (both in the series and the fandom) to downplay his victories.
    • Of course, said gamble deck is really a smattering of chance cards, which is meant to compensate for his lack of access to rare and powerful cards. Said fandom meanwhile is likely to take Kaiba's beatstick ownership for granted as much as Kaiba does, and predictably, treats Joey as he would.
  • And he has lost to a lot of minor level duelists. In order, Tea, Duke Devlin, Steve (look, he had no real name, okay?), Odion (He would have won easily if he hadn't been forced to play the fake card) and Mai.
    • His loss to Tea/Anzu was from before he was properly trained by Yugi's grandpa or even had a remotely playable deck. For Duke, it was originally a random dice game where Duke is exposed by Atem in the manga, that was changed to a card duel in the anime played with draft decks (decks exclusively made up of cards pulled from booster packs on the spot), and Joey narrowly lost, partly due to Duke topdecking the very card he needed to finish him off. Steve was using an illegal deck loaded with multiples of limited cards including draw cards such as Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity, and most of all, 3 Exodia sets, which were fakes at that. Odion did come close, but due to rule differences, wouldn't have won if Judgment of Anubis were the same as its real life card self, as Joey played Giant Trunade, which returns s/t cards to the players' hands rather than destroying them, and Anubis only negates the latter case. (Not to mention that Joey was limited more by lack of strong monsters than by skill, otherwise he would have reduced Odion to 0 outright before he got the chance to spring the Temple of the Kings combo.) And Mai a minor duelist? How dare you, sir.
      • You mean similar to how Jinzo was given the new effect of destroying rather than just negating all trap cards? That wasn't doing Odion any favors either - it left him open to Joey's multiple direct attacks.
        • Wouldn't have made a difference. Embodiment of Apophis is returned to the spell zone it came from and treated as a trap card when its effect is negated, so there wouldn't have been a functional difference for Odion if his traps got destroyed or negated.
          • The only reason Joey summoned Jinzo in the first place was because he used a two-card combo of Foolish Burial and Graverobber that both used effects that were completely different from their actual ones.
      • Duke may have been a rewrite, but its still canon for the anime. He also was participating in a draft duel, which most duelists will agree is the only way to have a level playing field in a battle between a champion who has had his deck rebuilt over and over with rare cards and a noob (which I'll remind you is exactly what that was). Duke may have topdecked Fairy Meteor Crush, but Joey admitted he topdecked Goblin Attack Force, so saying that diminishes his loss is just wrong.
        • Which would mean that Duke really was a good duelist who suffered a case of Redemption Demotion at the end of that mini-arc.
  • This Troper may be mistaken, but didn't he lose to Mai ON PURPOSE?
    • Mai was in position to make the winning move, but when she realized that she didn't actually want to beat Joey, he collapsed, tired from his previous duel, and lost anyway.
• This Troper just read the volume of the manga where they start the semi-finals of the battle city tournament, and a question came up: How the hell do they duel on top of a blimp? I know there's a guard rail just in case and that joeys cards get whipped around at one point, and that it's all part of the challenge but there are still quite a few problems with that:1) If they hit turbulence, everyone, especially the duelists and their cards, go flying. 2) It was established they were going at a pretty fast speed, and there are no foot grips or anything so how do the duelists stay standing when they could easily be knocked off. and finally, 3) It's established their high enough up to create a cold windy environment, which is brought up once. Just once. And at that altitude it would be freezing for the crowd too, it would be inhospitable and thus make it near impossible to concentrate. Seriously what was Kaiba on when he designed this, then again he did say he needed to lay off the drugs but still he designs a deathtrap of a theme park and yet he doesn't see all the flaws in this?
  • Sadly I have the answer to my own question: Rule of Cool meets Dramatic Convenience: As impractical as it is Takashi just did it because it looks badass, and similar problems are present with their previous skyscraper duel but it looks so badass, you don't really care. but it still bugs me a bit though.
  • Because it was the only place with a big enough space to hold Kaiba's ego?
• How is it that if a character is given a card before a duel, they WILL draw that card in the duel even though, if they are using 40 card decks and the duels last about 5 turns, meaning they draw about 10 cards, there would only be a 1 in 4 chance of them drawing that particular card?
  • It's very simple: Dramatic Convince: Just like (Sorry to say) my example above with the whole blimp thing as annoying and unrealistic as these things are it's simply so Takashi can create drama. If they didn't get the card, there would be no reason to introduce it.
    • Similar to The Casey Effect in movies. Not to mention that the antagonists draw the hands they need beforehand in order to create said conflict.
      • See: The Magic Poker Equation
• Mai's motivation in the Doma arc. She blamed Joey for letting Marik torture her. Quick question, WHAT ABOUT MARIK? She didn't feel anger towards, you know, the guy who actually tortured her?
  • Heel Face Brainwashing, thanks to Dartz and the Seal of Orichalcos. Dartz used the fear inside of her from her earlier Mind Rape, leading her to believe that the nightmares of being abandoned and the possibility of dying should she lose another duel were true, so that she would accept the Seal and become his latest recruit. The Seal of course brings out the worst tendencies out of anyone, which was brutally lampshaded when Yami activated it.
    • That explains why she wanted revenge, but not against Joey instead of Marik.
    • Again, a result of Dartz leading Mai to believe that Yugi and Joey abandoned her, and deserved to be punished. Making Marik a target would serve no purpose for Dartz, since Yugi and Joey were both chosen ones, while Marik held no such importance.
    • Probably Marik never appeared because it was a filler arc with no connection to the series.
• What the hell was Zorc's motivation in the English dub?! I get why he planned on destroying the world in the sub since he was created from the Items, and would have represented the hatred of the sacrificed criminals on the rest of the world.But 4Kids Zorc was portrayed as far older, and creator of the Shadow Realm.Why couldn't they tie in the sacrifice(using souls instead of killing) with Zorc's destructive nature? Bakura was the best villain of the show,yet his English version Man Behind the Man was just some one dimensional demon thing.
  • Thats why total destruction of everything wasn't his motivation in the english dub. He wanted to dominate the world, to become its new god, thats why he was recruiting followers. The world of the future was being reformed to becoming the nightmare world that Zorc envisioned.
• I've just realized something strange; before the Ceremonial Battle, Yugi had to put the seven Millennium Items in the stone, and then the Eye of Wdjat would split his soul apart. Question: If Yami's soul was in the Millennium Puzzle, how'd the Eye of Wdjat separate it from Yugi after he took the Puzzle off? Did Yami's soul somehow detach from the Puzzle and stuck to Yugi?
  • I've always seen it as this: When the puzzle was in pieces for all those thousands of years, Yami's soul was somehow stuck inside it. Then when Yugi solved the puzzle for the first time, Yami's soul took up residence in Yugi's own body, and the puzzle's main purpose was to then serve as a conduit through which they could switch who was in control of the body, as is what happens when Yami takes over for a duel or whatever else is going on. That explains why in both the manga and dub, when the puzzle is stolen Yugi has to get it back himself without any help from Yami, because it seems like he can't get Yami's help without the puzzle. Strangely, the Japanese anime makes it seem like they COULD change places, but Yami doesn't want to because he senses Malik watching, although he doesn't know who Malik is at the time. Supporting the manga and dub version of this, however, is a second earlier theft of the puzzle in the manga. One of Yugi's classmates steals the puzzle while Yugi is in gym class, and challenges Yugi to a shadow game of the Chinese game Dragon Cards. Yugi looses, and before the dragon rips out his soul, he grabs the puzzle from his classmate's neck. Then Yami takes over and says "Just in time...if I hadn't snatched the puzzle back my soul would have been entombed in darkness...." This implies that if Yugi hadn't grabbed the puzzle, Yami's soul would have been stuck in Yugi's body but unable to control the body, and therefore unable to challenge the classmate to a rematch and rescue Yugi's soul.
  • Another question: The first season used spirit projections in some mental realm as a visual way seeing the discussions between Yugi and Yami. The second season did mostly the same, but it was outside the mental realm and in the real world. Still projections, but still just a way of visualizing.
    However, one instance during that arc changes this: Yugi, as a projection, picks up the Red Eyes Black Dragon card. After Battle City comes the Doma arc. From there, projections become 'solid' enough to cause physical action, eg, Yugi pushing away Yami to sacrifice himself or later, Yami having a spirit-projection duel with a spirit-duel disk against the real Leviathan. The latter is just as weird as it sounds.
    I could say that the oddities of the Doma arc are from its status as filler, so it doesn't have the same continuity as the manga. But what of Yugi's projection picking up the very real Red Eyes card?
    • Maybe when Yami and Yugi are seen in spirit form, they've actually become some sort of poltergeist?
  • And another question, sort of triggered by the Doma arc: simply put, it's been stated multiple times that Yami can't exist without Yugi, yet he does fine without him when Yugi sacrifices himself for the Seal of Orichalcos. Why?
    • Because Yami's original body is dead, if Yugi actually DIES then so does Yami because he's got nothing to fall back on. Yami Malik himself says so in their duel. He thinks to himself that if he wipes out Yugi's soul in the Shadow Game, it will kill both Yugi and Yami, but if they wipe out his good half, he will still remain. Yami is able to survive because Yugi is simply held captive and his soul is not in his body. Yugi's not actually dead when he gets captured by the Orichalcos.
      • This actually has precedent in the Manga - see how Yami Yugi was able to beat the Chinese Dragon Cards after Yugi's soul got sucked into a pot.
    • Although if you mean how Yami is mentally/emotionally unable to exist without Yuugi, then that's true; if I remember correctly, Word of God once stated that Yami really was insane when he first came out of the puzzle, but changed as time went by and interacted with Yuugi. So, IMO, seeing how Yami represents the 'darkness' of a whole soul, if you take out the 'light' (Yuugi), then Yami would have no one to balance him anymore, and would most likely be driven insane eventually, as evidenced in Doma in the duel against Weevil.
      • I think the fact that Weevil told Yami he had the card with Yuugi's soul in it, then ripped up said card (effectively KILLING Yuugi if the expression on Yami's face is anything to go by) in front of Yami, then laughed and said it was a completely different card and he didn't even have Yuugi's soul with him might have had something to do with pushing Yami over the edge during that duel...you know, what with how well Yami seems to take the idea of Yuugi being hurt at all.
• During Yugi's 3rd duel with Kaiba (The one that introduces Blue Eyes Ultimate), why didn't Kaiba just simply attack Yugi's Celtic Guardian after reborning his Blue-Eyes on the turn it was reborn? Instead, he waits a turn for some reason. He could have won that duel legitimately if he had just done that, and we know it's possible to attack with a monster on the turn it's reborned because Yugi himself does it with that card all the time in the same season.
  • For sake of drama. It puts Yugi in that realization that he's not the only person pulling the strings, which starts him communicating with Yami. If Kaiba ended it right there, Yugi wouldn't have secured the fact there was another presence.
  • Because Blue-Eyes is part of a fusion and therefore has to wait a turn before attacking, apparently. Which only brings the question why didn't he revive Swordstalker instead...
  • No, I'm pretty sure in the first season of the Duelist Kingdom rules, there was a clause that monsters reborn from the graveyard couldn't attack until the next turn, just like monsters that were just created through a fusion. Probably a "special summons cannot attack on the turn they are special summoned" rule or something, worded in real life terms.
  • No, it was already stated that Yugi does almost the exact same move in an earlier duel by reborning a Blue-Eyes and attacking on the same turn (Yugi vs Monster Clown). And later in the same season Yugi reborns a Black Skull Dragon and attacks on the same turn.
    • Actually, it was all part of some bizarre unique in-canon ruling regarding Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon at the time. The monster can only be destroyed one head at a time. (Which is why Yami could only behead one of the monster's three heads.) On the flipside, a revived head would have to wait a turn in order to attack.
    • Then couldn't Kaiba just revive another monster, like Curse of Dragon or Swordstalker and attack for the win?
    • He has a dragon fetish.
    • That doesn't explain why he couldn't have revived Curse of Dragon, though.
    • Probably because Kaiba knew that Yugi didn't have what it would take to kill him to win. (Boy, would he be surprised if Yugi didn't intervene!) Just Kaiba rubbing it in Yugi's face that he has the killer edge while Yugi doesn't.
  • The Duel Disks only have space for one card and 4 magic cards. At all times, there is only one monster in play - when Kuriboh was multiplying, Kuriboh acted as the sacrifice for Kuriboh Tokens, which didn't require placing an actual card down. Kaiba couldn't revive Curse of Dragon or Swordstalker cause he didn't have space - his BEUD was still on the field.
    • Not exactly, it's more like 1 active "main" monster and 4 side cards(which could be monsters). And you can attack with a non active monster, you just can't use your other side cards to power it up if you do. So even if he couldn't switch the active Blue-Eyes with his revived monster, he could still attack with it. Another odd thing about the scene is that Kaiba seemed to have Negate Attack as his fifth card, which means that once he drew Monster Reborn, he didn't need the suicide threat anymore. Now I guess it's possible he just did it to screw with Yugi's head, but everyone(including Kaiba) act as if it was his only way to win...
• During Joey's duel with Esper Roba why doesn't Mokuba stop the duel the moment he found out they were cheating? It's nice and all to be supportive of brothers but it's Mokuba's job to stop that sort of cheating. What would he have done if Esper had won, go over to Joey and say 'I'm sorry you lost while I refused to enforce the rules but at least some siblings are happy'?
  • Espa Roba's brothers count on him as a big brother. Mokuba has a big brother of his own which he counts on. He feels their pain, so he had to let them off somehow. As he says, "Big brother stories gets me every time."
    • So apparently the viewers are just supposed to accept nepotism and arbitrary rule enforcement?
    • You're already supposed to accept the fact that rich people can get away with kidnapping and attempted murder...
    • A case of "Screw The Rules, they have green hair...and remind me of myself?"
• In the first volumes of the manga, the part where the series doesn't revolve around Duel Monsters, there's always been something I can't figure out. There is at least two instances where the strap that the Millennium Puzzle is on gets broken. One happens when a street thug cuts it off of Yugi's neck to steal it, the other when Yugi grabs the Puzzle back from Imori. What bugs me is that in each of these cases, someone is wearing the Puzzle a few panels later (the thug and the Pharaoh respectively in each situation) and the strap is whole! There is no knot to indicate that the torn/cut ends have been tied together, there's no tape, no glue, or anything else that might be used to mend a broken strap. So how in the world did the strap get fixed so quickly?
  • This troper, who works with her hands far too much, wonders the same thing. Possible awnser: the strap is not so much a strap and more of a rope/string. If it's as old as the puzzle and from ancient Egypt as well, and the manga seems to imply this, then it's probably something highly fibrous such as goat hair or plant fibre (probably palm fibre). I know from experience that ropes/strings made out of this kind of thing will simply slide appart if they carry too much weight; a hefty tug will do the trick. But at the same time, a broken string can simply be matted or twisted back together by rolling the two ends in the palms of your hands. This only takes a few seconds and leaves no visible join, so it would be possible that Yugi fixed the Puzzle's cord like this. But it raises another question; if the cord is made of goat hair/plant fibre and is as old as the puzzle, how the hell did it survive 3000 years and near-constant handling without crubling to dust?!
  • Yami fixed it. With Ancient Egyptian Magic™!!
• In the Fourth Season, after it turns out that Pegasus got his soul taken, Yugi and co. are stuck in America with no way back home. A big to do is raised over the fact that Kaiba is their only way back home. What bothers me is that Pegasus is the one that flew them out. Did he not have the foresight to ensure that their flight was round-trip? The very least he could have done was buy them all tickets back home in advance to give them after he explained everything. Hell, Yugi and his friends could have just explained their situation to Pegasus' staff and gotten back on the plane. Surely his staff wouldn't be that uptight to not fly them back without an explicit say so from a conscious Pegasus, especially if they were clued in to what was going on.
  • Pegasus probably didn't know how long it take them to finish, and thus, couldn't get tickets for the time they would be leaving. As for his staff, they're a game company, not workers at an airport. Lots of companies in real life wouldn't bother with such a thing, as they would see it as a waste of money. Why should we expect the staff of Industrial Illusions to be any different?
• If Atem can control destiny with his will, why didn't he use it against Raphael? Could have saved a lot of angst.
  • Wasn't he only able to control that power after the Memory Arc? Also, he states that Rafael's bond with his monsters gives him the power to alter destiny as well.
  • He probably did control his destiny in that duel, as well as pretty much any other duel he's ever been in. (Exodia topdeck, anyone?) It's just that he didn't realize he could do that until after the Millennium World arc.
• Sorry if this is answered elsewhere obvious, but in the Millennium World story (the dub at least), how is Yami Bakura both Zorc and the Thief King? Was he a combination or what?
  • It's been a while since I've seen that, but if I remember right then Zorc and the Thief King were originally seperate entities when everything happened the first time around. (When the Pharaoh was actually alive, not when he was reliving it as a RPG.) I think, sometime near the end of the battle/events, the Thief King merged his soul/spirit with Zorc to gain more power to destroy the pharaoh. Or they just ended up getting stuck together when Atem sealed them both away.
    • I believe Thief King was a citizen of Kul Elna trying to avenge his people by summoning Zork, who bore the hatred of the people used to create the Millenium Items. Presumably the first time 'round, he succeeded in doing that on his own, without Yami Bakura causing a Diabolous Ex Machina. From there, Things probably went as the above poster said, and the resultant combination of Zork and Thief King Bakura was Yami Bakura.
      • My theory is that Thief King summoned Zork to avenge Kul Elna. The arnt the same person and never actually merged, Zork though possessed Thief King and actually repressed him. Theres a part in the Millenium World story where Zork stops controlling him and he sounds and acts differently then he was. Furthermore the spirit of the ring is only Zork, Thief King's soul is in the ring too, but like before, its repressed.
• Not so much a question as something of note; why do most villains after Pegasus merge with their monster at the end? You've got Noah and Shinato, Yami Marik and The Winged Dragon of Ra, Dartz with Leviathan, and Yami Bakura with Zorc.
  • Because its an easy way to kill the character permanently without involving the disturbing mind crush (Marik, Dartz, Bakura, almost Noah until he bullshitted his way out of the rules). That, and by law all Anime villains are required to have a One-Winged Angel form - Relinquished's eye was close enough to allow Pegasus a pass.
    • Hell, even Relinquished had Thousand Eyes Restrict.
• There's one thing that both confuses me and bugs the crap out of me. Some people (particularly shippers) seem to treat Yami and Atem as if they are two different people. As far as I can tell, they're the same person and the only significant difference is Yami can't remember his past or his name which is part of why he doesn't go by his real name in the series. So either I missed some big announcement in the manga/anime that officially declared them as being two separate people, or I just can't figure out what strange logic people are using to justify that.
  • Well, Yami = Atem + 3000/5000 years in a puzzle, missing a part of his soul, which is probably the reason why he was a sadist on a killing spree in the beginning + months of bonding with Yugi and learning from him - memories of his past life. That kind of justifies the notion that they're different. They're the same in general, but not in particular. If this makes sense.
    • So Yami is basically a future Atem who's gone through some rough things the other/younger has yet to experience?
    • Yami Yugi and Atem are the same person. The only time when you can consider them to be different is in the final arc when he's simultaneously fighting Yami Bakura in the present and the past.
      • Well, yes, in this arc, they were the same person, because Yami awoke in Atem's body, or rather his former body, with his present memories. And then there was the Yami playing with Yami Bakura. However, my point still stands. Atem = Yami - 3000/5000 years in a puzzle - friendship with yugi + a complete soul. They are the same person, but still different. You and your five year old self are also the same person, but still not quite the same.
      • I can see how some people would interpret his being in two places at once as meaning there's two separate people. But while you and your five year old self are not exactly the same, are you so different that you go by a completely different name when you grow up?
        • As for the name Yami, that was only in the 4kids version, and fans picked it up because it's an okay name for the spirit in fanfiction. It's just easier to write than "The pharao" or "Mou hitori no boku" or "other me". And by the time his real name was revealed, people had gotten used to using Yami. I think that from time to time, people use Atem in fanfiction that is set after the series finale, but it's quite rare. Sorry, I feel like I'm really missing the point in this discussion.
          • The original point was that it bugged me to see some fans absolutely insist that there is no way in the world that Yami = Atem when I've never seen any official canon declaration that says "Yes they are two separate people, not two versions of the same person." The first time I saw that there's an official shipping threesome of Atem x Yugi x Yami made me do a doubletake...because if Yami and Atem are the same person...isn't that kind of pairing impossible (or at least very tricky) to pull off?
            • Oh, I see. Sorry for arguing against you all the time. As for this seemingly impossible pairing, I have to admit that I'm guilty of liking Yami Bakura x Thief King Bakura, and Seto x Priest Set. I know, it's impossible (just as impossible as finding good fic) but I can definitely see the appeal. However, it's important for me to keep up a certain narcissistic self-cest element. (My favourite fics for these pairings are both takes on the Narcissus tale; the present incarnations see their past selves in mirrors. That's the only way it works for me. I'm not very fond of time travelling fics, and I can't even imagine fics that try to pull of these pairings without even bothering with such things and completely leaving the self-cest element out.)
  • Well, if your 15 year old self and 30 year old self were in the same room, you probably wouldn't know that they're the same person, personality wise.
  • I always thought that Atem = Yami + Yuugi, that is to say, Yami is but half of the person once known as Atem, the half that was sealed inside the puzzle while the other half (Yuugi) went on to reincarnate for millennia until he found the puzzle and became 'whole' again. So yeah, don't know how that works either.

• More meta, but here goes: Duelist Kingdom; 4Kids adds a subplot and cuts out repetition, replacing excess material with foreshadowing. Battle City, 4Kids goes the opposite direction; it cuts out a subplot and adds repetition rather than minor details in characters' dialogue. What exactly happened to cause this reversal in dubbing?
  • Could you give some specific examples?
  • Certainly; in Duelist Kingdom, after Yugi loses to Kaiba, he realizes Yami Yugi's recklessness that could put other people in danger. The difference is in the focus of the character development--the Japanese version focuses on Yami, while making Yugi look two-dimensional. The English has more development for them both as they learn from each other and the like. And the reduction of filler; I think of one particular voiceover by Pegasus about how the duel he's watching relates to the tragedy of his life. Foreshadowing in the English version. In the Japanese version, it's just something repeated about the duel.
    But in Battle City, the English version cuts out the True Duelist subplot--what it means to be one, as well as adding a relationship between Joey and Yugi. Instead, it replaced it with other generic dueling stuff, which leads to adjusting dialogue so it's overly repeated rather than a focus on said subplot.
    • I actually agree with you when it comes to your Duelist Kingdom example. The dub version makes far more sense than the Japanese. In the Japanese version it follows more closely with the manga, where he already knew about Yami's existence thanks to the first seven volumes. But that duel with Kaiba was the first time in both anime versions that he truly realized he wasn't alone in his own body. And Yami had basically just tried to kill someone in a duel, leading to an understandable BSOD in the dub, but it's more of a 'meh, whatever' thing in the Japanese?! It has always deeply disturbed me that Japanese Yugi is so casual about Yami's actions, given the ommision of the events from the first seven manga volumes. As for the omission of the True Duelist subplot, I honestly never noticed it was missing. But then I did watch the dub as a kid before I even knew the manga existed, so I wasn't really looking for the subplot.
• Here's one from the manga. In Yami/Atem's first appearance his preferred outfit, for lack of a better term, includes golden ankhs on the wrists of his coat, fairly sizable ones at that. Where did he get them? Were they just laying around in Yugi's closet? And he only wears them for a few chapters, then they never show up again. Where did they go? For that matter, in the first chapter Ushio demands 200,000 yen but when Yami/Atem challenges him to a game, he says he's brought 400,000 yen instead. Where did he get his hands on the extra 200,000 yen? Did he rob Yugi's Grandpa's store?
  • I'd say those ankhs were stylistic, like how Yugi grows another foot and his hair poofs upwards and there's no explanation for that. As for the extra 200,000 yen, it could be an illusion Yami created; he did like screwing people's minds in the early manga.
    • How do you stab an illusion?
      • It was a pile of leaves that Ushio thought was 400,000 Yen.
      • It was the penalty game that made Ushio think the leaves were money. When they were actually playing the game, the money they were stabbing at was real. Maybe Yami just decided to screw the rules because he can somehow create money from thin air.
  • Didn't Sugoruko put the extra 200,000 yen there? I was under the impression that he gave Yugi more money in case Ushio demands more later on.
  • Same place he got the knife.
    • They used Ushio's knife.
• The fact that Ryou Bakura barely reacted to not being possessed any longer. Maybe I skipped the important blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but assuming that he was possessed 90% of the time, shouldn't this have been a big deal? Shouldn't this elicit any kind of reaction?
  • He spends the several days that it took to finally kill Zorc outside the illusion - he probably adjusted to it then, off camera.
  • Well actualy, he's not outside the illusion: in the manga, he's still possessed during this time by Yami Bakura when they're playing the RPG, and in the anime, he's sort of... passed out on the floor, and he doesn't regain consiousness until the game ends. And then he passes out again due to starvation. Would you accept him finally getting to eat something as a reaction?
• On the same vein as above, in the manga after Battle City is said and done, Yugi has the Millennium Ring, and hides it from Bakura (which is a VERY good thing). But then why does Bakura have to go out of his way to try and find it and then PUT IT BACK ON?! This has bugged me for a LONG time, since Bakura knows Yami Bakura is in there (he has at least two on-screen conversations with him), and so he has to know what's going to happen when he puts in on. I mean, does YB have the power to wipe the memory of himself from Bakura? Please, someone come up with a better explanation than that.
  • I assume you're going by the manga? Because in the anime, it appears that YB haunts him, and then there's this slightly creepy scene in the church... Anyway, back to the manga. As for the memories, I think it's less of a power to wipe memories, but rather that he doesn't allow him to be conscious at the same time. It was similar with Yami and Yugi, in the beginning. Yugi had no idea what was going on. During Death-T, he finally confesses to his friends that he loses his memories from time to time, and that there is "something" inside of him that scares the hell out of him. Also, Yami tells Anzu not to tell Yugi about their visiting the museum, which means that Yugi was probably somewhere "asleep" in his own spirit room, or something like that (voluntarily, in this case.) As for Ryou putting the Ring back on, it seems that it controls him even if he doesn't wear it. During Duelist Kingdom, he doesn't actually put it on (the others rightfully freak out when they realise that he brought it with him in the first place), but Yugi notices that he zones out when he holds the ring in his hands. I think it can kinda be assumed that the spirit somehow transferred a part of his soul to Ryou (just like he transferred a part of his soul into the puzzle) to make sure he can control him even when the ring is lost.
  • But you're right, it is quite problematic that Ryou KNOWS that the spirit is evil. Maybe that WMG about Ryou being the most evil character is right? My theory is that the spirit somehow (after kind of bonding with the gang in the manga) convinced him that he wasn't evil (anymore), and, just like Yami, he only wanted to regain his memories.
    • He only voluntarily takes it back in the manga (in the anime, he takes it back after being re-possessed). If I recall correctly, Ryou's conversations with Bakura in the Duelist manga generally consist of Bakura claiming he's 'changed' and 'wants to help'. If Ryou's as gullible as the rest of the cast (which is entirely possible), that's a plausible enough explanation for him taking back the ring; his normal form can't 'help' as much as Bakura can. I also think the theory about Bakura leaving a bit of his soul in Ryou could be true; considering how Crazy Prepared Bakura tends to be, it seems like the kind of thing he'd do in case Ryou lost the ring.
• The timeline. Pegasus met Cecilia when he was 12, at 18 they were married, and she developed a terminal illness. Distraught, Pegasus roamed the earth, coming to Egypt, got his Millennium Eye and created Duel Monsters. 6 years later, when he's 24, the series begins. Okay, but 6 years before the series began, when Seto Kaiba was 12 (or 10 in the Japanese, but that just further complicates things), he was heavily into the game, with his cards being the only thing that got him through Gozaburo's torture. So that would put him being a huge fan of the game at the point when Cecilia was either dying or recently dead, and Pegasus had yet to create the game.
  • To give a very stupid answer, Kaiba is a Time Lord and he's played the game for his entire life. Course, even though it explains his extreme obsession with the game, it does cause many different plot holes....
• What the heck were Thief King Bakuras followers, anyway? Where did they come from? Why are their eyes glowing? Why do they look like zombies? If they are zombies, how did he resurrect zombie henchmen?
  • My best guess is they're some of the souls of Kul Elna giving him a hand? How on earth he got them to be solid I have no idea (maybe they aren't, and they're just an illusion? I don't know, did any of them actually touch a character?), but them being the dead souls sounds good.
  • I like to think that they were some sort of ancient Egyptian ReDeads that Bakura managed to enslave or domesticate. Similarly, the mummy creatures from the Pyramid of Light movie were Gibdos.
• If Kaiba despises his stepfather so much, why does he keep his name instead of just using his old name? He must have known it when he went to the orphanage. And why does he continue to glorify the name by keeping his company named Kaibacorp and building Kaibaland? Even if you don't despise the previous CEO, changing company name is just good sense when shifting focus.
  • Well, it's possible that by making the Kaiba name associated with him instead of his stepfather and the company name associated with games instead of weaponry, he's achieving a "victory" against his stepfather.
  • Exactly. Seto took the name of Kaiba away from him.
• How in the hell could the puzzle take eight years to solve? It had maybe 23 pieces - even if you didn't know what it looked like, simple trial and error would mean the puzzle would take a month at maximum. Did he just decide to work on it one day a year?
  • It was a magic puzzle. Its shadow magic clouded the mind of any who tried to solve it until the time was right and the one trying to solve it was in the proper mindset with the proper desires in his heart and/or until the Chosen One tried to solve it at the Chosen Time or something. Its not entirely clear, but the point is that its all but certain that he solved the puzzle on the puzzle's terms, not his. Note how he comments on how easily it suddenly is when he does start solving it.
  • He works on it very sporadically?
  • In the manga, Duke Devlin tries to piece together the broken Millennium Puzzle--he thinks it's easy, and he manages to piece it together halfway through, before being twisted by its shadows and briefly trapped in an illusion.
    • Actually Duke just flat out failed, it was his dad who got the mystic psycho illusion treatment for trying to put the puzzle together. And while Duke's dad was trying to put it together, Yugi weakly stood up (he'd just been choked and thrown against a wall by Duke's dad) and told him "Stop...you'll make...the puzzle angry...." Also in the manga, when Yami was confronted by Shadi in volume 3, Shadi told him that it was no coincidence that Yugi had solved the Millennium Puzzle...the puzzle had chosen Yugi. Somehow, the events of the first chapter convinced the puzzle to let itself be solved by Yugi. I personally think it was the moment where Yugi was getting beaten by Ushio, and his thoughts revealed that the 'wish' he made on the puzzle was for "friends who could count on him, no matter what" instead of something selfish like money or popularity or power.
  • Some puzzles are not just a matter of placing each of its pieces on top of each other. The millennium puzzle probably required complex rearrangement of the pieces around and through each other as it took shape.
• In the very first manga chapter, Yugi's grandpa says the Millennium Puzzle was taken out of Atem's tomb at the beginning of the 20th century by a team of British archaeologists. Jump to the start of the Memory World arc, and the one who retrieved the Puzzle from Atem's tomb was Yugi's grandpa himself. Which of these two versions is the truth about how the Puzzle got out of that tomb and eventually into Yugi's hands? Why is there even two versions at all?
  • Simple- by "the beginning of the 20th century" he meant the first half and at that time Grandpa Moto was working with a team of British egyptologists. When in the first half is uncertain- chronologically it was most probably the late '30s or early '40s, but politics makes that improbable for obvious reasons, so it was probably late '20s and early '30s, and Grandpa Moto is really good-looking for his age.
    • Small problem with that theory. In the flashback of how he found the Puzzle during the Memory World arc, Grandpa Moto was a gambler, and he was working with grave robbers, not Egyptologists.
    • It's not inconceivable that he was actually working with legitimate archaeologists most of the time and just decided to strike out on his own (and in less reputable company) on that one occasion, though.
    • It's also very possible that Grandpa was lying, and he didn't want Yugi to know that HE was the one to discover the puzzle for some reason. I guessed that because Yugi looked almost exactly like the spirit of the puzzle that had saved him, Grandpa knew in his heart that it was Yugi's destiny to solve it, and since he was his grandpa, he knew him well enough to know exactly what to say to push him in the right direction. This could also give a bit more meaning when in chapter 1 he said "I knew you'd be able to solve the puzzle." (Or something along those lines.)
    • This page of the manga establishes the date that Grandpa retrieved the puzzle as 1960. Not exactly what I would think of as the "early 1900s".
• I was just chatting with a friend, and we realized there are multiple scenes in both the manga and anime where Yugi/Yami end up lying face down on the ground, with the Millennium Puzzle underneath them. I've had to lay on top of objects before, and it's not the most pleasant position in the world. But when it's seen in the manga/anime, Yugi looks as if he's laying flat on a bed without the slightest bit of discomfort of a chunky metal object being pressed into his chest/abdomen by the weight of his body on top of it. How is that possible?
  • In case you haven't noticed, the weight of his body isn't a terribly large amount.
    • Maybe not, but he certainly weighs more than a feather. I'm short and not that heavy either so I'm usually the one who has to crawl into tight places around the house, but if I end up having to lay down on top of something with an edge on it, I'm uncomfortably aware of it. And the puzzle definitely has distinct edges rather than rounded ones...
  • All the times I've seen it, the Millennium Puzzle miraculously swings very left or very right, so Yugi/Yami doesn't suffer pain to their bodies when the Puzzle ends up to his side and not under him.
• The fact that Kaiba changed outfits before going to rescue Mokuba, who had been kidnapped by Bakura, doesn't really bug me, but I think it's just incredibly silly. Am I to assume that he has a secret wardrobe in his office where he stores his duel attire, just in case someone challenges him between important meetings? Does the outfit make him feel stronger? Seriously, what the hell. "Sorry, Mokuba, I'm too late and the bad guy almost killed you, but I really HAD to put on my lucky coat."
• Why does the Seal of Orichalcos adhere to the rules at the time? Or any rules at all? The Shadow Games makes a certain kind of sense, as all object being sought had to be won semi-honourably. But why does the Seal adhere to a childrens card game instead of just taking their souls? The wielders are clearly cheating, why even bother playing the game? And why those rules? Why doesn't it follow Duelist Kingdom rules instead - i.e, the rules that are still standard for anyone outside the Battle City tournament.
  • As for the rules, that didn't bug me at all. In my opinion, the duelist kingdom rules were a complete mess. Most of the games were won by things like "Yugi attacked the moon". Not that that wasn't kind of interesting, but the Battle City rules are easier to follow in real life, and Monster Cards with a high attack are less of a Game Breaker.
    • The rules are superior for people watching, but they're still custom rules Kaiba thought up just for his tournament, that became standard rules in his duel academy. As far as anyone else is concerned, in-universe the Duelist Kingdom rules are the actual rules.
      • Maybe he programmed the rules into the Duel Disks so that you can't play by the other rules? Or maybe the rules were so well-received that people started playing by them. I'm at a loss, but as I said, I didn't mind.
        • Well, in the case of Kaiba's programming, in Battle City, Joey tried summoning a high-level monster without a sacrifice, but it didn't work because it didn't follow the rules (this was promptly pointed out to him). So it seems that, yes, Kaiba had programmed them to work under his rules only. As for the seal, it probably follows the rules that either it's user or (if said evil seal has standards) both players decide to use.
          • This makes no sense. First, Dartz's Duel Disks were custom, possibly arcane things. They would hardly be subject to Kaibas rules. Second, the Seal is so unbelievably unfairly broken, that saying its a fair game is just laughable - the user has such a giant advantage, that only one duelist was able to beat someone using Seal without using the similarly broken Legendary Dragons cards - both times against extremely low level players, and both times only with a card he pulled right out of his ass. If you're going to cheat like that, why even bother with the game?
• HOW IN THE NAME OF SLIFER THE SKY DRAGON DO YOU EVEN PROGRAM ALL THIS STUFF INTO A CARD GAME?! To summarize one of Yugi's strategies: "I use my Catapult Turtle to shoot my Dragon Knight at your flying castle in order to break its anti-gravity ring, which will make it fall down and squish your monsters who are trapped by your magical shield thingy." Explaining this to someone who doesn't follow the anime got me a really weird look. I actually had a cousin who tried playing like this (ex. "My Graverobber digs a Trap Hole in front of your Castle Wall, which destabilizes it and makes it fall over and squish your Fierce Knight"), and while it was highly entertaining, we wouldn't let him get away with it because it was utterly ridiculous. It's a card game. You cannot pull that stuff off in a card game.
  • That was probably why they changed the rules permanently. (see the JBM entry right above.) This is nothing compared to season 0, though. Kaiba managed to end a game because he SPLIT THE DUEL FIELD. Another person pwned Yugi with Greek mythology related cards!
  • ...wait, what are you asking? If the card game itself can allow for it, or if the duel terminals and Duel Disks can actually keep up with it? Because between Kaibas ruthless work ethic and Pegasus's naked insanity, it'd be real easy to believe that The Dev Team Thinks of Everything.
  • That works for Battle City and beyond, when everyone has access to the holographic technology. Then it would work, if you thought of Duel Monsters as actually being a video game that used cards as controls. But before Duel Disks were released to the public, it seems like unless there was a duel arena around like the ones at Kaiba Land or in that warehouse where Yugi dueled Bandit Keith, players had to play Duel Monsters as just cards on a table like we do in real life, and there's no way all the crazy interactions we see in the anime could be printed on the cards (especially when we actually see the cards and they're normal monsters).
  • They say at the beginning of the arc that the game will have "a new set of rules" specifically for Duelist Kingdom. It's never stated that the field/environment advantage thing was the only one. Though this DOES bring into question how Yami knew about these things. Alternatively, Yami is using the Millennium Puzzle's Screw Destiny ability to make it all happen, so basically, he's cheating and 3,000/5,000 year old magic can influence how technology works.
  • I feel like I'm the only one who thinks that Yami's not cheating and simply using the holographic dueling system to his advantage. The way I see it, his "insane" strategies such as the one mentioned regarding the Catapult Turtle and Castle of Dark Illusions being used to crush Panik's trapped monsters are a result of two things. First is that the holograms are at the very least programed to simulate some sort of basic physics, since you can't make the movements of holograms look realistic without physics and that's what Kaiba wanted in the manga: realistic holograms. Also, in real life physics if you drop something heavy (like a book) on something small (like a bug) it gets smashed and killed. So it makes sense that if you replace the book with a castle hologram and the bug with a monster hologram and drop the castle on the monster, the computer will probably consider the monster to be squished. The second is that I think it's a subconscious holdover from his days as Pharaoh. Back when he was dealing with the shadow games and the ka instead of cards, the monsters WERE real. And in real life, if you somehow have a castle floating over the enemy and the enemy is trapped with no place to run...then if you make that castle fall, it'll squish your enemies and you'll win the fight. The fact that he's pulling out these strategies that seem so outrageous is, I think, proof that he's actually a much more brilliant strategist than anyone else in the series because everyone else is stuck with the mindset of "cards cannot do that, so I must play like I always have and not try something bold and new." In fact I felt somewhat disappointed by most of the Battle City rules (although I can see the point of some, such as requiring sacrifices to summon high level cards) because by having to submit himself to the restrictive Battle City rules, Yami isn't able to play to his full potential. Instead he has to focus more on the "card" aspect and keep himself from even considering some of the tactics he'd otherwise be able to use. Case in point: In Battle City Yami came close to loosing to Malik's puppet with Osiris/Slifer because he had to stick to the rules of the tournament which didn't allow him to pull any of those fancy strategies to weaken it. But in the Memory World arc, Bakura was able to defeat Osiris/Slifer very easily after he'd damaged the stone slab that housed the ka, causing Osiris/Slifer to weaken while Atem couldn't "draw more cards" to restore his ka's power.
    • This Troper seems to recall hearing that Duel Monsters would occasionally use a Game Master, much like RPGs, to illustrate various obscure effects, such as "Castle of Dark Illusions falls, all monsters underneath are destroyed".
  • In Duelist Kingdom, the rules appear to be that anything goes. The person who is most creative at bsing their way to plausible sounding rules or actions (THE MOON RAISES THE SEA!! OH YEAH WELL I ATTACK THE MOON!!) is the winner. Between Kaiba and Pegasus, they probably just ran about every conceivable action that any given card could be put through, and then let some of them combine. Besides, it looks cooler, and this way Yami can bs his way to victory in impressive ways.
• Okay, how does Mai's perfume trick work? I mean, fine, I can accept that she can distinguish cards by their smells when they are close to her. (Which is why Jonouchi being able to smell the cards makes a bit more sense in the manga, considering that they're actually sitting together in a small box with barely a meter between them.) But how in the hell did she manage to fool Dinosaur Ryuzaki? Even assuming that he didn't notice the smell (probably assumed she was wearing perfume), how could she possibly smell which card HE picked up? I know, of all things that could possibly bug me about Yu-gi-oh... but still, I don't get it. She's not Grenouille.
  • Thats not how her trick works. She doesn't know what card her opponent drew, she just makes them think she does. By playing her own cards by smell instead of by sight, she convinces her opponent that she's psychic, and thus makes them doubt their own strategies, meaning they never try them, meaning they start floundering, meaning they're easy pickings.
    • Yes, but at the beginning of the Duelist Kingdom arc, when she was on the ship with Rex, she asks him to shuffle her cards and draw, and then she tells him which cards he drew, right? Of course she did it only to confuse him, but still. How did she smell it from that distance? When she draws herself, she might subtly wave the card a bit, so that she can get the smell right, but when someone else draws for her? I get what the purpose of the trick is, I'm just not sure how it actually works.
    • Considering that they expect us to believe that she can actually discern different scents in a deck where each card has been sprayed with a different fragrance and then shuffled together I would say that smelling the cards from a distance is hardly the least believable aspect of it. Maybe she has the super sniffing powers.
    • You're right. Also, how in the hell does the smell stay? It has been established that the cards are pretty waterproof. (Exodia in the water, Yugi's cards in the river in season 4... the real cards would be ruined.) If you spray those cards, they might smell for a while, but wouldn't it just face pretty quickly, because the perfume would stay on the surface? I have just tried it out on a piece of plastic, and I can barely smell the perfume anymore. And if the cards weren't waterproof, she would probably ruin them by spraying them with perfume, unless she applied the perfume with a tissue, in which case the smell wouldn't be nearly as strong.
    • To further add to the impossibility, anyone who actually owns a decent number of perfumes know that they often contain similar ingredients to one another (such as vanilla, which is in most perfumes). Once the perfume has dried and faded a bit, sometimes the only thing you can pick out is that one particular ingredient. Meaning that after maybe ten minutes, all Mai's cards would start to smell the same unless she has very unique perfumes. And as someone already pointed out, the cards have been rubbing up on each other too...
  • I always figured that Mai was unconsciously using the Heart of the Cards. The first time it worked, she thought it was the perfume that did it, and has had no reason to suspect otherwise. Either that or she didn't want to believe in mystical energies from a children's card game of all things.

• This drives me crazy. How is it possible that Kaiba never knew Noah existed until that arc? He explicitly mentions watching Gozaburo on TV a fair bit, you'd think the coma/eventual death of an extremely powerful CEO would make the news. And no one ever mentions this to him? Really?
  • Especially because this could have been easily handwaved. Something like "Okay Mokuba, I knew this guy existed all along but never mentioned him to you because he was dead and stuff and therefore not important." would have sufficed.
  • Noah died AFTER it was decided that Seto was going to live with them, but BEFORE he actually moved in. I can guess that it was reported on the news about Noah's death the day Seto moved in, and given his hellish life there, it's not unlikely he didn't have time to watch TV or read a newspaper. Either that or Gozuboro didn't want to be reminded of Noah's death and payed off every news company in the world to not report the death, because, let's face it, he really did have that much money.
• Less fridge logic, just more a flat out mistake. In a flashback to when they were living in the orphanage, Seto tells Mokuba they would start their own themepark called Kaibaland. This was well before they were adopted.
  • He was obviously already planning to take over Kaibacorp somehow even in the orphanage.
  • Well, "Kaiba" can mean "seahorse" in Japanese (Or so I've heard), and in Japanese "seahorse" is somehow synonymous with "young dragon", and considering that Seto has a thing for dragon, it's not entirely impossible that the fact he wanted to name his theme park this was little more than coincidence.
• When Yugi and his friends found the pharaoh's name, there was only one cartouche in the tomb. Egyptian queens only had one cartouche, but all Egyptian kings had two cartouches, kind of like how most people today have a first and last name. And also, Egyptians did not write down vowels. (The "ah" sound was combined with a guttural sound for which there is no English equivalent, but it was treated as a consonant, as was the "ee" sound.) So Yugi had no way of knowing if Atem's name was missing some letters. If they technically found only half of Atem's name shouldn't he have been unable to stop Zorc?
  • Yugi showed Atem the Hyeroglyphs and Atem was able to read it, because he's egyptian. I don't know why that's so hard to guess.
• Somewhat related to my above entry, if Atem was able to use his name to invoke forces powerful enough to stop Zorc, then why didn't he just destroy Zorc in the first place rather than sealing himself and Zorc away for thousands of years? It would have saved a lot of trouble, and by not destroying Zorc in the first fight it seems Atem took a huge and seemingly (to me at least) out of character gamble. Bakura/Zorc basically points out during the Memory World arc, "You idiot, you can't even remember how you beat me the first time!" And then the only thing that guaranteed that Yugi would find his name was rule of plot, not to mention Yugi couldn't even read Egyptian hieroglyphics on top of the fact that Egyptians had a nasty habit of not writing down the letters they considered to be vowels. And then he had to find the pharaoh in the mess and confusion of battle to actually give him the name.... There were so many little things that had to go exactly right in order for Atem to beat Zorc, otherwise all he did was delay the end of the world by not destroying Zorc 3000/5000 years ago.
  • His name probably only had that much power in the game world.
  • First, he didn't have enough power to summon Horakty the first time around. In the memory world, he had his friends with him. Also, it doesn't matter how many vovels a written language is missing, if you're a native speaker of that language, you can read it. Yugi didn't read the name from the cartouche, he showed Atem the picture of exactly what he saw, and Atem read it. Makes perfect sense to me.
    • While Atem may be a native speaker, he doesn't get his memories back the instant he goes into the memory world and it's been 3000 (or 5000 if you go by the dub) years since he's last needed to read his native language. If I recall correctly, in the Japanese version when Malik showed Atem his back after Battle City, Atem remarked in a voice over/thinking to himself "I have no idea what this says." Or something to that effect and he only figured it out because the placement of the Egyptian Gods was the same as the stone he'd seen at the museum. This kind of makes it seem like those years of boredom he spent stuck in the puzzle caused him to forget how to even read his own language.
• The claim that Kaiba values Blue Eyes so much because it represents Kisara's reincarnation. Even if Takahashi said it himself, it contradicts Kaiba's love and modus operandi of having the rarest and most powerful cards, with his ownership of the only full playset of the card, which as of the series, is the most powerful monster with no adverse effects or summoning limitations, practically guarantees that no one else can hope to create a deck with as much built in power. What's more is that some fangirls will use the Kisara connection with as a humanizing trait, even though in practice, he uses the dragons to knock the stuffing out of his opponents while acting superior towards them, especially if they're using weaker monsters, more often than not. The Kisara connection would mean something if it were to a weak card he wouldn't otherwise dream of using, like Happy Lover.
  • Pfft, power nothing. Blue Eyes is a two-tribute beatstick without an effect, and it dies to removal just like any other monster. If it wasn't for the whole Kisara thing, even subconsciously, Kaiba would probably favor a card with just as much power but with a far better effect, like XYZ or Chaos Emperor Dragon. A player of Kaiba's caliber would only stick with a monster so horribly outdated for the Rule of Cool.
  • While I certainly agree that power plays the biggest role here, I wouldn't deny that there is some kind of emotional connection, even without Word of God. Especially if you consider how it represented a symbol of hope during one of the flashbacks in the virtual world (Mokuba's drawing), or how he relied on it despite having freakin' Obelisk on his side of the field. However, I wouldn't say that it changes anything (or much) about Kaiba's characterisation. If anything, I think it's more a kind of additional particular fondness, rather than "reunion with his one true love!!!"
    • Mokuba's drawing was non-canon, and the incident during the duel vs. Isis was about screwing destiny. If it were about going with love over power, it would be a Broken Aesop, because BEWD isn't much weaker than Obelisk. All I would maintain is that there are basic parallels, in that while Priest Seto valued Kisara as a near and dear individual, Kaiba quite possibly valued Blue-Eyes as a symbol of his rise to the top, and definitely one of his power.
  • I think what inspired this view is probably Raphael's relationship to his Eatos card, but that's definitely not the case here.
    • Another non-canon case. Raphael was always a counterpart to Atemu, with Eatos being his answer to the latter's Dark Magician.
  • Can't Kaiba fusion 3 out of his hand and have Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon 4500 atk, then if he has de-fusion that's three 3000 atk monsters without sacrificing those 6 monsters.
    • Yes he can. And he (well his spirit counterpart anyway) did EXACTLY that in GX.
  • "The Kisara connection would mean something if it were to a weak card he wouldn't otherwise dream of using." But it kind of is. 99% of characters' "ace" cards are special (like Fusion or Synchro) or have useful/intimidating Special Effects. The BEWD has nothing directly special about it except being fusion material and the highest Attack Points for a Normal monster. Even fans of Power Decks like Jack Atlas know the value of Special Effects over Attack Points, and Kaiba couldn't have become such a dueling legend by holding the amateurish philosophy that Attack Points are everything. Kaiba was unaware of his connection with Kisara when his obsession with the BEWD began; its high attack points are a half-decent way for Kaiba to subconsciously compromise having such a boring, otherwise weak monster at the center of his deck with his obsession with Power, but logically, it doesn't make all that much sense.
    • Yes, which would make sense if Kaiba was a character in Zexal. He is, however, a character in the original series. Yugis signature card was Dark Magician, Joeys was Red Eyes. Both of these with with the same limitations of effects and drawbacks as Blue eyes, but without the 3000 attack. Also, yes, the metagame is different now. But back then, back when the series started and Kaibas connection with his card was gone over, attack was everything.
• How are these tournaments expected to function? The KC Grand Prix would work, with a set number of contestants and regularly enforced rounds, but Duelist Kingdom and Battle City? There are way too many people in both for it to function properly - Duelist Kingdom would need at most 20 people (4X10 Star Chips means 40, 2 Chips Apiece means 40/2=20) and there were far more than that, and Battle City would require 48 - more, yes, but still far more than the number shown.
  • And even then, why allow people to just go wandering off? Why not actually make them fight? You know, like an actual tournament. What use does setting them loose in the city serve apart from giving the writers an excuse to put Yugi in a deathtrap?
    • In Battle City, allowing participants to wander off is to give the rare hunters plenty of opportunities to enter the game by stealing the duel disks. Bakura's, Marik's, Ishizu's, Odion's duel disks are definitely stolen from legitimate participants. The rare hunters most likely CAN NOT participate legally with the restriction that Kaiba placed (you need to be at least 5 star duelist to get the duel disks required to participate) and most likely WOULD NOT participate if they cannot cheat under watch of spectators/judges and what not. This would defeat the purpose of holding the tournament to begin with. It's also why the final is held in private. Otherwise, spectators would notice that the half of the finalists were not the original participants and that many of them were "screwing the rules."
      • But Odion, Marik and the Rare hunters duel disks weren't stolen -- each was given to them after the man in charge of handing out Duel Disks edited the information, fabricating their accounts and giving them a spot in the tournament - just like he did to Joey.
        • Well, that wasn't exactly legal either, was it? From a legal standpoint, we'd have to know whether the guy was distributing the names as Kaiba's employee, or has just bought a bunch of disks to distribute, in which case he could do whatever he liked with them. However, given that Kaiba wanted to control the distribution of the disks, it can be assumed that the guy had a contractual obligation to only give out disks to people who are qualified. Changing information and giving disks to peoeple who shouldn't have gotten them does amount to stealing and reset in the cases of the Rare Hunters and Marik.
  • In the manga, the actual number of contestants in battle city seems to actually be 48. At least Kaiba says that there are 48 locator cards. In the anime, it's spoken of "hundreds of duelists" if I remember correctly, which makes no sense whatsoever. As for the Duelist Kingdom, maybe it was mostly about who first manages to get 10 starchips (and wasn't there also a time limit?), with the additional "playkillers" as adversaries? Yeah, it really doesn't make any sense.
  • It's explained in the manga before Yugi's duel with the Player Killer of Darkness that there are 40 contestants in Duelist Kingdom, with a total of 80 Star Chips, and the goal of the Player Killers is to take 40 chips from the duelists, with the remaining 40 going to the tournament finalists.
  • Both tournaments had time limits.
  • Duel disks used in Battle City also has duelist finder function, which Joey used in the manga.
• If Kaiba's whole plan was to get powerful cards, why would he ban any cards at all? And then, why is Hinotama considered bannable but Harpies Feather Duster, the signature broken card, allowable?
  • In this case, I think Kaiba's pride played a big role. Maybe he thought that cards that can reduce lifepoints without any condition are a cheap way to win?
• The field Magic card was invented by Pegasus for the Duelist Kingdom competition. Okay, two major problems. One, Yugi already has the Burning Land card, which is useful only for destroying Field cards. In fact, thats the entirety of what it does in the entire season it is shown. Why did it exist before that? Second Major problem, Allister, Raphael and Valon had all been taking peoples souls long before that contest, using the Seal of Orichalcos. How would they even manage to play that card? There wouldn't exist a slot for it.
  • Funny how you ask a question about the Seal of Orichalcos right after the Field Spell question, which the Seal of Orichalcos happens to fall under. About Burning Land, the concepts of Field Spell cards and, as always, many cards like Burning Land, were different from the actual card game, since they were written beforehand. Pegasus' Duelist Kingdom field territory rules were entirely different, so evidently, Burning Land targeted designated areas.
• Why didn't Dartz and his men ambush Marik and the Rare Hunters to get the god cards without having to go through Yugi?
  • Filler arc following Battle City created to allow Takahashi to complete the Millennium Arc.
  • They might have had a harder time locating Marik, and by the time they did, he was already in the middle of the whole Battle City thing, and that would have made things too complicated. Or they could have been waiting for someone to have all three (Marik never got Obelisk).
• According to what I've heard, in the Manga, there is no Doma arc, it goes straight from Battle City to Kaiba Corp Grand Prix. So, Kaiba organised two contests back to back? Both directly after Duelist Kingdom?
  • There was no Kaiba Corp Grand Prix in the manga. It just goes straight to the Millennium Arc after Battle City.
• Why are there so many contradictory titles? Weevil's the Japanese champion, but the Japanese Kaiba is the best duelist in the world? Bandit Keith, an American, is the intercontinental champion (which is the same as world, but he and Kaiba have supposedly never had a match), but Rebecca Hawkins is the #1 American duelist? And not a single Rare Hunter or member of Paradius has a ranked title, despite both groups having triple copies of every single card in the game?
  • In the manga, Duel Monsters game was relatively unknown in Japan when Kaiba and Yugi had their first and second duels. While Kaiba was mentioned as the best player in the country, there was not much competition in Japan. Due to the mind crush Yami Yugi inflicted, Kaiba was in coma for a whole year, during which, Duel Monsters game became very popular in Japan, competitions started to be held, and Weevil became the champion. In the manga, the reason why Kaiba Corp. was going to be taken over by Pegasus and why Kaiba was not invited to Duel Kingdom was because he was still in coma with no sign of recovery. Kaiba didn't recover until after Duel Kingdom was halfway done.
  • Rare Hunters are Marik's mooks. Paradius was part of a filler arc. Rebecca was also a filler character.
• Everyones asked it, but it was never answered - why the hell do they never go to the police?
  • Police Are Useless?
  • To be fair, Police would be of any REAL help only in the Kaiba Corp Grand Prix, though there are moments in the first seven volumes where this could apply, and Zigfied and Death-T Kaiba are smart enough to get rid of the police. In the rest of the series though, WHAT THE HELL ARE THE POLICE GOING TO DO AGAINST ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MAGIC THAT COULD PROBABLY KILL THEM?!? And before any says the magic only works in the card game, I'd like to point your attention to the laser beam battle between Bakura and Pegasus.
  • Not exactly cops, but in chapter 8 of the manga, the shop owner looses Yami Yugi's/Atem's game and gets stung by his own poisoned scorpion. When Yugi goes back to talk to Jounouchi, he tells Jounouchi(in the English translation of the manga at least) that when he (Yugi) woke up the sneakers were "in his hands and the shop owner was being taken to the hospital" for the poisoning. Someone at least called the paramedics then. Since there was no one else in the shop (the owner said it was closed when Yami Yugi/Atem came in) and Yugi woke to find the paramedics already there, it seems like Yami Yugi/Atem was actually the one to make the call.
  • Paramedics are also called to take Yugi's grandpa to the hospital after Kaiba's duel holograms give him a heart attack. Again, not cops but it is some sort of professional help called in.
    • Also, causing a heart attack isn't illegal provided it was unintentional (and even if it were intentional, you'd have to prove it). Ditto the scorpion- that would probably have been ruled an accident. Part of proving something is explaining how it happened.
  • They did in the DOMA arc. The cops were brainwashed at this point.
• In his flashback, Rex says he and Weevil could just demand people give them their strongest cards, and they'd feel honoured to give them. The card they got was Dark Ruler Ha Des. Dark Ruler is singularly stronger than any card either of them played (save PU Great Moth and Great Moth), with additional side effects to boost other cards, back in the days before sacrifices. Why did neither of them play this card, how did the kid get this card, and why would he look up to them if he could kick the crap out of both easily?
  • First, neither ran fiends (Weevil ran insects, Rex ran dinosaurs), and probably kept the card as trade bait. (Not to mention that Dark Ruler Ha Des cannot be revived from the grave.) Second, he probably respected them before their reputations took a nosedive.
  • And there's the issue that Dark Ruler Ha Des might not have the same effect in universe as it does in our TCG.
    • No, it did. Bakura ran it back in Battle City, and it had the exact same effects.
• In Noah's Arc, each card in their decks was chosen from the Kaiba Corp database. At this point, all three Egyptian God cards were in the database. Why did nobody pick them? They weren't limitted by rarity anymore, they could each have the triple set.
  • Highly impractical, since the Egyptian gods require triple sacrifices, and are handicapped in terms of revival from the grave. And even so, a duel finished with one of the gods would have diminished the significance.
    • Then why didn't only Yugi pick those? you know, having then around all the time and by the final battle, summon all then to the field and blowing the Big Bad.
    • It could also be that they wanted to avoid the wrath of the gods that would come from using a digital copy of the cards.
      • After all they all saw what happened to Odion, they probably didn't wanted to try to test it again.
• If the Seal of Orichalcos isn't a real card, but a fake made by Dartz, why did it work in Yugi's duel disk?
  • Paradius Corporation had investments in practically every important technology and corporation.
• Why does the anime keep inventing dozens of BS cards (like Berzerker Soul), when there are plenty of legitimate ways to win a duel?
  • For those specific situations? Lets play Dueling Puzzles. Replicate the situation, your opponent has a monster with 2600 attack, you have a monster with 2700 attack rendered unable to attack via a spell card, as well as costing you 500 life points a turn. You're on 700 life points, he's on 3900. You have a card set, he has a card set, you have a 4 card hand. Win in one turn (No Exodia).
    • De-Spell to destroy Insect Barrier, then Brain Control Weevil's monster. And that's without using a single card that Yugi hadn't used before in another duel. But then we wouldn't have "DURO! MONSTA KADO!"
  • Rule of Cool, Rule of Drama... I know it comes off as an Ass Pull most of the times, but then again, isn't it a bit more exciting to see the character cornered, and then he suddenly plays an amazing card that turns things around, while the opponent can only helplessly stare?
    • No. That's called an Ass Pull and is generally thought of to be bad.
  • This only explains this particular duel, but the point here was the overkill. It was necessary to have a card that would 'allow' Atem to continue attacking even after he had already won to show how pissed he was and how his personality had been affected without his Morality Pet.
• What purpose would having Odion pretend to be Marik serve for Marik? He wants to win Battle City, and in doing so beat Yugi and get the two god cards. So what purpose does pretending to be benign serve at that point? Considering his entire deck is based around summoning and resurrecting the Winged Dragon of Ra ad nauseum, wouldn't it become obvious to everyone as soon as he duelled? But even if his cover hadn't been blown, what exactly does it gain him?
  • When Yami Malik faced Yami Bakura and Good Malik, Yami Malik specifically mentioned changing almost all the cards in Malik's deck since taking control. We never get to see what Malik's deck was like before Yami Malik took over and made his alterations, so it's very likely that the good Malik's deck ran with a completely different shtick. The closest we may have come to seeing Malik's original deck is when Yami Malik dueled against Mai, and he didn't seem to opt for the summon and resurrect strategy in that duel at all.
    • No, that duel was based around using and abusing shadow magic. Which also might have tipped the others off. And even then Mai would have won easily if she didn't tried to summon Ra. His strategy as pretty pathetic, even by the standards of the first series.
      • You have a point regarding the shadow magic abuse, but I was referring to the fact that the duel between Yami Malik and Mai occurred very soon after Jounouchi's duel with Rishid. So it seems like Yami Malik wouldn't have had a lot of time available to completely restructure the Good Malik's deck to best suit his preferred strategy. Heck, maybe he resorted to abusing shadow magic because he didn't have a chance to rework the deck and it was his way of "compensating".
• As someone who has watched the anime, but never played the card game, I was curious as to whether it was possible for a duel to end in a draw, with both players life points reduced to Zero? It happened in an episode of 5d's, but that's the anime, and it's so rare that I'm wondering if it's even possible.
  • It can happen in the game. In fact there are some cards, such as Self-Destruct Button, that are designed to do just that on purpose.
  • You could achieve that with every monster card that requires you to pay life points for an attack.
    • So does it always have to be a deliberate choice, or can it happen by accident. Like, the above example, you have a monster that costs life points to use, but a magic card that negates that cost, but then your opponent does something that cancels out the card, or you do something to end the duel but screw yourself in the process. You know something like that.
      • You are forbidden from using any card effects that require LP payment if your LP is insufficient.
  • In Kaiba's first duel with Alister, they both got to zero life points at the same time.
  • And in the Yugi vs Joey duel with the anchor, Joey deliberately ended the duel in a tie so both keys would be released.
  • You can go for the win and attack, and your opponet activate ring of destruction and then both players take damage, since it's not a cost it applies and it could end in a draw if the players had low LP.
• So the soulless Weevil falls off a train. How'd he get to the hospital, much less the same one as Rex, much less right next to him?
  • People checking on a runaway train thats stopped in the middle of the desert follow the tracks until they find Rex and eventually Weevil. Both are taken to the same hospital and treated for what they assume is a coma brought on by dehydration.
    • Except that Rex wasn't a victim of the train crash; Joey and Tristan carried him along, and then Kaiba arranged for him to be brought to the hospital.
• In the Duelist Kingdom arc in the anime, Yugi wears sneakers. But when he turns into Yami Yugi, his pants apparently merge into his shoes. ^{[dead link]} Oh, and he's wearing boots now. What?
  • The boots come from the same place the extra hair, clothes, muscle and bone that appears whenever Yugi becomes Yami Yugi.
  • Also note the loss of his white undershirt. The anime gives Yami Yugi strange dimension-warping powers that ascends to his clothing (a.k.a. taking their own little liberties with the character designs that don't make sense and giving Yami Yugi the ability to NOT GET BURNED BY FIRE during his duel with Panik). In the manga, Yami Yugi retains the same clothes, height, and muscle campacity as Yugi after the transformation. Even the boots and the white undershirt. The "extra hair" is just a few strands of Yugi's bangs flying up to make him look possessed. You can even compare their hairstyles in the pic shown on the main YGO page and notice that Yugi has more bangs than his alter ego.
• This one is particularly irritating to me: in the 8th manga volume (the last one which created the first anime, which was never aired in America), Bakura informs him that he needs a double to win and it turns out to be 33. In the anime, it is 99 and Yami only gets that thanks to Miho. But, since 99 was a fumble, Bakura could have just said that, for rolling that, he automatically fails the roll, which is the opposite of his agreement to allow a success on one certain roll. My question is this: why choose 99 with that in mind? It makes no sense and makes Bakura just seem like a lying bastard.
• I have a problem with the fact that sometimes people will withold information about their in play cards. There are a fair number of times when someone will announce something along the lines of 'When you attack my monster, its special ability activates!' And their opponent, and the crowd watching will be stunned to learn these facts.
  • Perhaps they simply assume the other player knows what the card does?
  • Alternatively, it's because describing in detail the function of every single card you play is incredibly annoying for your opponent. I know this from experience.
    • But, as Duel Monsters is usually played in series with Duel Disks/stadiums at a distance sometimes its impossible to check a cards text, and players seem to be explicitly hiding what should be publicly available information, which is against the rules in every card game known to man. At the very least, whenever a character sees an effect monster they don't know, they're demonstrating extremely bad play by not even asking what it does. Ra is perhaps the prime example of this, since it has new random powers in every duel its used in that consistently suprise everyone around it, and since the text on it isn't in english everyone seems to pretty much have to take Mariks word for what it does. Kaiba, who owns and maintains the program that supposedly admins card effects/damage/life points is even stumped analyzing the card.
      • Maybe Kaiba Corp. makes the system, but Industrial Illusions is the one filling in the card database and making the holograms?
    • From a pure scriptwriting standpoint, its so the monsters abilities can be demonstrated without them just saying it. You could have the villain saying "My monster will kill you if you attack it, so don't even try", or you could have it actually happen. In universe, its probably that effect monsters effects are treated like traps, so you don't have to reveal it until its time to use it - at that time, its effect is verified by the hardware, so as to avoid any cheating (Remember, if the disk registers a bad move, it will lock up and skip your turn). A card could only do more than it was intended once, and even then they needed to actually rewrite the code for the card on every level. All other times, all effects were apparently legit - including Jinzos rust proofing, Mystical Elfs ability to give the BEWD its power, and everything Ra did.
  • Also keep in mind that in the Yugioh-verse, to be a good player, you need to know pretty much what every card in the game does by heart. The ones in your hand have text written on them (in the original version), and it's assumed that you've read your cards before starting to play, because it would be really annoying if every other turn, your opponent stopped to read the effect. And still, If I recall correctly, there are a couple of instances where somebody says (or thinks) something among the lines of, "Heh, good thing you have no idea what your own card does, or I'd be dead now." I think that Jounouchi is the victim of this mostly, what with his time wizard having so many "surprising" effects. And there are just as many cases of somebody with an effect monster laying a pretty obvious trap - if you know what the effect is! Usually, Jounouchi attacks, and while his monster flies towards the opponent's monster, Yugi goes all, "NOOOOO!" but it's too late, and the opponent reveals the monster's hidden effect. So, in a way, knowledge actually is half the battle.
• How do they decide who goes first half the time? It seems like who ever just says 'MY TURN, DRAW!' Gets to open up the match.
  • Maybe the duel disks randomly select who goes up first.
• Why was Flame Swordsman made a Fusion Monster in the real game?
  • Because they needed a second justification to include a polymerisation in the Joey Starter deck. I'm dead serious, thats why.
• What do Timaeus, Hermos, and Critius do, exactly? I thought they made these weird fusions, but they seem to be able to fuse into any monster (and without needing a fusion card to boot), and they even have fairly consistent effects (Timaeus always fuses with a monster, Critius always fuses with a trap, and Hermos always turns the monster it fuses with into an equip spell). And if this wasn't enough, their rules go and turn into total bullcrap when the three dragons turn into knights.
  • They are deus ex machinas to counter Dartz's henchmens Deus Ex Machina cards. If you want any kind of consistency, Hermos always fuses with a monster to become an equip card with effects vaguely related to the name of the card it fused with - not the effect - Timaeus fuses with a monster to create an effect monster with an effect completely unrelated to the monster fused to summon it, and the Critius always fuses with a trap card to produce a monster card with effects that somewhat resemble the trap used to summon it, except played out indefinitely and weirdly.
  • The way the YGO wiki explains it, their effects can be pulled off in a real life, provided you treat the monsters/equip cards they merge into as separate cards.
• In the Manga, Yugi and Yami Yugi are horrified by Kaiba saying that he "bets his life" on the card game, saying a life is something too precious to bet. But earlier, Yami Yugi bets his life on pretty much every one of his games, and he wasn't wagering for someone he loved. Hell, he bet his life with Haga the previous day.
  • Which brings up another absurdity- why would Haga want to kill Yugi? At least the anime makes it more plausible by having Yugi wager his deck against Haga's other star chip, since his deck is something Haga would actually want.
  • Yami Yugi was still trying to get his head screwed on straight prior to Duelist Kingdom, though some of those games didn't quite give him a choice in what he would loose if he lost^[2]. Also, if I remember right, Haga was reluctant to wager both of his starchips at first when he saw that Yugi had only one chip of his own. Plus Yugi and Yami Yugi were both still pissed at Haga for getting rid of the Exodia cards at this point, and that anger was mixed with the drive to rescue Yugi's Grandpa's soul. In contrast, when they came up against Kaiba later, they didn't know the full extent of Mokuba's current condition (if they knew about it at all, I may be mixing up that detail with the anime since I haven't read that part of the manga in a while) so when they called Kaiba out on betting his life, they did so because they thought he just wanted to win at any cost. It's not like Kaiba told them all about his motives. Shame, considering Yugi and Yami Yugi would probably have tried to help rescue Mokuba if Kaiba had just taken a minute or two to explain his brother's situation.
• How does a company thats only worth, at most, less than $20 million with very small profit margins manage to get ahold of $100 million?
  • Either through illegal means, or because they're just that good.
• The Millenium puzzle is supposed to be the most powerful of the Millenium items. Therefore, the wish made on it, for Friends that would never betray him, should not be able to be broken by other millenium items. But Marik uses the rod to force Jounouchi to betray Yugi, and Bakura uses the ring to force Honda to.
  • Friends that would never betray them means just that. The puzzle won't magically keep them loyal, they are loyal because that's the kind of people they are. And they are NOT the same people while possessed.
• Okay, this is a minor one, but if Shadi was actually Hassan, then what's up with Shada? Twin brother? Red herring to mislead people about Shadi's true identity?
  • Might be a red herring, since Shadi says he was killed by Bakura all those years ago, and they carried the same Millenium item, which would lead people to think this was Shadi, but then his true identity as Hasan is revealed later?
• Here's another one. If two monsters with equal attack points battle, they both get destroyed. But what happens if they both due piercing damage(as in they do a certain amount of damage to the users lifepoints regardless of any other factors)? Will they both take damage?
  • This should go to the card game's page but basically, piercing damage refers to dealing damage when attacking a defense position monster.
• In the battle city finals duel between Yugi and Kaiba, what difference did the Red Eyes Black Dragon really make? He still would have blocked the first attack with magicians selection, lost his magnet warrior from the second blue eyes, and blocked the final Blue Eyes with spell binding circle. The only thing that would have changed is Kaiba's third attack target (Dark Magician instead of Red Eyes), but the results would have still been the same. It's not like he used the Red eyes the remainder of the duel anyway.
• Why the heck did 4kids edit the card description text out of the cards? I mean, in dub canon, every player has to have the exact effects and conditions of at least 40 cards memorized cold before they play *any* card games with them. It makes the shouting out descriptions make a lot more sense, but wouldn't that be a really counterintuative way to market a game? Also, given the way that this game seems to work, you'd have to have the effects of any cards you wanted to grab from your opponent memorized too. It seems like this'd lead to major abuse of the system, entirely apart from being stupid.
  • Quite simply, it cuts down on the costs of other language adaptions. Editing card text would not only raise production costs for 4kids, but for the companies in other countries doing the Spanish, French, Italian, etc. dubs. It would also increase the amount of time to get episodes ready for air, which could result in the anime falling victim to schedule slippage and possibly cancellation. It was feasible for the Pyramid of Light movie, which didn't have to meet a specific deadline, but generally they have to have a certain amount of episodes done in a certain amount of time to fit their weekly air schedule.
  • It's also about the Segregated Commercial trope; it's even mentioned on the text for that page that they can't show the characters using real cards from the game, because that's advertising, while Japan doesn't have the laws forbidding it. The movie, of course, didn't have that problem, since it's not regulated by TV laws. Seemingly, the players in the dub are playing with the English-language version of the cards - though some of them with different effects than in the TCG/OCG - since they clearly know each of their own cards and how they work.
• The items are supposed to be made of gold, right? This being the case, I have no idea how half of them are even usable, and how Yuugi does not strangle himself and/or break his little neck every time the puzzle swings a little. Gold is *heavy*; if we're assuming that the items are made of solid gold, than there's probably at least a liter and a half of gold in that puzzle. Given what gold weighs, the minimum I've been able to work it out to is roughly 60lbs/30kg. It is possibly a great deal more! If the puzzle's box is also solid gold than, depending on how much gold you say is in the box and puzzle combined, that could be close to 100lbs of gold, that tiny little Yuugi grabs and hauls around with no visible effort. And you can't tell me that having several pounds of gold hanging out in your eyesocket wouldn't be massively uncomfortable, or even dangerous.
  • The Millenium puzzle is hollow.
    • I've actually seen inconsistencies in the various scenes where the puzzle is being put together or taken apart. Sometimes it looks hollow^[3], other times it seems solid^[4]. Also in the Memory World arc, all the Egyptians call it the Millennium Pendant not the Puzzle. Which makes me think that, hollow or not, the Millennium Puzzle was originally one seamless item that only became broken up into puzzle pieces as a result of Atem sealing himself and Zork inside it.
  • The Puzzle and all the other Items are magical artifacts. It wouldn't surprise me if making the item easy to carry around was on the list of Required Secondary Powers for all the Items.
  • Forget the items, what about all that gold the Pharaoh runs around wearing during Memory World?? Although if he's strong enough to run around on a horse and fend off some of Thief Bakura's ghoul squad with a sword while wearing all that, it does explain how he's able to pull off what appears to be an 8 foot vertical leap in the Capsule Monsters spin-off....
• In the Japanese dub and the manga, part of the prize for Duelist's Kingdom was majority shares for Industrial Illusions. What did Yuugi do with all of those shares? I mean, it effectively meant that he owned the company. Did he trade them for new trading cards? Sell them so he could afford to redo his wardrobe entirely in leather? What happened??
• I'm probably the only one who isn't in on the joke but, why exactly does Kaiba hate Joey so much? Like, even more than anyone else in Yugi's gang? Almost imediatley after they meet?
  • Dub-only. Kaiba is slightly condescending to everyone. Jonouchi just happens to have a hot enough temper to be bothered by it. Doesn't help that the dubbers take the liberty of adding insults to Kaiba's lines to make it look like he has some kind of vendetta against "Wheeler".
    • Perhaps they wanted to go with a "Slobs Versus Snobs" theme. Problem is, they pretty much made it one-sided in the "Snob's" favor.
• Bakura's voice. Or more specifically, voice-actor. Why is it a female in the Japanese version? I like the Japanese voice jsut fine but, it's an odd choice, seeing as he's a teenage boy, and in Season Zero he's voiced by a guy (and in every dub of the second series, he's voiced by a guy). So what gives? Why the odd choice for voice-actor?
  • How is it odd? There are a lot of cases where females voice young boys because a man's voice happens to be too deep. Tommy Pickles of the Rugrats and All Grown Up, anyone? Ash Ketchum from the Pokemon anime (both Japanese and English versions, the former being the same voice actor as Bakura)?
• Just a little thing that's finally driven me crazy. In the very start of the series (going by the manga) the Pharaoh's first appearance is to take control of Yuugi's body and proceed to subject the school thug to a shadow game. How does the Pharaoh manage to learn and speak perfect Japanese in the short time between being released and calling Ushio^[5] to the school?
  • Remember, the entire plot of the series (card games aside) is that the Pharaoh has almost no memories of his past. At the start of the manga, I think that it's safe to say that he barely had any sense of self left (having been locked in the puzzle for several thousand years and all); his knowledge and memories were initially copied from Yugi's own, with only the personality belonging to the Pharaoh himself. There are many more instances of him knowing modern-day conventions - Japan's monetary system, the alcohol content of vodka, etc. - that were presumably "borrowed" from Yugi's mind.
  • Most of the time Pre-Battle City, Dark Yuugi was merely treated as a more confident version of Yuugi. He thought he was Yuugi. He thought Yuugi's grandfather was his grandfather. He got angry whenever YUUGI's friends and family were in danger as if they were HIS friends and family. The fact of the matter is, Dark Yuugi didn't know that he was an ancient spirit trapped inside the puzzle and treated himself as another part of Yuugi's personality, which was why he was never dumbfounded with the world around him during his first few appearances and jumped straight into action. He knew what was going on through his other half and was aware of everything his other half experienced before he awakened. The only thing he didn't borrow was his knowledge of the shadow powers the puzzle held and used them to dish out justice. He might have been kind of aware that he wasn't exactly "Yuugi", but the person he was then was just an extension to Yuugi, only more confident and knowledgeable of the powers of the Sennen Puzzle.
• Why the HELL did Joey's parents have a Solomon Divorce? It was obvious that Joey loved his sister, and that it really hurt him to be separated from her. Adding to that, his dad was a drunk and a gambling addict (which I'm going to assume was the reason for the divorce). Why leave a child in that kind of environment? Did she have some kind of vendetta against her son or something? Why the hell would she leave her own son in such an obviously abusive environment?
  • Values Dissonance. As far as I know, in Japan, the elder child stays with the father, the younger with the mother. I don't know if that has a legal or traditional basis, but unless there's a very good reason for both children to stay with one parent, they don't. Yes, an alcoholic gambler could be considered a good reason, but we don't know if he was one before. Sadly, we don't find out nearly enough about his family. Or anyone's family (including Yugi's!)
• I think this is anime only, but it still bugs me. It has been established that you need to have the actual fusion monster, which is consistent with real life rules, unless one of the mystical dragons in season 4 is involved. So, for what reason does Yugi carry a card he could ONLY every use in a 2 vs 2 duel with Kaiba? I'm talking about the fusion between Black Luster Soldier and the Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon. This card cannot be used in any other situation, and unlike other cards that only work under a certain condition, this is no in-game condition. The condition is Kaiba, who's not known for being a team player, to actually have a double duel with you. It just strains the Crazy Prepared trope a bit too much.
  • BLS is a good card on its own (as good as any similar card can be in the anime), so Yugi keeps it around. It being able to fuse with Kaiba's most powerful mon is a bonus.
    • Yes, but why does he actually have a Dragon Master Knight in his deck?
      • Because he has a habit of dueling Kaiba, either with him or against him. A monster that only requires Kaiba's BEUD to die, then a Monster Reborn to use, and has THAT level of power, is well worth using.
  • At the time when the series came out (i.e. before the creation of Syncros) there was no limit to the number of cards you could have in your fusion deck. It would make sense to keep any fusion monster you got your hands on on the off-chance it may be useful - even if not against Kaiba, a person could use a fusion substitute monster.
  • I know Headscratchers and WMG insists on answering questions that normally are assumed to be hand waved, but come on. Fusion Monsters (and Synchros and Xyz) exist in a state of dimensional flux. When Polymerization is activated, the Fusion Monster crosses from the other dimension into this one. If it makes you feel better, just imagine the card creating itself like what happens in 5D's.
    • I'm totally ready to accept that you can just randomly fuse monsters just like that. I'm just not really happy about the fact that it turns out that you need to have a fusion monster card (just talking about the anime here, not the RL TCG). But I accepted the other tropers' reasons for Yugi carrying around that particular card, so I didn't argue further.
• Why does Otogi challenge Yugi to a game of his own creation, without even properly explaining the rules? Douchey much? What was he trying to accomplish? His chances to win were incredibly high, which would have made victory nearly meaningless. Kind of like beating a little child at their first chess game and acting all superior about it. And on the other side of the coin, Yugi's chances of victory were so low, if he won, the loss and humiliation would be pretty much worse. (Which, as we know, happened in the end.) Wouldn't it have been much better to start off on a more or less equal footing? Winning then would have proved that Otogi was truly superior.
• Why does the fake psychic, who's implied to have burned a house down, attempted to murder or at least severely harm Yugi, and was apparently attempting to rape Anzu only get humiliated, when a guy who's only crime was being a jerk over a spot at a school carnival die in a violent inferno?
  • Kazuki Takahashi (or Yami Yugi, if you prefer to think of it that way) has a sick sense of humor, and a bad sense of justice? And we never really know if that guy died or not. He could be alive.
  • We are never shown what happens to anyone after Yami Yugi's penalty games (except for Kaiba and Mokuba) in any part of the series. While some of the punishments may seem trivial, if you think about it, they all have the potential to be deadly. Ushio's punishment was to see trash at money and never think about anything else. But what if he starved to death because he didn't care about eating? The TV director had his vision permanently obscured by a digital mosaic, so he could die due to not being able to see danger such as a car speeding towards him. The fake psychic was playing a game where the loser was knocked out from inhaling an almost full bottle of chloroform. Even if he seemed to be just sleeping at first, how do we know he didn't get an overdose and die before someone found him the next morning? And the carnival bully's punishment of being blown up needs no explanation of its possible dangers. Hell, one of Yami Yugi's later games (his maze of fire for the thugs that beat up Hanosaki and tried to extort money from his father) he actually says the only way they'll survive is to escape the maze.
• When Kaiba defeated the Duel Robot in the Battle City arc, it exploded. Why weren't the 3 BEWD cards (& the BEUD) destroyed?
  • Maybe the cards are made of Unobtainium and therefore indestructable. In the manga, he was able to use a card to block the hammer of a gun to stop one of Pegasus' goons from shooting him point blank.
  • If that was when it blew up from Obelisk's attack, I thought those were virtual cards. I could be conflating that with the "Kaiba vs. three-god-cards-Yugi" battle simulation from The Movie.
• I have a friend who brought up an interesting question. When Yugi's grandpa took the Puzzle from the Pharaoh's tomb, where were the tombkeepers? Their whole purpose was to guard the tomb of the nameless Pharaoh, right? If they guarded a different tomb, then why was Atem's body not buried with the Puzzle and all his funerary stuff? And if it was the same tomb, then how did they fail so miserably at guarding it? Or, if they didn't actually guard his TOMB literally but rather his memory, then why would they need to live underground?
  • The tombkeepers guard the millenium items in Kul Elna (Shadi's branch) and wherever the Ishtars lived, not the Pharoah's tomb. It would be necesary for them to 'fail' at guarding the nameless Pharoah's tomb because SOMEONE's going to have to find the puzzle and kick-start the rebirth of the Pharoah eventually, and it has lots of deadly traps in the mean time. They don't really need to live underground. Shadi's group doesn't look like they do, so why the Ishtars do it is a mystery, maybe they got paraniod and decided the items would be safer that way? That said, all of these folks probably shouldn't have been called tombkeepers in the first place. But it sounded better than item-keepers, so there you go.
  • About them living underground, I wonder why Marik HAD to stay there at all cost. Ishizu was obviously allowed to leave the tomb. Sure, it looked like her father didn't pay much attention to her, but it's still a bit weird.
  • Ishizu didn't have the entire history the Ishtars were guarding carved on her back. I assumed that those that did have the secrets cut into them were never let outside in case the information would fall into the wrong hands, or something.
• During Battle City tournament, Yami Yugi has two sources of motivation; his first priority is to learn who he is. As the arc goes on he mostly just wants them all to get out alive so that he could keep his promise about dueling Jounouchi in the finals or after the tournament. Okay, so Battle city finally ends, Kaiba blows up Alcatraz, gang stands on top of the blimp and Jounouchi and Yami Yugi put their decks in duel disks. Back to the Domino City we go and there's this double page featuring two of them all ready to duel, with the text "Our battle city isn't over!" Chapter ends. Next chapter: flashback to the time Yugi's grandpa found the Millennium Puzzle. Afterwards the memory world starts and no one ever mentions for the rest of the series that Jounouchi and Yami Yugi had duel. Or that they were supposed to, which is really weird considering half of Yami Yugi's internal monologue that wasn't about card games was revolving arout his friend and how he's looking forward to that duel. I've never really watched the second series of YGO seeing that it never aired where I live, so I don't know if this applies to anime or is it just a plothole the manga has. Maybe Kazuki Takahashi was just plain sick of drawing card games at this point that he didn't want to bother anymore, seeing that Jounouchi would have lost anyway. Who knows. It's still really odd how the whole thing was just skipped over like that.
  • It's the same in the anime. However, I did not think at all that the arc was incomplete, and I certainly wouldn't call it a plothole (maybe an anti-climax). Also, from Jonouchi's POV, it was not about the outcome of the duel, but rather about the duel itself. He didn't want to face Yugi until he became a real duelist. Them facing off at the end means that he accomplished his goal. It doesn't really matter who wins. Personally, I thought it was a great way to end the arc on a positive note.
• I know this series is a poster child for the Screw The Rules tropes, but there's a particularly egrigious example that I felt needed to be mentioned. When Yami and Joey duel the Big Five, Lecter summons the Five-Headed Dragon using a ritual card, stating that he has to sacrifice five monsters, each one with a different attribute. He then proceeds to sacrifice all five of his deck masters. This seems to work at first, until you realize that Nightmare Penguin (Krump's deckmaster) and Deepsea Warrior (Gansley's Deckmaster) have the same attribute. In other words, Lecter not only broke the rules, he explicitly stated what they were before doing so. What the hell is up with that?
• Here's a thought; In chapter 8 of the Dulist Manga, Pegasus tells Yugi of how he gained the Millenium Eye. The story gets to a scene where he witnesses a thief dies while vomiting flames when wearing the Millenium Ring, then Shadi remarks that only the chosen are allowed to own the items. Here's where the question arises: In Chapter 4 of the original, a street thug beats Yugi up in the arcade and takes the Millenium Puzzle as a "Prize" and is later seen wearing it. Why did he not die or something similar upon wearing it? I mean, I understand that would have cut the chapter short, and that these powers are in the New Powers as the Plot Demands catergory, but if we were to excuse that, why didn't he die? Also, something similar happens in the anime where Yugi places the puzzle around Joey's neck. Now, the most likely answer I'll get is that the puzzle is good where-as the Ring which the thief stole was evil, However it is heavily implied that all the items do this, as Pegasus is told this could happen if the eye was to reject him. Also, Duke's father tried to assemble the puzzle, only to make it angry and trap him temporarilly in an illusion.
  • Regarding the bully from chapter 4, it's likely that Takahashi hadn't thought that far ahead yet (as far as the plot is concerned), so it's probably a case of New Powers as the Plot Demands, as you mentioned. If however, we assume that the author actually knew what he was doing, you could argue that the puzzle (or Yami, perhaps) did not drive the thug insane because he needed him alive to eventually return to Yuugi, at which point he probably punished him with a penalty game of sorts. And as for Joey, since Yuugi willingly gave him the puzzle, it (or most likely Yami at this point) did not react because he/it didn't consider Joey an enemy, unlike Duke's father who had nearly choked Yuugi to death.
    • The Joey one might have been a bit over the top, and Duke's father's case is strange since Yami though sealed in the puzzle couldn't do much else after that.
• How much in-universe time does the series take up? The events of Battle City all the way through the Memory World clearly come right after one another (with a few days' separation in between each), since Yugi's goal once he has the God Cards is to get right to the museum. None of the major arcs seem to take more than a week. Specifically, the first part of Battle City and the entire KC Grand Championship seem to have been one really long day of dueling time with little break. The Virtual World arc is implied to take only a few hours in the real world, hence Yami Marik wandering around and not using the time to find Odion, and the last round of the Battle City Finals is all on one day. The DOMA arc is probably the longest, since they're traveling to different places and there is some actual passage of days, but still didn't seem to last too long. However, right before the events of the Memory World arc, Tea in the dub says that they've had "four years" of adventures together, and in the final battle Ishizu mentions that she hasn't used her necklace to make a prediction "in years" since giving it to Yugi. So what gives? Did they take breaks after Duelist Kingdom and Battle City to go to school for a year? Or was the dub team trying to avert Comic Book Time? Either way, nobody's aged a bit in four years, or seems to have graduated from high school (which they already attended before meeting in the anime and is only three years long in Japan). Personally, I think it's only taken a few months at most, but we aren't really told how long each arc is, are we?
• And now for the greatest battle in all Yugioh continuity: What would happen if ever there was a duel between the Heart of the Cards and the Power of Friendship?
• Seto's big test to prove his worthiness to lead KaibaCorp. His mission was to turn $10 million into $100 million in one year. He did so by buying a majority stake in a company, then demanding to be bought out at ten times his purchase price, or else he would fire all the company's employees, whom the now minority owner cared deeply enough about to give in. How in the world did that scheme succeed? The idea that said super-protective owner, who apparently had so much surplus cash lying around that paying off Seto's outlandish demand was even possible, would even allow outside investors in his company at all, much less allow someone else to take over majority control, is hard enough to swallow. But why couldn't he have simply used a fraction of that buyout money to start a brand-new company and re-hire everyone Seto fired? It all makes Little Kuriboh's alternative narrative, wherein Seto simply pulled a gun on the company owner, much more plausible by comparison.
  • It's possible that the old owner owned several companies and had to take resources from all of them to save the one Kaiba took over. Furthermore starting a new company would not be as easy as all that, since the old one may already have control over the market and could continue to do so if Kaiba brought in his own people.
    • If the old owner owned other companies, why couldn't he have those companies absorb the fired employees? And the "control over the market" argument rather assumes customers would remain loyal to a company name, rather than the people who won their business in the first place.
• Why did the Big Five and Noah simply not take over the main characters bodies right away? They clearly could do it, and if I was stuck in a prison, I wouldn't set my freedom on winning a card game.
  • Noah ordered them to play the card game and win, and not cheat during it. It's because he wanted to prove to Gozaburo that he was worthy of being the CEO of Kaiba Corp by besting Kaiba and his friends.
  • How does beating them at a card game prove that Noah is better at running a buisness?
• Yugi's duel with Pandora has the stipulation that the loser gets their shackled legs cut off by a rapidly spinning, gradually approaching buzzsaw (or gets sent to the Shadow Realm by a rapidly spinning, gradually approaching Dark Energy Disc, if you prefer). That said, how in the hell was either duelist able to hear themselves think, let alone hear their opponent, with one in each ear? The way I understand it, even the ordinary buzzsaw in your tool shed is an assault on your ears; I can't really imagine two giant saws spinning fast enough for a relatively clean slice would be any quieter.
  • It was probably meant to strain the victim; not let you think calmly as you can hear the buzz saw spinning closer and closer...
• What is up with the Duel Disks? They way they work is very inconsistent at times. For example, when Joey summons Red Eyes against the Rare Hunter, the card appears, then he sacrifices the 2 tokens and the monster comes out of the card, later on, players sacrifice the monsters, they disappear, then they summon the high-level monster, and finally, near the end, when they appear in Egypt, they put in their ace monster, which is of a high level, and it just appears in monster form without tributes. What? Maybe the sacrifice worked differently when Joey took on the Rare Hunter as it was the first time Joey played his high-level monster, so it's card form appeared as though to tell him he needed the sacrifices, but the Egypt example is going way too far, did the Duel Disks recognize they were in Ancient Egypt and adjusted themselves to the rules of 3000/5000 years ago or something?
  • Weren't the duel disks a product of their imagination? But I think it also happens outside of duels, season 4 for example. Okay, the anime is not the most reliable source, but it leads me to believe that there are different modi. Presumably, there's the duel-mode that basically follows the rules, and a "just for fun" mode where you can basically just throw any card on the disk and have it materialise.
• Why in the world were the priests wasting time trying to take out Diabound instead of just killing Bakura. I spotted at least a dozen instances in which Bakura could have been killed, sparing everyone so much trouble...

1. ↑ Shadi actually clued Yuugi in as early as the last chapters of volume 2, telling Yuugi to "discover your other self"
2. ↑ Bakura's Monster World RPG, Kaiba's Death-T, and Imori's Dragon Cards for instance
3. ↑ Ex: when Yuugi first solves it in the manga
4. ↑ Ex: when Yuugi rebuilds the puzzle in that fire between the Duelist Kingdom and Battle City arcs
5. ↑ Ushio says he was called to the school 'by Yuugi' but he doesn't know about the pharaoh and Yuugi never seems to remember making that call. So I think it's safe to assume that the Pharaoh made the phonecall.