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Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Yu-Gi-Oh!


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Tenbyakugon



Joined: 11 Jan 2012
Posts: 788
Location: Ohio, United States
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 11:31 am Reply with quote
Yu-Gi-Oh!!! Right in the childhood, Mr. Thompson! <3

The first manga I had ever read and one of the first anime I had ever watched! It's not my favorite series, but it is a classic and as people say, it's not the best, but it is something many people know about! For what what was around at the time, the themes are fantastic (to the point of being so cheesy at points*)!

I'm proud to have the series on my bookshelf and it continues being so with the ZeXal series. Smile Thank you for your work on the original Yu-Gi-Oh! and for writing this justice-filled article.

*Anime hyper (For those that run this forum, there appears to be a glitch that eliminates paragraphs that feature emoticons in parentheses.)
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mewpudding101
Industry Insider


Joined: 07 Apr 2009
Posts: 2204
Location: Tokyo, Japan
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 11:40 am Reply with quote
Awesome article. Made my Japanese day/night. It is 1:00 AM here...

Definitely laughed, and it was super interesting hearing how the manga was edited. It was a big part of my childhood, and I thank you for your great work.

But I've always wondered... WHY DID THEY SUDDENLY CHANGE ALL THE NAMES IN THE SEQUEL, YU-GI-OH GX? That thing was censored really badly, and oh god, the name changes... I couldn't take the English version seriously. Good thing I bought the Japanese versions...
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malvarez1



Joined: 17 Nov 2008
Posts: 1628
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 11:49 am Reply with quote
Cool, a Yu-Gi-Oh! article.

As a fan of anything Shonen Jump, of course I've read this, and I love it. IMO, I never got the hate. Yeah, card games, but ignoring that for a second, the plot is pretty good, with a strong set of characters, like most SJ manga.

Battle City was my favorite arc, by the way. The best duels, the coolest cards (those God cards), a really sick villain (Marik) and an over-all epic feeling.

I did enjoy Millennium World because it tried something different, but man, some of those twists....

And yeah, the ending is one of the most memorable ending to any manga/anime I've ever seen/read. A Shonen Jump manga with a mostly tragic ending? Whoah.
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gatotsu911



Joined: 18 Jul 2006
Posts: 457
Location: US of East Coast
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 12:02 pm Reply with quote
After having spent several years dismissing Yu-Gi-Oh in favor of Pokemon (my reasons, at the time, being its crass commercialism and really stupid, poorly translated monster titles as opposed to Pokemon's wordplay-filled names), when I was 12 or so Yu-Gi-Oh ended up being the manga that got me into the entire Shonen Jump line and expanded my interests beyond just Rumiko Takahashi series. I'm not sure why, but something about the imaginatively twisted storylines, the gloriously over-the-top melodrama, and all the creativity and care put into the details of the various ludicrously-high-stakes games that the characters play really appealed to me. The time during which I was into the manga also happened to overlap with the time during which I was fanatically into Magic: The Gathering, so all the inside references to Magic and CCGs in general were much appreciated and made my snobbish little self feel like I "got" the series in ways that people introduced to CCGs through YGO didn't.

It's unfortunate, then, that the series totally lost its shit during the Battle City arc - the story became so drawn-out, repetitive, schmaltzy, generic, and implausible even by its own absurdist standards that by the time I got to the end of the last "Duelist" volume, I had more or less lost interest, because everything that had drawn me to the series to begin with - the campy melodrama, the dark storylines, the creativity of the games and setpieces - had pretty much evaporated. From what I've read, apparently this was true for many Japanese readers during the manga's original run, as well - the series' popularity waned so much during the Battle City arc that Takahashi's editor told him it was time to start wrapping it up. I never did finish the Millenium World arc, although someday I may go back and do so out of curiosity. At any rate, the early volumes are still legit classic shonen manga.

Also, the fact that all the card names' translations were kept in line with the embarrassing and lazy translations by 4Kids and Konami, respectively, irritated me to no end (e.g. "Slifer the Sky Dragon" instead of "Osiris the God Dragon"). Was that some kind of corporate mandate, or what?

Lastly: I'm sure someone, somewhere is horribly offended by the way YGO exoticizes Egypt (i.e. "Orientalism"), but surprisingly I've never actually seen anyone complain about it.
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v1cious



Joined: 31 Dec 2002
Posts: 6199
Location: Houston, TX
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 12:08 pm Reply with quote
That... actually made Yu-Gi-Oh seem less awful. Fascinating
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Looneygamemaster



Joined: 21 Jan 2012
Posts: 192
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 12:10 pm Reply with quote
Yu-Gi-Oh! holds a special place in my heart as the first manga I started collecting. I'll be the first to admit it's no masterpiece, not by a long shot, but I do like it and feel that it doesn't deserve the derision it's gotten.
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Melanchthon



Joined: 02 Oct 2010
Posts: 550
Location: Northwest from Here
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 12:25 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
Isis Ishtar may be the only anime heroine who wears something vaguely like a hijab

In the first Urusei Yatsura movie, Lum wears a hijab to gate crash Ataru's forced wedding...which doesn't really count, does it? I'm sure I've a seen a couple side characters in hijabs somewhere, but can't seem to remember any.

As for Yu-Gi-Oh itself, I was really into Magic when I was a kid, like twenty years ago. Still have a bunch of cards, lots of 4th edition and Ice Age and even a few Betas (I have one Alpha -- an Island). I was going to sell them on the Ebay, but I then discovered they were worthless. Yeah, if I was seven again when this came out, I'd be all over it like the English on a new Royal, but given my current state of maturity (...snort...) I am predisposed to hold such marketing gimmicks and 'children's entertainment' in disdain. Sorry.
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sakuragtin



Joined: 18 Nov 2008
Posts: 222
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 1:09 pm Reply with quote
This series holds a special place in my nerdy heart! I'm just now collecting the manga so it was actually the 4kids version of the anime that captured my heart completely (I mean I chose to watch it over Sailor Moon which was on Cartoon Network at the time, that's love.) I remember people in highschool running around with well thumbed (more like tattered and on the verge of falling apart they read it so much) Yugioh manga in their hands playing the card game. I collected the cards but never played. To this day I still feel the overwhelming urge to collect cards (mind you the older sets) and still do when I find a pack. It's fun to know that Jason worked on it and makes me want to collect the rest of the manga faster and enjoy the Yugioh experience that way.
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EnigmaticSky



Joined: 06 Aug 2011
Posts: 750
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 1:14 pm Reply with quote
I loved the show to death as a kid. I have a hell of a card collection that I have been trying to sell on ebay, but some of them are pretty hard to part with.

This... actually made me want to read the manga. I really enjoyed this article.
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KabaKabaFruit



Joined: 20 Sep 2007
Posts: 1869
Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 1:34 pm Reply with quote
gatotsu911 wrote:
Also, the fact that all the card names' translations were kept in line with the embarrassing and lazy translations by 4Kids and Konami, respectively, irritated me to no end (e.g. "Slifer the Sky Dragon" instead of "Osiris the God Dragon"). Was that some kind of corporate mandate, or what?

Not a mandate but a personal preference by 4Kids to honor American producer, Roger Slifer. However, I won't deny that such a move was stupid as

A: There could have been better ways to honor Slifer and

B: The name change arguably forever bastardizes Osiris the God Dragon to current and future generations.

We also have to contend with the fact that the Slifer/Osiris debacle is but a big drop in a bucket of bastardized 4Kids and Konami card names that we have seen over the years just for the sake of making what are essentially lame cards sound MORE important than they really are. Case in point: Mystical Space Typhoon over Black Hole. I mean...really?
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Ryusui



Joined: 22 Jun 2004
Posts: 461
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 1:55 pm Reply with quote
Black Hole became Dark Hole in the US, because apparently someone at Konami Japan got told that using the word "black" in card names was racist. Mystical Space Typhoon was Cyclone in Japan. And for the record, both are pretty powerful cards and are still staples in decks to this day.

Konami's actually gotten a lot better in recent years. The dub is still unmitigated garbage, but the localizations are cleverer - there are still bowdlerizations here and there, but nowhere on the level of the mangled Engrish garbage of yesteryear. They've even gone back and fixed a few of the more egregious mistakes (such as "Pigeonholing Books of Spell" appearing in recent reprints as "Spellbook Organization"), though at least partly out of necessity (there are now effects that refer specifically to "Spellbook" cards).

All I know is, if I'm given a choice between "Polar God Sacred Emperor Odin" and "Odin, Father of the Aesir," I'll pick the one that sounds like a good-and-proper mythological reference and not a random string of nouns.
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musouka



Joined: 09 Sep 2003
Posts: 705
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 2:08 pm Reply with quote
Yugioh was the reason I bought my first ever Japanese edition of Shounen Jump--the back and white cover pic of Dark Yugi was too cool, okay!--and also one of the first series I ever began collecting in Japanese, along with Sailormoon.

Recently, a friend and I watched through every single Yugioh series in its entirety and had a total blast doing it. All seven hundred ish episodes. I even own the (semi) recently released artbook.

It has a firm place in my heart as one of my favorite shounen series ever. I love the cast, I love the silly plot, and Battle City will probably always remain my single favorite tournament arc in any shounen series I've ever seen. I've loved all the anime spin offs, too.

When I was younger, I was so disappointed when Takahashi didn't go on to write another manga. Even now, I still hope he's content working on the endless spin offs and doing designs.
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Ryusui



Joined: 22 Jun 2004
Posts: 461
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 2:13 pm Reply with quote
ZEXAL has actually been...well, pretty amazing, IMHO. I'll admit I've been following the synopses, but the story's been awesome so far. Vector is easily not just one of Yu-Gi-Oh!'s greatest villains, but one of the greatest anime villains of all time. Just for the way he spends twenty-something episodes effectively weaponizing shonen cliche against Yuma. And the payoff is the most epic bit of hax in all of Yu-Gi-Oh! history. You know how the hero can always pull the card he needs right when he needs it? Wait until you see how Yuma actually defeats Vector. :3
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malvarez1



Joined: 17 Nov 2008
Posts: 1628
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 3:33 pm Reply with quote
musouka wrote:

Recently, a friend and I watched through every single Yugioh series in its entirety and had a total blast doing it. All seven hundred ish episodes. I even own the (semi) recently released artbook.

It has a firm place in my heart as one of my favorite shounen series ever. I love the cast, I love the silly plot, and Battle City will probably always remain my single favorite tournament arc in any shounen series I've ever seen. I've loved all the anime spin offs, too.

When I was younger, I was so disappointed when Takahashi didn't go on to write another manga. Even now, I still hope he's content working on the endless spin offs and doing designs.


Wow, all the anime back-to-back? That's cool, I'm kinda jealous. I've seen all the anime too, but gradually.

I loved Battle City too. My favorite arc in the manga (and the anime adaption had some really great animation, unlike Millennium World).

Yeah, Takahashi needs to work more, but I guess he's like Toriyama in that regard.
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster


Joined: 07 May 2005
Posts: 357
Location: San Francisco
PostPosted: Thu Jul 25, 2013 3:36 pm Reply with quote
KabaKabaFruit wrote:
gatotsu911 wrote:
Also, the fact that all the card names' translations were kept in line with the embarrassing and lazy translations by 4Kids and Konami, respectively, irritated me to no end (e.g. "Slifer the Sky Dragon" instead of "Osiris the God Dragon"). Was that some kind of corporate mandate, or what?

Not a mandate but a personal preference by 4Kids to honor American producer, Roger Slifer. However, I won't deny that such a move was stupid as

A: There could have been better ways to honor Slifer and

B: The name change arguably forever bastardizes Osiris the God Dragon to current and future generations.

We also have to contend with the fact that the Slifer/Osiris debacle is but a big drop in a bucket of bastardized 4Kids and Konami card names that we have seen over the years just for the sake of making what are essentially lame cards sound MORE important than they really are. Case in point: Mystical Space Typhoon over Black Hole. I mean...really?


I don't know what 4Kids picked the names they did. I'm inclined to guess that they changed Osiris because it sounded too religious, but then why did they keep Ra? Hmm. :/
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