Review: YU-GI-OH!

People forget this particular series started out as a Weekly Shonen Jump series, but is it worth remembering over 30 years later?

YU-GI-OH! (Yu-Gi-O!), by Kazuki Takahashi.  First published in 1996 and first published in North America in 2003.

PLOT: 

Yugi Motoh is a happy-go-lucky teen with a fondness for puzzles and a tendency for him and his friends to get into trouble.  Luckily, he has a secret weapon.  Yugi's grandfather gave him an ancient puzzle, which turns out to have dark and ancient spirit within it.  Whenever he needs help, this spirit can possess Yugi and allow him to enact revenge against his oppressors with games of his own where the stakes can be deadly.

STORY:

Before there was a card game, an anime, or even jokes about card games on motorcycles, there was just a quaint little shonen manga about puzzles.  It's hard to imagine such a series inspiring such a long-lasting franchise.  Yet there's a certain quirky je ne sais quoi to this series that might explain how it got popular in the first place.

On the surface, Yu-Gi-Oh! seems almost embarrassingly earnest.  Yugi is so sincere, so gentle, and so hapless that it almost feels like parody.  The same could be said for Yugi's friends.  Anzu is your typical Token Shonen Manga Girl: kind, motherly, mildly prudish, and the object of awkward, immersion-breaking fanservice.  Jounoichi and Honda are your standard enemies-turned-allies, whose rowdier, hornier natures serve to kickstart most of the plots in this volume.  There's a lot of discussion about The Power of Friendship.  So what makes this any different from anything else running in Weekly Shonen Jump at the time?

You could point to the focus games of chance and you'd be partially right.  It's kind of a dorky focus, but it's a relatively novel one and one that allows for a lot of variety.  Just in this volume alone you have a knife games, dice games, silence games, motion games, all of them more ludicrous than the last.  If you ask me, though, where Yu-Gi-Oh! shines the most is whenever Yugi's spirit-possessed self comes out.  There are no Shadow Realms to be found here - this version of Yugi has a competitive, even sadistic edge, and has no problem punishing those who would bully or exploit him and his friends with madness and even death.  It's a concept that speaks to any child that was ever bullied and the edginess that Takahashi brings to it makes it all the more appealing to its target teen audience.  It feels like Takahashi's personality as a mangaka truly shines in these moments.  These moments got me through the dopier parts and they're the ones that stuck with me after I put the volume down.

ART:

Takahashi's character designs are fairly typical of their time.  There's a lot of goofy hair styles and some rubbery faces, but they lack the sharper edges of this series' post-card game overhaul.  There is something kind of comical about how different Yugi and his grandpa look in comparison to the rest of the cast.  They're at least half the height of everyone else, with big round eyes, barely any nose, and strange, almost sculpture-like hair.  Yet I would be lying if I said that the design for Yugi's possessed self wasn't gloriously edgy.  It's not just that his clothes take a turn for the goth, it's that his very expression takes on a manic, wicked edge.  Even the inking becomes darker whenever he's around.  Those moments sell the transformation and liven up what is otherwise a pretty average-looking manga.

PRESENTATION:

It should be noted that much like Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, this series ran as one long, continuous one in Japan but was split by Viz for the sake of marketing to those familiar only with the anime.  They also made a curious choice when it came to localizing the name.  While they do stick with the original Japanese names, they include some awkward footnotes on the side noting what their dub names are.  I'm sure they switch things over once the focus shifts exclusively to the card game, although without having read it myself I can't say with certainty.

RATING:

Yu-Gi-Oh! can be kind of basic and looks kind of weird to modern eyes, but when it lets itself get weird and dark it's kind of amazing.  It's kind of a shame that it got famous for something else and became a completely different series because I kind of love this version. 

This series is published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 38 volumes available.  All 38 were published and are currently in print.