Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged or otherwise

[Dracos]

So a few of us were yammering on it, after I mentioned that it was really a setting concept that I don't understand, especially outside of its space of reality bending around it.  Specifically, because it demands relevance, without monsters or super powers or anything that clearly has present effect to force reality to need to bend to it.  Most shonen shows have the good reason that if lots of people existed wandering around with superpowers/monsters, society would have to deal with it.  The card games lack this sort of present force.

But what is clear is that it is well suited for parody: yugiohabridged.com

Yu-Gi-Oh abridged takes the hacked together terrible american version of this and makes it funny.  It has about 70ish episodes with an average 4 minute length, and enough change over it to make it funny.

[Arakawa]

Most shonen shows have the good reason that if lots of people existed wandering around with superpowers/monsters, society would have to deal with it.  The card games lack this sort of present force.

To be absolutely fair to it, from what I remember it did have the Indiana Jones thing with ancient Egyptian artefacts of world-ending importance. Why they had to stake their ancient Egyptian artefacts of world-ending importance on a children's card game, though....

As for the abridged series, somehow the later episodes seem to drag on to me. _{(There's a penguin who wants to take over the body of a teenage girl, or something?)} It may be a hazard of long-running abridged series in general, as it runs out of obvious absurdity in the series premise itself to parody and has to invent stuff, or just reference itself a bunch.

[thepanda]

Most shonen shows have the good reason that if lots of people existed wandering around with superpowers/monsters, society would have to deal with it.  The card games lack this sort of present force.

To be absolutely fair to it, from what I remember it did have the Indiana Jones thing with ancient Egyptian artefacts of world-ending importance. Why they had to stake their ancient Egyptian artefacts of world-ending importance on a children's card game, though....

Haven't watched it in a million years but I vaguely recall the children's card game being based off some ancient Egyptian magic dueling system. Sort of like if ouija boards actually were magic but needed special items to power them properly.

[Arakawa]

I think (think, don't remember) the anime went like this:

• Season 1, Maximilian Pegasus holds the tournament, with fake monsters in a giant holographic dungeon, but with actual Millennium Items being at stake. He blackmails Yugi into playing because he wants Yugi's pyramid-thingy, or something.
• Season 2 (?), Kaiba holds the tournament, with fake monsters off portable holographic projectors, but some folks show up with Egyptian God Cards, which are unique and real and summon actual Egyptian Gods (with associated dire possibilities), but somehow are accepted as official by the game computer. I think because Pegasus was drawing some unique collector's cards one day, got a whiff of some eldritch Lovecraftian inspiration, so he ended up unintentionally making actual spell cards that summon actual Egyptian God-Monsters, and officially including them into the game.
• A variety of possessed jerkasses can put people in Shadow Games where it's just like an ordinary game, except the loser loses his soul or whatever.
• At some point (somewhere) other cards can be used to summon actual Duel Monsters, assuming you have the special McGuffin?? So the cards are like GPS coordinates of an actual Ancient Egyptian monster that's still out there to be summoned, but you need the right eldritch magic to actually use that, I guess.
• 1234,235532,3242 seasons later, http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Domino_City is a 25th century Blade Runner / Tron metropolis where the motorcycle-riding cops apprehend criminals by playing card games at them. _{I don't even know.}

It's all very confusing and un-memorable (above description is most certainly wrong on most points, because I never watched anything besides random out-of-context episodes) and it's very hard to tell at which point the holographic simulations and aribtrary card-game rules stop and stuff gets real.

I get the feeling the original idea was to have something like the No Game No Life or even Tron universe, where the outcome of real stuff is decided by the playing of games, but unlike NGNL or Tron which just postulates completely different fantasy universes where gaming can be a law of reality, the Yu-Gi-Oh authors really botched it by making such a piecemeal justification of why playing the games would matter in our world.

[thepanda]

before the magic started flying left and right the real consequences were jerkass people setting p death traps and whatnot. Handcuffing people to exploding duel platforms, threatening grandfathers, and the like.

[Arakawa]

before the magic started flying left and right the real consequences were jerkass people setting p death traps and whatnot. Handcuffing people to exploding duel platforms, threatening grandfathers, and the like.

Oh yeah.

Suddenly I remember the thing where the guy rigged a circular saw to descend as their life points got drained, or some completely ridiculous thing like that.

*snickers*

I think it was some kind of soul saw that cuts your soul open, or some stuff like that.

[Bezzerker]

And all of the anime was spawned due to what amounts to the game one character played in the original manga. I actually preferred the original in that regard, as each person Yugi encountered played a different game. Mokuba, Seto's younger brother, didn't even play the card duel. He played a capsule monster game that played like Stratego.

Although, the death traps were still there, as Seto actually built like a five 'floor' dungeon for Yugi and his friends to traverse, with legitimate dangers in them like falling blocks that need to be climbed and a psychopath being given a variety of weapons to fight with....