DM Episode 1, redux

Because I can feel myself flinch whenever I see that someone is reading older Actual Content posts. All I’m doing here is a brand-new write up of the episodes, without consulting the older one.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (the anime) starts at roughly the same point as Yu-Gi-Oh Duelist (the manga), which means there are seven volumes of the manga that don’t get adapted directly*. While most of the first seven volumes are highly episodic and don’t necessarily *have* to be adapted to tell the card games-centric part of the story, there are two characters that were introduced in these volumes who can’t just be tossed into the first episode as part of Yugi’s circle of friends.

The first of these is Seto Kaiba.

Kaiba gets two separate stories in the manga that tie together; the first is a duel with Yami Yugi after he tries to steal Yugi’s grandpa’s Blue Eyes. The second is the Death-T arc, which is him going totally overkill to get revenge on Yugi for their first meeting. The anime splices these chapters together to create a single episode.

The episode starts off adding in the very first scene, which is just an introduction of what Duel Monsters is, who Yugi and his friends are, and they set up a little thing where Kaiba may be looking for the Blue-Eyes.

The manga introduces the game too, but they’re already at the card shop. Whatever.

We then get what is basically a word-for-word adaptation of the scene in the card shop. Kaiba leaves the game shop, and then we suddenly cut to the adaptation of Death-T5.

And again, the duel itself is basically word-for-word in its adaptation. The only thing that gets baffling is, uh

What did Kaiba do to him?

Uh, yeah, shennanigans.

That’s more like it.

Kaiba gets Mind Crushed at the end of both, but the nature of the Mind Crush is different. The manga’s Mind Crush is like breaking a puzzle; Kaiba’s soul has gotten disarranged, he isn’t behaving how he is naturally meant to, and the only solution is to break his soul and have Kaiba put it back together right. Me, I think of it like defragmenting a computer. Naturally, this takes time, so Kaiba is out cold for six months. It’s also a Penalty Game that is unique to to this story.

Mind Crush in the anime is Yami Yugi’s default Penalty Game; it’s the only one he ever does. And they don’t really elaborate on what it does. It’s just -SHOOM-, flashy lights, and maybe the recipient gets knocked off their feet. It also wears off quickly, so Kaiba has to go on an impromptu hermitage for six months to get him out of the way of the plot.

The things we’ve lost from the manga – the biggest by far is Mokuba. Mokuba gets a cameo in the anime episode, but in the manga, he has three whole games against Yugi to himself: a game of CapMon, where he’s trying to avenge Kaiba for his first loss; a game of dinner Russian Roulette; and Death-T4, which is another game of CapMon. Death-T4 is extra interesting, because the Kaiba brothers had made a bet on which level Yugi would lose at; Mokuba bet on his own game, but Kaiba bet against it. The altercation between the brothers (as well as Kaiba giving Mokuba a Penalty Game for losing) is meant to show us just how messed up Kaiba is, and why he needs a Mind Crush.

We also lose Death-T, but, the way the anime is approaching Kaiba’s character, nothing that happens there is important. Mind Crush functions as a reset button on Kaiba’s character in both canons, so the anime safely boxes Death-T away with the rest of the seven volumes it doesn’t adapt.

After the end of Death-T, there is also a little backstory on the Kaibas that wasn’t included in the anime episode, but we get an entire filler arc in the middle of Battle City to make up for it.

…Nnnnnext……timeee……… *cough*, we get to kick off the plot proper with Duelist Kingdom and antiquated technology.

*[They are adapted in the Toei anime (Season 0), but since that series is not in the same continuity as DM, I’m not going to cover it here.]