"Let's see, what can I review today?"
"Well, you been playing some Megaman games. You have been reading Berserk and Scott Pilgrim. Why don't you do those?...
"That's great. I am going to do YU-GI-OH again."
"Wait, what?"
Battle City is the second major arc of the original YU-GI-OH, and I would negligent to not mention how this arc is very close to my heart. It arguably holds more nostalgia than Duelist Kingdom as I imagine it does for most YU-GI-OH fans. So with that in mind, this review is going to be very bias.
Battle City is an important arc as it established a lot of tropes that will endure for the remainder of the show and some of the future installments. It would transition the ruleset that is more faithful to the card game. Although, I was surprised by how much Duelist King DNA is still in Battle City which sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, the duel involving Revival Jam would have been a great duel in Duelist Kingdom but feels inconsistent thanks to established rules of the card game. Most of the duels in Battle City feel like this. However, I already mentioned this in my Duelist Kingdom review, so I will digress.
Battle City is also the arc that has a demonstrable shift towards the Millennium Items which was more background lore in the last season. Because of this, the stakes are raised to world ending threats and the threat level will remain that way for the majority of the arcs henceforth. You could argue the Duelist Kingdom also had world ending implications. But again, it was very in the background. For the most part, the things that were at stake were more personal. It wasn't the entire world but mainly stuff like Grandpa's soul, Kaiba's business, and the like.
This leaves Battle City less enjoyable from a plot perspective. World ending stakes are very easy mode and impersonal as a result. It doesn't help that our main character Yugi is established to win basically any match up unless the opponent succeeds at cheating or something. As a side note, I was also surprised by how much cheating happens in Battle City. Almost every duel with a villain has some foul play. Bandit Keith has cards hidden in sleeve. The Rare Hunter inked his cards to predict his next draw. Weevil snuck a card into Joey's deck for an advantage. Espa Roba illegally looked at Joey's hand. Arcana trimmed the edges of his more powerful cards to know their placement in the deck. The entire circumstance between Possessed Joey and Yugi. Yami Bakura/Marik threatens Bakura's life. Noah does the same with Mokuba's life. Johnson alters the odds in luck games to always match his favor. I think that's all of them. Oh wait, I have one more. Yami Marik's final shadow duel where he essentially holds a character hostage.
But anyway, speaking of Yugi, Battle City takes a dip in quality when it comes to our main characters.
One of the things I like about Duelist Kingdom was the main characters had sort of an arc or at least a motivation. Yugi had to save his grandpa. Joey had to save his sister and grew from an amateur duelist to a rookie pro. Kaiba meanwhile starts off as a pompous ass at the beginning. But when his brother gets kidnap, he is put in a position where he actually has something to fight for and grows as a result. It's not perfect, but I admire the effort Duelist Kingdom had when it came to its protagonists. In the sequel, the characters' drive in this one are a lateral move at best. Joey has the same arc except without the stakes of saving his sister. Yugi doesn't have his grandpa but his Millennium Puzzle which is the crux to saving the world and solving the mystery to Yami's backstory. Unfortunately, the mystery doesn't develop much intrigue until much later into the show far beyond Battle City. And as for Kaiba, his character essentially regressed back to what he was in the very first episode except somehow he became more of a monster. This is amusing in some regards, but it is a flanderization that I have to point out. In ways, Kaiba acts as a better villain than Marik.
Speaking of Marik, I had trouble liking him as a villain. A part of the reason is Jonathan Ross' performance which gives the character such an annoying shrillness. The other part is his backstory which tries to go for a tragic backstory approach, and for some reason it doesn't work for me. I believe it is just the inelegance in how they present it. On paper, his backstory is pretty good. A bit out of place since there is some unintentional social commentary about religion, but that is YU-GI-OH for ya. My problem is how we don't really learn about this until Marik's character is replaced by Yami Marik making it feel very irrelevant. This is in contrast to say Pegasus who we do learn about bit by bit throughout the season. It doesn't help that Odion plays a large part into his backstory, but he only gets about four episodes of screen time. It leads to one of the biggest missed opportunities in the series when they didn't go all in on the premise of Odion posing as Marik to hide his identity. A cool concept since Odion is far more intimidating and is given a great voice performance. It would have been a cool moment if throughout the first part of the arc we were lead to believe Odion was Marik only to pull the rug under us and reveal it was Namu (Marik's fake identity) all along. Instead, we get a brief arc where Odion poses as Marik, and Marik has the remind the audience constantly via inner monologue that he is actually Marik this whole time.
In fairness to some of the characters, they get a little more interesting as the show proceeds to set up increasing motivations. For example, Yugi's motivation does get more personal as some of his friends will either get kidnapped, possessed, and or become comatose in later episodes.
This loosely applies to Joey as well with Mai which is done surprisingly well. Unfortunately, it renders Mai into a plot device which rubs me the wrong way. Her character is about as bad as it was in Duelist Kingdom. I didn't even bother reviewing Mai's character in the last review since she was that inessential. I am only mentioning her here because some of her moments are just baffling. The episode that comes to mind is her first duel with a movie star. It's a blatant attempt to establish Mai's dueling talents, and it is so lazily done. The antagonist even pulls the "if I win you must marry me" trope that drives me nut in YU-GI-OH. I will likely not mention Mai again in both this review and future YU-GI-OH reviews. But considering Mai is my favorite female character in the series, I will throw her a few thoughts. Like a lot of YU-GI-OH, she had a lot of potential as a character. Her voice performance is great and the character has a charming personality. Unfortunately YU-GI-OH can't write female characters, and that will be a problem for basically the entire series including the future installments that I'm aware of.
But back to the characters the show actually cares about, when Marik turns into Yami Marik, his character becomes a force of nature which was interesting mainly for how morbid Yami Marik gets in some episodes. The image of Mai stuck in an hour glass is legitimately haunting as is Yami Marik's blatant apathy towards humanity.
The show itself gets better when you ignore some of the nonsens-
YU-GI-OH: The Noah Arc | The Ultimate Sidetrack
Oh yeah, before I continue, I got to cover this real quick.
I hate this arc. I don't even have the energy to give this arc a proper introduction. It's an interruptive filler arc that has like three and a half good episodes in a 24 episode slog. I will give the arc credit for humanizing Kaiba a bit. But similar to Marik, it could have been more elegantly done. This filler arc could be much more condense. Or better yet, these story pieces of Kaiba's life could be spread throughout the Battle City arc and we could have rid this filler arc entirely. It would have made Kaiba's flanderization into a comical douchebag make more sense.
Other than that, I don't have much else to say. I admire a handful of jokes in one episode that felt like subtle jabs at Dungeon Dice Monsters. Monkey Tristian is amusing and frankly an improvement on the character. Kaibacorp board executives, except Leichter, are some of the worst villains in the series thanks to their incessant puns. Noah is also pretty awful as well due to his annoying voice and how inconsistent his character acts as he will go from evil but fair to a lying backstabber that plays dirty to a character that wants to redeem himself. It wasn't necessary to see any of the side characters like Serenity and Tea duel.
As Kaiba literally said at the end of this arc, this detour was a complete waste of time and effort, so let's move on and pretend that nonsense never happened. HE LITERALLY SAID THIS-
YU-GI-OH: Back to Battle City | AKA The Good Part of the Show
But anyway, as I was saying, the show does get better. However, there is a lot of padding and nonsense that tempts the viewer to skip to the good parts. And honestly, I would suggest fast forwarding through this fluff for your own sanity. An example of this fluff is the amount of recap dialogue.
Now, recap dialogue is not unusual in a television show especially older ones that released once a week and had commercial breaks. It's understandable to have a piece of dialogue to catch up audiences who may have jumped in the middle of a season or episode. That said, Battle City goes above and beyond with recap dialogue. I don't remember if this was a problem in Duelist Kingdom, but it is an absolute nightmare in Battle City. It seems every five minutes we need a reminder of somebody's motivation, the situation, and or the rules of the card game. This is excluding the recap promo that plays at the beginning of most episodes. The only time I found the excessive recap dialogue useful was when I briefly suffered severe brain damage, so I couldn't pay attention as well as I normally would.
Another side example is the heavy use of flashbacks which is used for the same reason and seems to also pad out the runtime by reusing animation from previous episodes. It's telling that Battle City is the first season of YU-GI-OH to feature a clip show and more telling that Battle City has essentially two of them. You can make the argument that every episode is a clip show since the show uses so many flashbacks. They even do a flashback within a flashback!
The Back to Battle City portion of the show is where the story is at its most enjoyable since the show does give all the set ups a well deserved pay off. While the first three quarters of the show was admittedly a slow burn, I feel it made the last quarter far more satisfying to the point where I would say that Back to Battle City is one of my favorite portions of the entire series. Specifically, I love Kaiba versus Yugi. It's, dare I say, an epic showdown. Jeez, the duel lasts longer than Yugi's duel with the main villain. It's satisfying seeing Yugi humble Kaiba knowing how awful he was acting throughout the show. Joey even gets a few opportunities to humble Kaiba in their Battle of the Bronze which was a pretty ok duel.
There are other portions I like too. Joey's stuff with Mai gets a cute payoff albeit with a severe case of romantic blue balls for the viewer. And naturally, the final showdown between Yami Marik and Yugi is quite satisfying. It's at least has a more interesting ending compared to the Pegasus battle where Yugi won with friendship. Here, the battle feels like proper culmination to everyone's plight.
I think another reason Back to Battle City is really solid compared to the rest of the season is that it is more focused and condensed. There isn't Mai, Ishitzu, Odion, or Bakura to worry about. And similar to the Duelist Kingdom semi-finals, it focuses on the four most important characters. And unlike Duelist Kingdom, the four semi-finalists all have a significant role in the story whereas Bandit Keith and Mai felt comparatively tacked on. The four way duel best demonstrated the best. You got four guys battling each other for their own reasons. All four conflict with one another, and it is great.
To the rest of the show's credit, there are little touches throughout the season as a whole that I appreciated from a story perspective. This is essentially the detail round of the review since I've covered the main things I wanted to talk about.
There are some wonderful call backs that were incredibly subtle for Battle City. Yugi vs. the Rare Hunter has Yugi defeat his first great card which was a great book end to Yugi's Exodia and establishes the raised stakes of this new season. Likewise in Kaiba vs. Gozoboru, Kaiba redeems himself against Exodia by beating Exodia Necross. There is subtle call back during the double duel between Kaiba/Yugi and the Masked Duelists where Yugi saves Kaiba using Kuriboh's Multiply, an effect that almost defeated him in Duelist Kingdom.
I'm glad they finally gave Bakura proper screen time that isn't him walking around or doing random shit. His three duels were some of my favorite, and I failed to mention last time how much I love the voice actor. And finally, I really like Yugi vs. Strings which feels like the only time regular Marik was threatening.
However, there is honestly an equal amount of weird, stupid, anti-climatic, and forced nonsense as well which I will get into now. The episode where Yami and Tea go out is one of the worst episodes in the series. Everything that happens could have been done in a couple of scenes. We also didn't need a scene where Yugi gets new cards.
Speaking of which, aside from the Egyptian God Cards, why doesn't Yugi get a new rare card from his opponents similar to Joey? I would have loved to see Yugi use Arcana's Dark Magician.
And speaking of that, in the Arcana episode, they do a weird Pokémon thing where they talk about treating your cards with respect implying the holograms have feelings. It is never brought up again and is really only used as one payoff for that particular episode. I don't know. It weirded me out and stood out to me ever since I watched it. Oh also, Dark Magician Girl's effect is really weird from a feminism perspective. Dark Magician Girl gets stronger if there Dark Magician in the graveyard. Is that anti-women because she gets her strength from men or is that pro-women because those men are dead? I need to stop overthinking these things.
Joey has a plot thing with his mom. And it is so quickly resolved, it ends faster than this sentence.
Why did Ishizu think she would beat Kaiba in the Battle City tournament when she said in an earlier episode that Kaiba was going to someday face Yugi? Did she just forget about that?
If Pegasus worked for Hasbro and found the Egyptian God tablets, would everyone be playing Monopoly in order to retrieve the Egyptian God Properties? Sorry, I needed to write a stupid joke. Writing this review has been exhausting.
Why did they establish that Odion got Marik 12 locator cards as a backup plan before the climatic duel between Possessed Joey and Yugi? Wouldn't that imply to the viewers that Yugi was somehow going to foil Marik's plan? Odion giving Marik 12 locator cards for the finals should have been a cool cliffhanging stinger at the end. It's such a blatant writing mistake. Speaking of Marik, Yami Marik's powers are really inconsistent. He can't send some people to the shadow realm without beating them in a duel. Others, like Odion, he can send with a flick of the wand. Why does Marik get to make the rules in all the shadow games? Wouldn't Bakura be able to also pull this trickery as well when he faced him? This show seriously needs to get its shadow realm mechanics in order.
And finally, the Duke Tristian Love Triangle with Serenity is really pointless. It's very "we gotta give the characters something to do." You get this sense once Serenity is sidelined to take care of Mai and the whole Love Triangle business becomes almost non-existent.
I left Battle City pretty exhausted compared to Duelist Kingdom. While Duelist Kingdom is flawed, I left feeling pretty satisfied Dungeon Dice Monsters aside. Battle City has highs that are genuinely high. The duels are very back and forth in terms of pacing focusing more on interesting dilemmas than Dungeons and Dragons creativity. However, there are also has lows that are extremely low. There are so many interruptions and padding from the recap dialogue and flashbacks to the just other random nonsense that has always plague this series.
Even with nostalgia, I came out of Battle City liking it less than how I remembered it. And yet, in a weird way, I still want to recommend it. Of course, it's recommended that you fast forwarded through the padding, and most if not all the Noah arc can be skipped to no detriment to the main plot.
If this and the Duelist Kingdom review teaches you anything, it is that YU-GI-OH is a sloppy yet interesting franchise. I really feel most people can get something out of the show as horribly flawed it can be at times. It can be a great case study in narrative writing or can be a nice background show while hanging with your friends. I compared this show to professional wrestling one time, and I think that may be the best analogy for this show. It's weird and certainly stupid. But underneath that veil, there is some interesting gems hidden in there. For what it's worth, it does a couple of pretty neat things despite its premise of people saving the world through the medium of a Japanese card game.
At the very least, it is great for the memes. I mean, how else can you see "we have reached the official dueling altitude" without the satisfaction of context?
