[COMPLETED] Paradox Disliked This: Let's Play The Original Yu-Gi-Oh!

Sixty Duels done. Just forty more to go.

Flame Swordsman can be fused with pretty much every monster that could reasonably be considered FIRE with pretty much every warrior at or below 1800 attack, bar some strangeness, and is a part of the Demon's Sword chain, fusing with it and any Warrior between 1400 and 1500 attack - except Kanan, sadly, but including itself.

But... we are facing Jonouchi. Flame Swordsman is one of his iconic monsters. So, that can't be all, right?

Well... funny story.

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015 - "Honoo no Kenshi" or Swordsman of Fire (localized as Flame Swordsman)A fighter gifted with the power of fire. Attacks enemies with a sword that launches flames.ほのおのちからを あわせもつ せんしほのおを はなつけんで こうげきするDebuted in Chapter 78 of the manga.Dropped By: Communication Bonus

...This is the first card we've encountered that's Totally Multiplayer Only, and it's only encounterable this way because you happen to be able to fuse into it.

We'll be getting into the multiplayer sh*t eventually by hook or by crook, but keep in mind that this is a very early, comparatively, prize, and while its Equipment situation sucks sh*t it's an 1800 monster and will stick around in your deck for a really f*cking long time just because of that.

mmmmmeh.

Shrek!

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012 - "Barbarians Nigo" or Barbarians #2 (localized as Swamp Battleguard)Crushes all comers with his spiked club. It is not known why he is called "Number 2".トゲつきこんぼうで あらゆるものをはかいする なぜ２ごうかはふめいDebuted in Chapter 78 in the manga.Dropped By: Victory Bonus, 2/2048 from Jonouchi Katsuya

Yeah, Barbarians #1/Lava Battleguard didn't exist until Duel Monsters 2 added it as one of the recolors. It's not even in the manga at any point! Weird to consider, given that #2 came first, but there you go.

anyway i don't care if the swamp thing is a dubism i'm gonna keep calling it shrek :V it's the best of jonouchi's 1800 attack monsters too, arguably the best 1800 in the game although that's mostly because the next best contestant is a 1 time only card.

Man I am... not getting the things I was kind of hoping I would get, I guess.

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068 - "Garuzasu" (localized as Garoozis)An axe-swinging beast-warrior with the head of a dragon.りゅうのあたまをもつ じゅうせんし オノのこうげきは かなりきょうりょくDebuted in Chapter 70 of the manga.Dropped By: Victory Bonus, 2/2048 from Jonochi Katsuya

80 wins prize of course. Garoozis (i do not understand that name) is nice because while it isn't buffed by one of the two best Equips, the fact that it has the head of a dragon is great because it means the dragon equip works on it.

Seriously, like, not even one? I know of at least one card he commonly drops which I haven't seen yet...

And Time Wizard is the 90 win prize, which should inform you what the 100 will likely be given everything else thus far.

...

I should have stopped last update at 50 wins I think. I'd have much more to talk about.

Dinosaur Ryuzaki's going to be a f*cking pain to cover I can already tell.

Oh well.

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082 - "Red Eyes Black Dragon" (localized as Red-Eyes Black Dragon)A very rare card with high-level ATK factor.こうげきりょくは じょうきゅうレベル まぼろしの ちょうレアカードだ！Debuted in Chapter 79 of the manga.Dropped By: Victory Bonus

"The blue dragon brings victory - however, the red one does not bring victory. It brings only the potential."

So, suffice it to say, Red-Eyes Black Dragon - and yes, that hyphen is important, if it didn't have that hyphen then Hundred Eyes Dragon would be a part of its archetype and we know this because Hundred Eyes Dragon used to be Hundred-Eyes Dragon and they had to f*cking errata the hyphen out - being one of the strongest and most iconic cards in the game, even in this pre-METEOR BURAKKU DORAGON landscape, is obviously incredibly based and powerful in this game, and there is obviously no reason to ever remove this single copy from your deck. In fact, in a theoretically ideal deck that could be made without either cheating or doing sh*t that I would consider idiotic and to such a degree that you may as well cheat, that singleton copy would be accidentally one of the best cards in it.

Now, on seeing this, you might have one of two questions - or possibly both of those two at once. The first is obvious. "Hold on, this is before Meteor B, but what about..." And to this question, I respond with this:

As for the second question... well, you might remember that Jonouchi had three 1/2048 cards he could play. You might remember all three being pretty iconic Duelist Kingdom cards. You might be wondering, then, where the f*ck the other two are.

And to that, I respond only with this.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwjTsUHDLBo

Onto the cards we didn't get from Jonouchi which haven't gotten reviews yet!

Armored Lizard: Communications Bonus AND Victory Bonus, so we'll get it later - it's only a 3/2048 from Jonouchi anyway.

Kuriboh: :/ you've seen this three times already. initial deck, all four stage 1 people, mokuba, 2/2048. we'll talk in two parts.

Battle Warrior: 40/2048 from Jonouchi, and absolutely nowhere else. Which means...

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100 - "Kakuto Senshi Ultimator" or Grappling Warrior Ultimator (localized as Battle Warrior, booooooo)A grappling warrior who does not use any weapons and fights with bare hands.ぶきをいっさいつかわず すでで たたかいぬく かくとうせんしDebuted in Chapter 91 of the manga, the last new monster to debut before this game's cutoff!Dropped By: 40/2048 from Jonouchi Katsuya, as just mentioned.

kind of a shame that I couldn't get this thing but oh well. it'll happen. rather have an 1800 attack monster than a 700 one.

Hard Armor: 10/2048 from Jonouchi and nowhere else, which is weird, because, like...

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156 - "Hard Armor" (localized as Hard Armor)A living suit of armor that attacks enemies with a bone-jarring tackle.こころのあるよろい かたいからだで ソルジャータックルをしかけてくるDropped By: 10/2048 from Jonouchi Katsuya, as just mentioned.

It's not even good! One of an exceptionally small number of monsters in this game with 300 or less Attack. Why is it so rare? I get that it's a fan design (Turtle Tiger from last time was too, oops, only found that out this time) but even so!

Eyearmor: 1/2048 from Jonouchi and Mokuba, Initial Deck, nowhere else. Weird.

And now that that's done...

Once you have beaten all four Stage 1 opponents 5 times, an arrow appears on the right side of the screen, finally revealing why you can only move between these four awkwardly placed opponents by moving up and down. Whenever you hit Right, you finally go from Stage 1, being In The Ship...

...to Stage 2, Duel Kingdom.

Duelist Kingdom is really, really annoying to navigate. The only way to know what area a specific Duelist is at is by clicking on it, meaning if you want to go back to this screen because you misclicked you have to go all the way back to the main menu. This wouldn't be as bad, except for some reason they decided to put NINE of this game's f*cking opponents in Stage 2. These are, in order:

Insector Haga of the Forests, King of Insects, and the reigning National Dueling Champion in Japan.

Mai Kujaku of the Mountains, the beguiling champion who always gets what she wants. At this point in the manga she was slowly beginning to approach "major character" status as she'd appeared in several chapters, which isn't shocking, as she eventually ends up as one of the four Finalists of Duelist Kingdom.

She also cheats at cards, but only sometimes.

Dinosaur Ryuzaki of the Wastelands, the brutal powerhouse who is Second Place at the National Dueling Championships in Japan.

Ryota Kajiki of the Seas, here fought on the coast (following the same techniques he used in Duelist Kingdom in the manga), the master of the hidden depths of the ocean.

Seto f*cking Kaiba, who absolutely should not be a Stage 2 opponent. The former King of Games, one of the richest men in the world, once created an entire theme park half to spite his dead adoptive father and half to murder one specific person, has killed several people personally, has killed several more people through catspaws, once took over an entire city so that he could get his hand on two cards, broke the f*cking afterlife by combining the souls of people across the world using VR so he could get a salty runback, and his favorite monster not only gets the God music sometimes but is a f*cking orbital beam cannon dragon. Which he owns all copies of. And the metaphysical soul of one of those monsters is his f*cking soul. And one of the other two was a previous incarnation of him. And the third is that incarnation's... lover? Girlfriend? Lalah.

Oh also in one of the Duel Monsters sequels (8, specifically, it's like the only good part of DM8) he decided to create a version of himself who's a Tokusatsu Hero and that thing gained sapience and turned into a Monster spirit because we f*cking saw it in the sequel to Yugioh Duel Monsters.

I'm not going to talk about the order of the other Duelists in Stage 2 in this part, because I want to keep you guys guessing - who could possibly be next? It's everyone's favorite thought experiment, I know - but if you guys didn't know that the Main character's f*cking rival who owns the strongest no-questions monster in the game as of the start of the manga was going to be the hardest opponent here as opposed to mostly a bunch of bit players, I dunno what to tell you. I do not get why this guy was here instead of either in Stage 3 or inserted before Stage 4 - because you bet your f*cking ass he's harder than the guy in Stage 3, too. Not as much the final boss of Stage 4 or the true final boss of Stage 5, however.

Anyway, that rant aside, he's currently invading Duelist Kingdom by a different coast, as he was when we saw him first in this arc in the manga.

So too is Mokuba Kaiba, Seto's brother, the master of... Monster Capsule, which we aren't playing here. And also that guy who keeps f*cking showing up in the Drops section. There is a reason for that.

Nearer to a lake, you will find the "Puppeteer of Doom", otherwise and more accurately called the Ventriloquist of the Dead - a servant of Pegasus who uses a puppet which he claims has the soul of Seto Kaiba, along with his stolen deck. Fortunately, he doesn't have a deck nearly as terrifying as Kaiba's, thank christ, but he's still a formidable opponent.

If you know your Yugioh and don't know this guy, it's because in the anime he got replaced with the Impersonator of Death, who looks like this:

Obviously a very different character altogether. The Ventriloquist would get into DM2, but would then after that only show up again in Dungeon Dice Monsters and DM8, both games with a sh*tload of random idiots in it to pad time out - DM8 even had him alongside the Impersonator for some goddamn reason.

Following the Ventriloquist/Puppeteer, we have the Player Killer of Darkness, another of Pegasus's employees, in the dark, distant forest. A master of defensive, stealthy attacks, he eliminates all foes under the cover of night.

PK and the Puppeteer are both Eliminators, people specifically hired by Pegasus to thin out the herds of people in Duelist Kingdom - there are 80 Star Chips on the island and you need 10 to make it to the Finals, but only 4 people are supposed to make it there, so the Player Killers are to take all of the rest of them by beating everyone else in duels. While the Ventriloquist was specifically there for Yugi, the Player Killer preferred to spread out and take on more foes - the Labyrinth Brothers, a pair of Eliminators who showed up slightly later than this game would be able to show off, preferred to wait in one spot where they could play their favorite mind games on people.

And, lastly...

...Hiding out in a strange industrial area that definitely was not in Duelist Kingdom in any other version of things stands Keith Howard. Known as the Bandit for his incredibly fearsome card play, so bad that most opponents who face him are traumatized by his power, and his preference for high stakes tournaments, he hails from America, a country which in Yugioh was very, very into Duel Monsters and adopted it way quicker than Japan. He's considered one of the top Card Professors, but he was defeated by Pegasus using a proxy duelist in a challenge, and kind of went nuts after that. He cheated to get here and he's currently cheating the rules in several ways, most notably that he has three underlings with him who he's basically handing wins to - the idea being, if he gets in the Finals, and the other three goons do too, he's already got this thing won.

Curiously, while he's normally associated with machines, and does have something of a machine focus in this game (presumably Takahashi warned them about that), he's actually significantly more focused on Zombies in this one - because the last duel in the manga at the time this game's cards were finalized was Jonouchi vs Ghost Kotsuzuka, who he provided cards to, and those cards were Zombies or Zombie support. Kotsuzuka isn't in this game though, and neither are the other two minions (who have never been in any game I think and have never been shown to have cards outside of a split-second cameo in the anime), so Keith gets all their sh*t.

He's also probably not someone who should be at this level, but oh well, that's just how this game split Duelists. DM2 actually did put him in Stage 3, alongside Kaiba, Haga, Mai, and the Player Killer, and to compensate for the fact that Stage 2 now only had four opponents it stuck the Labyrinth Brothers in there as separate opponents, for some goddamn reason.

...And you know what, since we have time, let's throw in another sequel analysis here. This one is the PS2 equivalent to Duel Monsters II, a game that was definitely intended as a counterpart but which is simply a much better game, and yet a game that lives in infamy to this day. That's mostly because "Yu-gi-oh! Shin Duel Monsters - Sealed Memories" saw a much broader release, and it did so as...

Now, if you know Yugioh, you know what Forbidden Memories is. If you don't, you might have seen a video in your Youtube feed talking about THE HARDEST YUGIOH GAME EVER MADE or THE ULTIMATE YUGIOH SPEEDRUNNING CHALLENGE and didn't click on it because it's clickbait, and while the latter might be true, the former is total horsesh*t - in a few parts we're going to get to the retrospective on DM4 and eventually DM8 is going to see the light of day here and both of those games are infinitely dumber, the latter is absolutely the hardest Yugioh game ever.

But what is Shin Duel Monster's deal? Well,

~The fusion pools are massively expanded from DM1 and DM2.
~Speaking of, you can now fuse from the hand and equip monsters with sh*t from the hand while they are in your hand. You can only play one card per turn, but that card could be a combination of all five cards from your hand, in theory.
~Opponents have more than one drop table based on how you do in the duel - great technical play is rewarded with access to a pool that has better Magic and Trap cards, better beatdown play is rewarded with access to a pool that has better Monster cards.
~Passwords still have a cost, but that cost is in Star Chips, which you get from winning duels, and you get more from winning duels well. However, while every card has a password, some have Star Chip costs that are essentially physically impossible to obtain. You are meant to get these through other means.
~The AI... is no longer stupid. Well, sort of. They do still sometimes cheat to make themselves more of a threat, but now they can actually use Spells and Traps.
~also Rituals and Traps are no longer stupid and f*cked and unusable unlike in DM2. Although, Rituals still suck sh*t. But they don't remove themselves from your save file after use now! And traps, which stay on the field until triggered, are legitimately really good now.
~Terrains now give 500 Atk/Def to everything that is buffed by it, and everything hurt by it is debuffed 500 Atk/Def. Though niche, the way the gameplay is structured makes terrains significantly more important, such that you actually have to pay attention to them - as opposed to DM1, where, if you haven't noticed, I've staunchly refused to use even a single copy of any of them.
~There's a plot. A whole story mode. Something that the regular DM series wouldn't really get into until all the way in 7.
~The Alignment System from 2 was expanded, only for this game. Now, instead of everything having one alignment and instantly winning against specific other alignments, everything has two potential ones (of which the AI will only ever choose one to make choices easier ingame), and you get a 500 Atk/Def boost if your alignment is better. A much fairer system.
~The game has a lot of Pocketstation integration, like a metric sh*tload of it. The Pocketstation came in a bundle with this game in Japan (or at least, it did for some copies, it was a limited time thing as I'm told) and they expect you to use it. This is, of course, a Big Problem outside of Japan where the Pocketstation doesn't exist, meaning the intended progression for the lategame enemies is borked - their challenge is set to "a player who's serious could probably pretty easily have a bunch of 3000-3500 attack monsters, we need something that can fight that," which means that in international regions the endgame bosses having 20 card hands, being able to see your facedowns, and playing 3750 and 4500 attack monsters makes them nigh insurmountable when you get one 3500 attack monster and nothing else above 2800 by the endgame. (Although the final boss gauntlet drops better stuff for you if you grind them in the postgame)
~(it's also totally required to 100% the game, mind you, but with it you CAN obtain a copy of every card! For the first time in the franchise! And there's no Deck Cost or Duelist Limit either! The only grind is for currency and drops, which is an actually reasonable thing, and the only restriction on your deck is a 3 card max limit which is directly taken from the manga! And this includes the only two cards that are in this game that weren't in DMII, which are Pocketstation locked but meant to be relatively easy to access with them)

Oh, and I can't forget the presentation. Shin Duel Monsters has animated models for every single monster in the game, which all have idle animations, death animations, victory animations, and two whole attacks based on the Alignment you set them to. While it's all pretty basic, this is the PSX after all, and there were the 100 recolor monsters to save space... na, I'm not gonna hate on that sh*t, it's cool, does very little to the game in theory but adds a lot to it in practice.

Overall, while Forbidden Memories has many, many problems, and I have no real desire to ever go back to it... yeah, there's a reason it's the best selling physical Yugioh game ever made. Sold well enough, in fact, that it got a whole sequel on the PS2! Yugioh Shin Duel Monsters 2: Succeeded Memories, or as it's better known by it's subtitle in the West...

Yugioh, the Duelists of the Roses.

Now, I'm not going to go too far into DotR, because it's very much trying to be its own thing, based on some ideas from Duelist Kingdom that had the game turned into a 7x7 board that monsters move around on (even copying some fields from the opponents in DK - Haga's field is taken literally from a shot from the manga for example). It is, however, the first Yugioh game that I would honest to god say is... actually good? Or at least decent. It has a steep learning curve where the early-game opponents will probably stomp you because you don't know what you're doing and until you figure it out you're going to be screwed, but if you bother to get good and learn how the game works, it suddenly becomes much simpler, and you can do some really cool sh*t! Though that does lead to the game being too easy, and since it was a PSX game that got brought up to the PS2, it still has the spaghetti code emblematic of such an endeavor, so hacking it is... not a very well understood field (though there is a pretty good difficulty hack out there that aims to make the game a more enjoyable experience for people who find the original easy, and even smooths out some of the game's rougher underlying features.)

Honestly I might play through DotR at some point here, or the Redux mod. I was providing commentary for someone else's DotR run here for the like two parts that got recorded. Suffice to say though that as a game it's much more interesting than anything from the franchise in terms of video games in its era. Also, the 3D monsters now only have one attack, but look way better and their attacks do too, thank god.

Unfortunately it only sold about half the sales of its predecessor, which is due in part to the fact that the JP audience had mostly moved away from Yugioh video games by the time this came out - Konami, ever greedy, had flown too close to the sun, and their wings had melted away by now. But we won't get to that today. No, that's a story for another day, two parts of DM Game Discussion away from now.

And we're not going to continue that next time, as NEXT TIME, we take on the first opponent from Stage 2, and see what they have to offer in a fight.

[COMPLETED] Paradox Disliked This: Let's Play The Original Yu-Gi-Oh! - Duel Monsters for the Gameboy (2024)