The Wacky Worldbuilding of Early Yu-Gi-Oh! 

Yugioh, where one character is so spiteful and driven that he almost single handily advances human technology hundreds of years for a card game.

People say war drives technology forward, but nah, war is nothing compared to one man's need for his salty runback.

I can't believe Seto Kaiba took over the entire global economy just because he had a hate-boner for a dead king.

To be fair, if all the world's conflicts could be solved with a children's card game rather than violence, I might be willing to accept Seto Kaiba as our mega-capitalist lord and savior.

Kaiba built a machine capable of taking him straight to the afterlife so he could settle his grudge over a 5 millennia old dead guy on a children’s card game. An absolute madlad.

This video doesn't even mention the time in GX where Kaiba fired trading cards into space that were designed by children so they could be bombarded by space rays and gain superpowers. The more you follow this series the more you realize that it's also the story where a supervillain successfully reshapes the world in his image, died beloved, successful, unrepentant, and accomplished all his goals, except for the only one that really mattered: beating someone in a card game. What I'm saying is that Kaiba's the best.

Can we take a moment to appreciate how customer friendly Kaiba's products are though? In the finale of GX Jaden dueled Yugi, who was wielding a duel disk that was roughly 10 years behind his own model and they were still compatible

Why is no one talking about how kaiba admitted that Atem has perfect hair and that it took longer to finish because of his hair.

The only industries more profitable than children's card games in the YGO universe: Hair gel and clothing starch.

Takahashi: All I wanted was a horror story about a murderous spirit, but they keep bringing trucks full of money!

There's a particular scene that always stuck with me and is when Kaiba is about to get mugged and he challenges the robber to a card duel, the man just goes with it, loses and then disappears off the face of the earth.

Something else that is both hilarious and terrifying in 5Ds: the cops play Duel Monsters to catch lawbreakers. In fact, the rules of Duel Monsters are so immutable to the law and order of Neo Domino city that the bikes called Duel Runners are able to remotely hacked by the police to force a duel, and losing that duel shuts down your bike. The rules of Duel Monsters sit above the police in terms of hierarchy, since if they could hack Duel Runners to force a duel, they could probably just shut down your bike remotely. I like to imagine Kaiba is sitting on his capitalist throne saying "If a criminal can beat you in a duel, then what authority do you have to catch them", and just forces the police to adapt to his survival-of-the-duelist world that he made.

The American dub yugioh: believe in the power of friendship! Original Yugioh: "that kid looked at you weird, lets go play saw blade disk golf with him"

"they were still using VHS tapes when Kaiba invented holograms" That line absolutely killed me.

Kaiba propels humanity into a technological golden age because he lost a card game once.

You forgot the most important part of Yusei solving wealth inequality forever with a bridge: he did so by playing a card game really good

Kaiba is so rich he could spend the money to end world hunger. Instead he spends his fortune to build a machine that can transcend space, time and death to play a children's card game with a dead spirit.

In GX a naval convoy was used to deliver booster packs to the school.

That moment where Seto Kaiba literally declares himself god and everyone just cheers.

I like how this starts as "Wow, early Yugioh was weird!" and then suddenly morphs into "Kaiba pulled off a real-world Cultural Victory by way of card games".

I don’t people truly grasp what happens at the end ofDark Side Of Dimensions. Kaiba literally flies a rocket to Egyptian heaven so he can play a guy in a card game.

"Billionaires are parasites" You're just jealous that you don't have a jet shaped like a blue eyes white dragon.

The good news is: if Yugi ever really does create his own game, there’s now way it will die in obscurity...Kaiba will never let that happen. That man will support it in every way possible, for the simple fact that he would have the shot to say that he beat the king of games at his own game 🙃🙃

Honestly the most impressive thing about Kazuki Takahashi's writing is that despite being shackled to a brand he managed to bring his story ALL THE WAY BACK AROUND to season 0 by ending the original series in Millenium World with the exact same situation as season 0: a tabletop RPG against Yami Bakura. That's the kind of dedication you don't usually see even in a long form series writer, especially one working on promoting a product.

I can’t believe you didn’t mention the most bananas part of Yu-Gi-Oh! worldbuilding, the fact that (at least according to the Virtual World arc in the anime) there was an on-Broadway musical about Dark Magician Girl. It won a Tony for Best Musical.

The looting of Domino City has gone on for too long. The top 1% of duelists have all the Egyptian god cards, and the working duelists do not even have health care for when they're mind broken in a shadow game.

I think one thing we forget is that Kaiba was in Yugi’s class at the start of the show and then the next episode he’s just owned his company taking over the world

Kaiba built a space elevator to fight with his dead boyfriend. Do you guys ever sit there and think about how Seto is the real main character of the entire franchise

Kaiba didn't just change an entire city's way of doing things, or even the entire world for that matter. He literally changed how villains try to conquer the world. He's so influential that villains are still playing his game.

In the Japanese Dark Side of Dimensions Kaiba literally owns Domino City and requires everyone to have a Duel Monsters Deck and to register it in a database

Things Kaiba has done because he hates Yugi: - Build an electric chair rollercoaster - Kidnapped an old game shop owner - Hire a serial killer. Honestly this should have solved his problem and it is amazing that it didn't. - Invent like, 3 different forms of handheld card game hologram technology - Involve the mafia in the deaths of the original owners of the blue eyes white dragon - Build dimension warping VR tech and an accompanying satellite - Hire Mercenaries to kill Yugi in a deadly game of laser tag - Build a room with falling concrete cubes to crush this perfectly coiffed pointy headed classmate - Allow his younger brother to play fast food russian roulette with Yugi

Seto kaiba is such a ridiculous character that when they revealed in GX that he sent cards into deep space for no other reason than “fuck you I can” I couldn’t even raise any objections to how absurd of a concept that is because that was EXACTLY something yugioh one Kaiba would do.

"when I say analogue games, I really mean murder with extra steps." I died.

Dark Side of Dimension is incredible. Upon finally accepting that the pharaoh is dead, Kaiba retro-engineers ancient Egyptian magic to travel to the underworld to have his last duel. You just can't make that shit up.

Rest In Peace Takahashi… your story affected millions, and the card game that spawned from it deserves everything.

Ironically, despite Kaiba's attempt to redefine Kaiba Corp as a game company instead of arms manufacturing, he turned Duel Monsters into the world's weapon.

Kaiba probably could’ve solved world hunger or poverty, ended up with a Nobel Peace Prize, but no, he just focuses on his Dragon fetish.

I want to see a Yugioh season where the main character doesn’t care at all about duel monsters. He just wants to be an electrician or something, but gets dragged into the nonsense that is Yugioh.

"Kaiba, mostly driven by the desire to win a card game against one guy" Couldn't have said it any better LOL

Kazuki Takahashi...... You created an empire, and enriched the lives and childhoods of millions. May you enrich heaven in the same way.

"Screw economics I have money" -Seto Kaiba probably

Admit it, you've always wanted to go to a dueling school lol.

Once you continue watching every series, you realize that saying things like "This world is just one of four dimensions created after the duel between a talented girl and her crazy friend with his four dragons" or "The universe itself was created by a card" or even "This guy traveled from the future to recover a secret card, his mind is shared between him and his deceased brothers, also his mom from the past is in love with him", don't sound weird at all.

In Seto Kaiba's defense, he was an orphan. No money, no parents, and basically nothing to his name but a bottomless well of willpower. Everybody points out Seto's massive wealth, but few remember that he knew poverty more than most of us ever will.* He played chess with cheap plastic pieces for so long that he was able to beat Gozuboro Kaiba to force him to adopt him and Mokuba, and things only went up from there. Sure he was kinda' evil (which was more or less the gimmick of the series at that point), but after Yugi beat him and destroyed the darkness in his heart, Seto was able to reassemble the pieces of his heart (which is why it's called the Millennium *Puzzle* and not the Millennium Pyramid) into someone who had all the drive he used to have, but without his more hostile ambitions. Incidentally, this is why Kaiba considers Yugi such an iconic rival. Unlike in the dub, where Kaiba is an irrational flat earth atheist who will jump through all manner of hoops to claim that magic isn't real, Japanese Kaiba acknowledged magic's existence, but hated it because that kind of warfare and violence was a reminder of his own past. He wanted to put everything painful in his past behind him, and he made the Pharaoh into his own personal avatar of that past. Just look at how both characters contextualize memory: one wants to forget a past he hates, while the other tries desperately to remember a past he forgot. [* This is also related to why Seto relentlessly craps on Jounouchi because he represents what Seto could've been, both in a positive way (his protectiveness of his own sibling) and a negative way (being a dumb, irresponsible slacker who skates by on luck and the charity of others).] You can see a lot of Kaiba's philosophy in the way he duels. (As you can with a lot of characters, which is why I hate it when people dismiss the card game as hollow commercialism rather than an illustration of who that character is as a person.) Blue-Eyes aside, ever noticed how strong some of Kaiba's 4-star drops can be? La Jinn, Battle Ox, Vorse Raider, Slate Warrior, Spear Dragon, Kaiser Seahorse, X Head Cannon, Cave Dragon... they're all very strong for their level, just like Kaiba had to be very strong for his relatively young age. Just about the only noteworthy exception to this rule is Saggi the Dark Clown, and three guesses who *that's* supposed to represent. In fact, a common archetype in many of his decks are virus-based cards (notably Crush Card Virus). While one might think that has more to do with Kaiba's programming and hacking skills, viruses are about the most definitive example of something small taking out something larger and more powerful, which is basically the story of his life.

"I went through a great deal of trouble recreating the pharaoh's deck, strategies, even his perfectly quaffed hair. In fact that part is what took the longest." Inventing holograms and sapient AI? Piece of cake. Figuring out how the hell Yugi's hair works? Uuuuuuuhhhhhh???

I still CANNOT believe the insane switch the manga made from "boy possessed by Egyptian spirit that wants to murder people with games" to "boy somewhat possessed by Egyptian guy plays a single card game and yells about friendship"

In my head-canon it is strictly BECAUSE Duel Monsters was such a faithful recreation by Pegasus, that some amount of magic possibly within the very drawing remained and caused a Master effect on anyone that sees it. The game is a giant if subtle cognito-hazard that slowly causes a shift in anyone's behaviour to favor its own dissemination and popularity.

Kaiba is literally the Lex Luthor of his planet. Man's could literally be the saviour of humanity but he ain't got time for that shit

“His perfectly quaffed hair.” That sounds like something Little Kuriboh would say.

"Because fuck you, who is going to stop him" is a well rounded way of describing Kaiba that made me burst a lung

From my understanding, Kaiba's heart was stolen to the point he changed the entire direction of the world just so he can see his love again. Damn, talking about having it bad

After everything he went through, I'm glad Joey likely become an insanely wealthy and popular duelist. You know that really burnt Kaiba up.

The world where the only way people solve problems is by playing a children's card game .

One thing that most people forget, including the writers, is that Yuugi won controlling shares in Industrial Illusions when he won Duellist Kingdom. Controlling shares. He owns 51% of the most successful company in the world. That kid is absolutely filthy rich, so if he wants to spend his time making games for fun, he totally can. Also, Darkside of Dimensions was the greatest love letter to the fans ever :) Also: F*ck marry kill: Yami Bakura, Yami Yuugi/Atem and Insector Haga ^^

"They were still using VHS tapes when Kaiba invented holograms." To be fair, in real life, there was a guillotining of a murderer by the French government that took place in 1977, the same year that the first Star Wars movie came out. And then capitol punishment and the use of guillotining to carry it out wasn't finally abolished until 1981.

Honestly Seto Kaiba is not just a... Just unimaginably wealthy edgelord, he's a force of nature, a way of life, a man who can summon a literal GOD because he just can, a man who pretty much owns the entire world in a short amount of time and constructed a space elevator with a base shaped like the company logo! THIS is a man who looked at reality and all its limitations and said "Screw the rules because... I am Seto Kaiba!.... Also I have money." Seto Kaiba I salute you sir!

Kaiba is the embodiment of petty.

"Which was uh... arms manufacturing!" wait so... Seto is the adoptive son of an arms manufacturer who pivots the company to more commercial endeavors and leads it to more economic growth than it's ever seen? And his adoptive father's biological son to hold a grudge against him?? OH MY GOT SETO KAIBA IS IRON MAN!!!

So, let's talk about the economic repercussions of Kaiba. I would argue that Kaiba and his extreme spending actually funded the economy of the world. And that the class inequality of 5Ds didn't happen until after his death, when eventually the greed of the analog characters of our real world society were able to do something. Kaiba may have been Jeff Bezos, but he was Jeff Bezos that spent money and paid more than fair wages. You don't just get an R&D department like that who eventually develop quantum computing without paying the moolah.

One of the funniest things about Kaiba is that he's technically normal. Like sure he's impossible rich he probably stopped commiting tax fraud because he was wasting more money on doing that then actually paying them, but he has no ancient spirits or ghosts on his side. He was simply a man humble man, who was crossed blades with those oh so larger then himself.

There are three versions: Sub, Dub, and LittleKuriboh

This is basically the equivalent of Magic: the Gathering outright replacing the entirety of the New York Stock Exchange, the United Nations, and NATO in roughly the same amount of time it took a high schooler to get through the trigonometry unit of grade 10 math.

I heard the phrase "VR MMO isekai" and it made me realize that the Virtual World arc was roughly ten thousand times as good as Sword Art Online and it _still_ gets derided by a lot of fans.

The weirdest thing to me is the fact that while the Duel Monsters anime was essentially a soft reboot, the DM manga actually continues and acknowledges what happened in the original story

Anyone who has been addicted to yugioh and got into the actual tournament scene can understand the storybuilding of it taking over the world around it, because it truly takes over your world. You travel to events, eat breath and plan around playing, and it really takes over.

The most horrifying aspect of the Yu-Gi-Oh world: sleeves do not exist.

I would ALSO like to mention more than half a year later that in the Japanese version of Dark Side of Dimensions, still set in 1999, it is literally, directly stated that in order to be a resident of Domino City, you MUST own and register a Duel Disk. You have to own a likely $500+ plus card game accessory with little to no functional use outside of that card game to own a house and be a registered resident of one of the largest cities in the world. Zigfreid had no idea what he was up against in Season 5.

You can really see the JoJo's influence on the early Yu-Gi-Oh series. Besides the Egyptian mysticism and spirits fighting on behalf of you, look at the way Dark Magician poses on his card.

New Yugioh: solve problems with children's card games Old Yugioh: solve problems with Money and Knife

Original duel with Arcana: The one who loses this duel will have their LEGS CUT OFF BY THESE SAWS! Dubbed duel with Arcana: The one who loses this duel will be sent to the shadow realm (by these saws)!

Here after hearing of the creator's death. RIP Kazuki Takahashi

This analysis proves that Yugioh is the greatest anime ever. Seto Kaiba is my anime character ever solely because his massive ego is actually EARNED! I like the idea as to why the card game took over the world: the ancient Egypt magic did it first and wants a comeback. It does so thanks to crazy technology. Such a concept shouldn’t have worked, like at all. But by Ra I’m so glad that it did.

“Card game-industrial complex” is the best collection of noises that has ever passed my eardrums

I read the Yu-Gi-Oh manga before I watched the anime. Yami Yugi took no shit. The arcs were BRUTAL. You mentioned Yami killing a convict by tricking him into lighting himself on fire, but that’s not even the most painful thing he did to someone. That T.V Director you talked about? He wanted to capture a student being bullied on camera so he told one of his assistants to put on the school uniform and beat the shit out of Yugi. The director talks to Yugi while he’s on the ground in pain and tells him not to worry about his identity being broadcast because they’ll mosaic his face. So how does Yami punish the director? He makes it so that the director can only see in mosaic. There’s a kid that has a magic dragon card game where you bet your soul. That ends with that kid getting his soul eaten by the dragons. The Millenium Ring that Bakura wears? You see those spikes hanging off it? When he gets possessed they stab into his chest. Yami literally Mind Break’s Kaiba after he wins the duel for his Grandpa. Kaiba hires a literal serial killer that ripped young children to shreds to face Yugi and his friends in the tower. Those yo-yo’s you mentioned? Yugi gets stuck on a tin roof with his opponents using them to steadily break the roof. The rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots battle has both Yami and the villain take physical damage when their fighter gets hit. But none of those are my favourite moment. My favourite moment doesn’t even have Yugi in the final face off. My favourite moment revolves around Bruce Lee’s infamous “One Inch Punch”. The villain does something to Yugi and Joey gets angry. He follows the villain and confronts him. Joey wants a fight and the villain proposes a game to go along with it. Joey agrees. The game is that while they’re fighting, they each have a knife in their mouths with the tip facing towards them. This is incredibly dangerous but Joey does it anyway. The villain has two advantages: 1: He has mastered Bruce Lee’s One Inch Punch. 2: The knife he has in his mouth has a retractable blade, if it gets hit it’ll retract and leave him unharmed. I’m not going to give a play by play of the fight, I strongly encourage anyone reading this to go and read the manga. Suffice to say that Joey wins, Yugi thanks him and Joey is happy. It’s a wonderful display of friendship.

Yugi wanting to make a new game is a very obvious metaphor for Takahashi wanting to tell a new story.

The joke is on everyone. I unironically love the sheer craziness of duelist kingdom b/c I knew they were making it up as they went along and it made for so many cool plot twists. The balls to the walls insanity of that arc created the absurd energy that drove the series and everything that came after it.

I never even once paused to consider Yu-Gi-Oh worldbuilding and now that I have I feel like I've taken a step beyond Alice's looking glass and into some brand new world.

Man the straight faced way he addresses the world building is fascinating.

I still have, and sometimes even play, the GBA game about Dice Monsters. The idea was extremely fun. It's a shame it got forgotten that fast.

I've read a comment/analysis somewhere that I still remember till this day. Kaiba changing the world to dance around card games makes it so legit supervillains using it to their benefit. Hence, the world can actually fight against those villains thanks to yugi and the gang. Without card games, people like dartz would be invincible

“Kidnapping his grandpa for cardboard” I cannot breath from laughing. I mean it is really nice looking cardboard

Solitaire-orrist is both insane and absolutely accurate

I liked the catapult turtle thing. My headcanon was that the millennium puzzle basically turned every duel yugi played into a quasi-shadow game. Explains a lot, tbh. So they aren’t cards anymore. They’re actual monsters who can do a lot of things that cards couldnt

The card game in its current form has included explicit references to demonology and occultism, from the Qliphoth of Jewish mysticism to Aleister Crowley in the Invoked series, and American Evangelicals *still* haven’t given Yu-Gi-Oh! the time of day. The show literally had the unicursal hexagram (the main symbol of Crowley’s religion) and Enochian (Elizabethan magic) as consistently recurring elements in the Atlantis arc.

"Like everyone who graduated in 1999, they really had no way of knowing" As someone who graduated in 2015, I still felt that.

Let's just appreciate the fact Kaiba made a device that can literally allow you to travel into the ancient Egyptian afterlife... so he could play a card game with his rival one more time.

The wildest thing about Kaiba reshaping the world in the image of Duel Monsters, to me, is that his company does not make duel monsters. I'm not up on the lore of later series, but in the first one at least, he achieved terrifying levels of wealth and success... by making ACCESSORIES for a game.

I will say the weirdest thing was finding out that Kaiba set on a Space Capsule to aliens so he can try to teach them how to duel that when you have too much money

"....and without his competition, Joey is looking at a potentially bright future as a pro duelist." Interesting fact, there's an early episode of 5D's where Joey makes a cameo appearance and you can hear a background character say something to the effect of "Whoa, that's Joey Wheeler, one of the most legendary duelists of all time!"

Pokemon, the anime, can learn a thing or two from Yugioh, like you can have different protagonists on different eras and not have ashe chug on the fountain of youth for what it feels like 20 years already

I feel like Kaiba took a cue from The Mighty Monarch who said "I just wanted to kick his ass. I wanted to build a machine to kick his ass! I wanted to build an empire to house the machine TO KICK HIS ASS!"

Love the causal “all billionaires are parasites.” You’re the best anime analyst.

I'm sure this entire video was a class in that Duel Academy titled "how did card games became literally the most important thing in the whole world".

Let’s not forget that Kaiba also started a space program to teach aliens how to play Duel Monsters.

"At least kaiba invented his own inventions so its not a 1-1" oof, shots fired. Keep up the great work!

The Death-T arc of the manga is perhaps the most insane and amazing thing I've ever read. What's amazing about Takahashi is how he is able to keep the character writing grounded through all the insanity. The gang make huge strides in their bonds while at the same time a baby murders someone with poop and it all somehow works. That's just how good Takahashi is at writing this group of friends. He made me care about Tristan for god's sake! Tristan!

You know Takahashi did state that there was a sincere possibility that Yugi's game would make a breakthrough, as there is art of him and Kaiba playing it, but then again of course Kaiba would support Yugi's game...it gives him another opportunity to beat him...and another taste of defeat.

Unpopular opinion. Card games on motorcycles was actually 🔥

"The darker Lord: late stage capitalism" The casual tacit tone almost made me chuckle.

THANK YOU for bringing up the Millennium World arc, it's my single favorite piece of YGO media, & the best manga arc in the entire franchise. I own every single volume. The way it returns to Takahashi's ancient Egyptian horror themes & magic, including the truly heinous nature of the Thief King's backstory is good good stuff. Highly recommend to anyone who is a YGO fan.