What's the premise of Yu-Gi-Oh?

Cafe Society
21

Tbone and the Weeping Princess love this show too. He has about a million cards, and every time someone on the show pulls out the “Circle of Radiating LIGHT!” or whatever, Tbone grabs his and stares at it. I have no idea what the hell is going on, but my kid can now read words like “pyramid” and “realm of despair.”

The funniest thing is when the two of them want to play and have left the cards at home, and all they have access to is whatever they can find in the car. One time it was a rental catalog, and they were saying things like, “I summon the…big round POOL IN THE YARD!!!”. Another time it was a box of Christmas cards, and the battle went thusly: “I call forth the…ROUND THING you hang on the DOOOOR! ATTACK!” “Oh, that is no match for my, uh, (what are those, Tbone?), my CHRISSUS ORMAMENTS!!!”

As fads go, it’s at least a fairly inexpensive one, if you just stick to the cards.

22

As others have beaten around the bush… The premise is to simply dupe Magic out of more money. But then, You Gay Ho is under license from WOTC so I doubt WOTC feels the pinch in the wallet. Or Should I say Hasbro? ((Do not get me started on my love/hate relationship of Hasbro, thats another post altogether))

Horribly HORRIBLY over simplified for anyone over the age of 8. I mean if they explained a premise or a concept once, it would be tolerable. NO, they have to explain the same exact play/move in three sets of terms… each one getting more and more watered down.

I thought the guy with the spikey hair was Yugioh. -but apparently he goes by the name “yugi” which is another misnomer, as I think this is a title or something.

Duel Masters, from what I’ve seen of it, is Hasbro/Wotc’s attempt to win back the yugioh crowd. Too little to late. If you give checkers or chess to second graders, they will go with checkers. Even if you make up a new game soon after.

Ok, I will let the others argue after me, But be true to the Original. Look at and play some Magic The Gathering.

www.playmagic.com

If MTG wasnt so tied up in their storyline (or lack there of nowdays) and didn’t make crappy Video Games (Armageddon, Battlemage, and that new Mortal Kombat rip-off) it might have a chance in other media.

The Target audience of the Straight Dope would be way better off with Magic over You Gay Ho.

-and yes I still play.

23

Clearly Meeko does NOT know Yu-Gi-Oh.

Yugi is not a title. It’s his name. Yugi Moto. (One of those 'o’s is long, I can’t remember offhand which it is.) Yami (short for Yami Yugi, or Dark Yugi) is occasionally used as though it’s his name, but that’s because he’s a different entity than Yugi, and saying Yami Yugi every time is a pain in the ass. When it’s revealed that he’s the legendary Pharoah, that’s used as though it’s his name, too. Because he has no other name.

In the cartoon many of the other characters are renamed, but Yugi’s intact, as are the Kaiba brothers. (FTR, Joey == Jonouchi, Tea == Anzu, and Tristan == Honda.)

Yu-Gi-Oh is not, in any way, connected to WotC. It’s not licenced from or by WotC, or any other division of Hasbro. I can’t even figure out where you would have gotten that idea.

Granted, Magic is a likely inspiration for Wizards and Monsters/Duel Monsters. But it’s more the CCG genre in general - it’s not like M:tG has been the only one on the market for a long, long time. The mechanics of the game are completely different, aside creatures having both an attack and defense score - and those scores function completely differently. Magic is Poker to Yu-Gi-Oh’s Old Maid. A more complex game, aimed at an older audience, with completely different rules, aside from the parts that are common to all card games, and some genre cliches. This holds even more true for the unplayably simple version of the game that was originally introduced early in the manga, before they realised it would be popular enough to licence.

And ‘Collectable Card Game’ is too general an idea for WotC to own. So any attempt by WotC to claim ownership would fail horribly - it’s not like Kodansha and Konami are small companies that can be burried by Hasbro’s legal team even if there’s no case there. So, Konami didn’t licence it from WotC, and Topps licenced it from Konami.

(BTW, bodypoet - that’s Swords of Revealing Light. A delightful card to have, a bitch to have played against you.)

Man…that was a LOT of writing about Yu-Gi-Oh, of all things.

24

<geek hat on> My kids and I are big fans of the show, I’ll sheepishly admit to watching the show even when my kids don’t wake up in time to cath it.

The premise is a mix of Jophiel and Jayn_Newell’s posts.

Yu Gi/Pharoah is or was a multiple personality. Yu Gi assembled the millenium puzzle, which allwed the Pharoah to return form the dead. The pharoah (they never say which) once fought to save the world through duel monsters. A prophecy found in a Pyramid, predicts his return to once again banish some nebulous evil also returning via the game. In the show, Pharoah duels while Yu Gi gives advice.

Pegasus (better known as arogant bad guy) recreated the game, other than that his motives are unclear.

Kai ba Seto is rich and a kind of a jerk. He won the company he owns from his foster father with a duel, and now duels as a means to an ends. He doesn’t believe in any magical property of the cards, he just wants to win. His little brother Mokuba looks up to his older brother.

Wheeler is a frind of Yu Gi, a more or less good duelist and/or he’s built a good deck* and gets lucky, it’s hard to tell which.

As far as game play goes (tv, and game play), each card can be different, but the idea is to build a deck. The best way to do this is with trends. There are several different types of cards, Monster, Magic, Spell, and Trap. There are also diffrent types of monsters. The idea is to build a deck on “like” monsters. There are also different kind of points; “life” “attack” and “defense”. Like monsters ar able to fuse or multliply "attack’ or “defense” points. Thus saving you “Life” points.

Basically if your monster has more points, it deflects an attack defeats a monster with lesser points. When you’re out of life points, the other “duelist” wins.
In the TV show, the monsters are somtimes holographic and sometimes real. When real monsters are about, someone evil is around.

25

Do Téa and Tristan actually play? I think I’ve seen Tristan play once but Téa, aside from being friends with the rest and supplying the obligatory female presence, seems to be more of a groupie than anything else.

Then again, I haven’t seen the show in ages.

26

Tristan/Honda has a couple times. Tea/Anzu did at least once in the virtual reality arc. She dueled the guy working for Noa who was trapped in the penguin monster body.

Even Joey/Jonouchi’s sister dueled once in that arc. She was in a 3-on-1 duel against the machine guy…I think Honda and Jonouchi were her partners. May have been Honda and Yugi. But I’m pretty sure it was Jonouchi.

27

I’d like to add that Tea also dueled against Mai in Duelist Kingdom(?) sometime in the first season, when Pegasus was still a threat.

And also, I’m glad to see I’m not the only adult to watch this show, although I think I’m starting to like Shaman King (from the same producers) more. Even despite Li’l Black Sambo.

28

Actually, it was Honda/Tristan and Duke Devlin.

29

Since there are people who seem to know I can finally ask this question: how old is everyone in this show? Joey and Tristan seem a little older than Yugi and Tea. Mokuba seems to be much younger than the main group. Kaiba seems to be older than them, but how much older is a mystery.

30

1.Upper Deck currently owns Yu-gi-oh.

  1. I quite possibly could have gotten the idea that WotC has a connection with this:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5662332.WKU.&OS=PN/5662332&RS=PN/5662332

Also this
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast, now a Renton Washington subsidiary of Hasbro was instrumental in bringing the Pokemon Trading Card Game to video game format. Wizard’s U.S. Patent 5,662,332 is strongly referenced by Konami’s more recent patent, U.S. Patent 6,398,651 covering Yu-Gi-Oh video games. Wizard’s patent includes many elements and concepts now present in Yu-Gi-Oh.
Wizards of the Coast (WotC) had the Pokemon card license and was recently awarded the Star Wars trading card license. Some were surprised the Yu-Gi-Oh license went to Upper Deck instead of WotC. Reports indicate the decision may have been made by Hasbro (they own WotC) to go with Star Wars to fill out some of their existing Star Wars licenses, vs. Yu-Gi-Oh. That decision may have placed WotC in poor position. Pokemon continues to slide downhill and Yu-Gi-Oh may have been a more attractive property of WotC than Star Wars.

Wizards of the Coast, the U.S. firm behind Pokemon, says they planned it for kids 8 to 11 years old. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Gathering is designed for 11 and older with many kids 16 or over playing the game. The wider age range (5 years vs. 3 years) provides a large audience of potential users.

Online message boards include some comments from advanced gamers who wish Wizards of the Coast had won the Yu-Gi-Oh license. They think the game would have been more jazzed up and better received by older teens and adults.

From:
http://www.virtualpet.com/vp/yugioh/market/ymarket.htm

31

Private: Meeko, your recent note to the Moderators, I can’t answer because you seem to have changed email address since you registered. Please, correct your email address in your registration and write me back.

32

I cannot believe there’s a Yu-Gi-Oh thread on the dope. My brother and I have been playing for a while now. I have a LOT of cards sitting at my house that I’m getting ready to Ebay as soon as I can sort them all out. I hope to get some good money.

Check this out. People pay BIG money for cards.

33

Gah…Upper Deck, right. Should have checked my deck. Topps has a different licence. :smack:

I assume you realise now you apparently originally misread it?

Aside from that, to address one of the points raised in the quote… Do people honestly think

If WotC had bought it?

Wizards aren’t dummies, they’d know the major market for the YGO cards would be kids who watch the cartoon, and some older people who’d played the Japanese version of the game. Changing the game wouldn’t outright kill this market, but it would disappoint it, since it would no longer be like the game on the show, or the Japanese game, and therefor hurt its chances. Nor would they change the marketting, for the same reason - they know who the market is, and aiming at someone else would be dumb.

34

So who would win if Yugi dueled with a prepared Batman?