Yu-Gi-Oh! (Volumes 1-6)

On September 30th 1996, in Issue #42 of Weekly Shōnen Jump, one of the few comics that Kazuki Takahashi managed to get published in his fifteen year career saw the light of day. Concepts he'd been working on since the start of his career and even before came to light. After years of honing his craft, several failed attempts at getting published, and even a few published comics that didn't go anywhere fast, the first chapter of the biggest series of his entire career was published. A fifty-four page horror comic about a kid with impossible hair and a puzzle. Thus was born one of the biggest franchises of all-time, the legendary juggernaut, Yu-Gi-Oh! Thirty billion plus trading cards printed. Two animated adaptations. Four feature films. Six spinoff series. A novel. Sixty-three video-games ranging all the way back to the original GameBoy. Action-figures, card catalogs, collections of card catalogs, board-games, Heroclix, Dicemasters. Merchandise from every single venue you can possibly think of. We have the twentieth anniversary of the series coming up at the end of the month, and to commemorate that I'm delving into the history of the franchise. This is The History of Yu-Gi-Oh!
Today we're looking at the thing that started it all. The original black and white comic, which paradoxically a lot of fans are likely unfamiliar with.
I will be reviewing the manga out of the 2012 reprinting of the Viz published tankoban (Trade-Paperback) collection from 2003. Further down the line I'm going to get to the bunkoban (Deluxe) edition printings, but not this year, because I don't have them yet.
Looking at those publishing dates, you can tell that this was a series published back in the early days of the Japanese culture boom. Facts that will become even more apparent the further we dig into the franchise. First is the seven year gap between initial publication of the comics in Japan and the introduction in the United States, second is the six year gap between the publication of the TPB's in Japan and their publication in the United States. I can sort of see why they didn't introduce the series internationally for a good long while, since Dragon Ball was still riding high outside the land of the rising sun, while within it the series was wrapping up only a year after Yu-Gi-Oh! debuted. I'm not saying that was the only reason, far from it, but it was likely one of many contributing factors. Another being the complete implosion of the comics industry outside of Japan during the 90's. As well as the fact that black-and-white comics were stereotyped as poorly made for a very long time. Most of the ones that saw any kind of release in the states were monumentally bad, at least until The Walking Dead came along. Plus, why would a kid pick up something that looks so bland when there are colorful comics with their favorite superheroes in them? This isn't just speculation, this was the exact reaction my friends and I had when our library started getting black and white comics in alongside the typical Marvel and DC fare. We learned better later obviously.
As usual, spoilers inbound. Also, for those of you wondering, I'll be referring to the characters by their international names as opposed to their Japanese ones where applicable.
Yu-Gi-Oh! begins rather innocuously, with a kid named Yugi Moto playing a game of Pop-Up Pirate by himself. He wishes to play with others, but he doesn't really have any friends. He takes out a golden box with a puzzle inside to fiddle with it, but Tristan Taylor snatches it away before he can open it. He and Joey Wheeler start tossing it around the room, teasing Yugi before Téa Gardner catches the box and runs the two of them off.

Yugi and Téa start talking about their mutual distaste for basketball before conversation drifts towards the box with the puzzle in it. Yugi shows her the puzzle, and tells her about how his grandfather found it in an Egyptian tomb, and how the writing on the box says that whoever solves the puzzle will be granted a wish. Yugi laments that he's been working on the puzzle for eight years with no progress, but Téa encourages him to keep going.
In the hallway, Joey and Tristan run into the hall-monitor Ushio while discussing bullies. Ushio leaves when Tristan keeps Joey from picking a fight. Apparently Ushio and his gang have taken over the school and run the place. Joey then tosses a piece of Yugi's puzzle out of the window into the pool outside.
Ushio goes to Yugi and tells him that he's going to be Yugi's bodyguard whether he likes it or not. Perplexed, Yugi and Téa go back to the game-store his grandfather owns. There, we meet Solomon Moto, Yugi's grandpa. Solomon mentions that the archaeologists who discovered the puzzle died and their last words were "The Shadow Games."
At school, Yugi finds that Ushio and his gang have beaten Joey and Tristan within an inch of their lives. Naturally horrified by this, Yugi tells them to stop, but Ushio beats them up more. Ushio encourages Yugi to do so, but he refuses. Ushio scoffs and says that Yugi owes him 200,000 yen (About $1,600 USD) for his services. Ushio beats up Yugi and then threatens to stab Yugi if he doesn't pay.
Yugi spends the rest of the day worrying and trying to put together the money to pay off Ushio, but he winds up working on the puzzle, the pattern becoming clear to him, the puzzle coming to him naturally. Until he comes to the end, the last piece. The missing piece. As he despairs, Joey, soaked to the bone gives the last piece to Solomon, who returns the piece to Yugi. Solomon also mentions that Joey told him about the issues with Ushio, and gives Yugi the money he needs to pay him off. Yugi finishes the puzzle, and an eye of Horus begins glowing on his head.
Yugi, now more imposing and confident, tells Ushio that he's upped the ante to 400,000 yen and that he wishes to play a game of courage with the knife. Put the bills on your hand, stab them with the knife, you get to keep the bills you stab. Gotta take more than one bill, and if you try to cheat and take it without stabbing, you forfeit the money to your opponent. Ushio naturally gets greedy, thinking that he can just overwhelm Yugi with sheer strength. Yugi Mind-Crushes Ushio, causing him to see money falling everywhere, and leaves with all the money.
The series continues much in this vein for the next several chapters. Not to say that it's formulaic, it's just mostly episodic, standalone stories. Things happen to set up the villains, Yugi gets involved, bad things happen to bad people, Yami Yugi is the angel of vengeance. Along the way, we see some incredible development of the principle cast, Yami Yugi being a bad-ass, cool concepts for games, and some amazing strategies from Yugi. Sometimes he outright punishes or kills people, other times he just screws up their minds, and sometimes he just wins outright. Yami Yugi is like The Punisher with magic powers, and he plays games. Thing is, Frank Castle wasn't quite this gleeful in his actions. Not quite as sadistic. He never stuck someone with a fate worse than death, not like this. Yami Yugi is a freaking beast. I would love to see an official crossover of him going up against someone like The Joker, or Wilson Fisk. Their encounter might not last very long, but it would be an epic showdown.
Before we move on to the more plot-heavy chapters of the series, I'm going to touch on Chapter 4, which is both important in terms of character development (like anything in this series isn't) but also contains one of the coolest moments in the entire series.
Yugi and Joey are going to get something to eat on the way home, and are headed to Burger World before Téa nervously tells them to go to Calorie Burger instead. Téa says that she can't join them because she's got chores and doesn't want to run into the escaped Prisoner 777 while she's out, and the teachers order them straight home anyways. Yugi and Joey start wondering why Téa acted so strange when they suggested going to Burger World, or why she hasn't been hanging with them lately. They follow her and strangely enough wind up at Burger World. While there, Prisoner 777 shows up demanding alcohol and cigarettes. I don't know what exactly fast-food chains serve in Japan, but I'm almost certain that they don't serve booze and smokes, for no other reason than if there was a McVodka and a McMarlboro in Japan it would be number one on all of these lists. Maybe Takahashi confused it with a convenience store, maybe I don't know jack about how Japan runs their fast-food chains, so if anyone has a clue why a burger chain has Russian vodka and Lucky Strike cigarettes please inform me.
Lucky 7 (This is what I'm calling him from here on out) takes Téa and everyone else in the restaurant hostage until he's had enough to eat and drink. He blindfolds Téa to scare her even more and orders Yugi to bring him cigarettes and alcohol. Téa shouts for him to stay away, but when Lucky 7 slaps her and tells her to shut up, causing Yugi to transform into Yami Yugi and start seriously screwing with the escaped prisoner. Yami Yugi challenges Lucky 7 to a game with only one rule. You can only move one finger. The prisoner chooses his right index finger and Yugi chooses his thumb.
Yugi uses his thumb to light Lucky's cigarette and drops the lighter on the mans hand. The one pouring out the vodka. Yugi yanks Téa away from the table as the cigarette slips from Lucky's lips and sets the man ablaze, burning him alive and establishing Yami Yugi as Téa Gardner's knight in shining armor.
This is by-far one of the most important moments in the series. While the previous chapter had a similar premise, with Yami taking over and beating someone down because someone hurt Yugi and Joey, this chapter introduced Téa's crush on Yami, something which would stay with the series all the way to the end. Plus, while it's really cool to see Yami punishing a corrupt news producer with seeing the world as mosaic, this chapter blurred the lines between Yami Yugi and regular Yugi, something else which would stick with the series up until the very end. Plus, Yugi saw one of his friends, his love-interest even being smacked around by a gun-wielding lunatic and what did he do? He burned the sumbitch alive. You can't say that was all Yami's doing, because while they are to some extent distinct strategists and distinct personalities, they're still inherently intertwined, irrefutably interlinked. Yami might be the driving force, but as the series later proved, Yami doesn't do what Yugi doesn't let him.
In the authors notes, Takahashi mentions how odd he finds the series as opposed to where he started from.The idea was to create a story about the mysterious nature of everyday life. Then it became a horror-comic. Then it became a horror-comic with strategy thrown in. Then it became a gaming-horror comic with ties to ancient Egypt. Then it became all about card games.

Despite the character development and some foreshadowing, there is very little resemblance to an overarching plot for the first eight chapters, until we hit the very first two-parter in the series, The Cards With Teeth. Here we are introduced to Yugi's recurring rival, Seto Kaiba, and the card-game that would come to define not just the series, but the entire franchise, Duel Monsters.
A card game popular in America (ironic) that is picking up some significant steam in Japan, Duel Monsters in its earliest form is much closer to Magic: The Gathering than it is to the current incarnation of the iconic card-game. As such, this version will be almost entirely unfamiliar to casual fans, and seems like what it is, a prototype that eventually led into the final version. There are only two types of cards, spells and monsters, and only one type of monster. In fact, no monster types are visible on the cards.
Eventually, talk drifts to how expensive the game can get, and how good some of the cards are. Solomon shows the gang his rarest card, the Blue Eyes White Dragon. Eventually they start
While they're talking about the game, one of Yugi's classmates, Seto Kaiba, walks into the shop and sees the card. Being a rich son of a bitch and wanting to be the best duelist in the world, Seto Kaiba offers Solomon whatever he wants for that card. Solomon refuses, and Kaiba slinks back into his gaming cave to plot his heist.
Later on Kaiba swaps out the card for a counterfeit, but Yugi catches him in it. Kaiba claims innocence at first before smacking Yugi upside the head with an aluminum briefcase full of Duel Monsters cards and pisses off back to his castle. Naturally, Yami Yugi takes over and challenges Kaiba to a duel.
Yami brings the monsters and the battlefield to life with his otherworldly powers. After some back and forth, Kaiba eventually cheats, and summons his stolen Blue-Eyes White Dragon. However, the monster refuses to attack, because it's not actually Kaiba's monster. It self-destructs, and on his turn, Yami activates Monster Reborn to resurrect the fallen monster. He wipes out Kaiba's life-points and traps him in a repeating illusion of death, returning the Blue-Eyes to Solomon.
The two chapters that follow this are some of the most important chapters in the entire series in terms of characterization and story. You see, "The Wild Gang (Part 1 &2)" delve into Joey Wheeler's back-story and the formation of the person we see throughout the series, from the beginning to the end. Joey lives with his abusive alcoholic father and used to run with a gang in junior-high, before they were split up when they went to different high-schools. A gang who's caught up with him now, and he's trying to play it cool with. At least until Yugi, Tristan and Téa catch up with them and one of the gangers clocks Yugi upside the head. Back at the gangs hideout, Joey knocks the guy out, but the rest of the gang still outnumbers and overpowers him despite his incredible brawling skills.
Tristan, Yugi and Téa manage to track them down to the warehouse the gang calls their base, and find the unconscious gangster. The three split up the search out the rooms.
Elsewhere in the designated torture-chamber, the gang beats on Joey and electrocutes him with tasers to within an inch of his life.
Yugi, pretty much unaware of his transformations at this point, tries to find Joey without much success, and holds the Millennium Puzzle tight, hoping for some kind of hint, a feeling about where Joey might be. Yami takes the reigns, and uses his powers to scope out the warehouse, finding the room where the gangers are keeping his friend.
Right in the nick of time too, because they were about to kill Joey if they keep on going. What follows is one the single most bad-ass beatdowns of the entire series, possibly the whole franchise. It's a masterful piece of planning on Yami's part, and one of the most brilliant gambits of the entire series. Not even kidding. With a cursory glance around the room, Yami exploits his environment and his opponents like he's the god-damn Batman. Except, he takes down every single bad-guy in the room without throwing a single freaking punch.
Yugi lets himself get hit to cover for propping up the arm of one of the taser-wielding gangers Joey knocked out, using the Millennium Puzzle as a Chinese water-torture device on the guys head to wake him up in time, and perching himself upon a rubber tire while the gang traipses around in the water looking for the "bomb" Yugi tells them he set. He knocks all of them out in one swoop and rescues Joey. Check-mate in two, maybe three moves if we're being generous.
Following the second two-parter is the third, "The Man From Egypt (Part 1 & 2)", although it's more like an eight-parter considering the fact that the story of Chapter 13, "The Man From Egypt (Part 1)" doesn't conclude until Chapter 20, "Game Over". These chapters set-up the overall narrative of the series, the one which would last all the way to the end. Within the first two chapters we see the debut of two more Millennium Items, the Key and the Scales. Held by the only other Millennium Item wielder we've seen thus far, Shadi. These eight chapters are among the most important in the series as well. Aside from the obvious points from above, it also builds on the character development we've seen in previous chapters.
Yugi is approached by Kanekura Kanchō, the curator of the Domino City Museum about displaying his Millennium Puzzle alongside his teams recent findings and Yugi agrees. However, Kanekura wants to sell off the puzzle (and presumably other artifacts from the museum exhibit) and bribe Yugi into silence. Usually this would end in Yami beating the guy within an inch of his life with his own museum and then finishing him off with a mind-crush or a steep dive out the nearest window. However, that's just the start, and it's not Yami who does it. It's Shadi. Yes, Shadi actually gets involved in the fray, killing the buyer and Kanekura, seeing the completed Millennium Puzzle, and running into Yugi on the way out of the building. Yugi asks him if he's seen the puzzle or Kanekura, and Shadi is naturally taken aback by the idea that a kid was the only one to solve the Millennium Puzzle in a good three-thousand years.
Shadi uses the Millennium Key to look inside Yugi's head and see if he's the one who could actually solve the puzzle. Within, we see two doors. One wide-open and full of toys like the room of a child, and the other sealed shut, with the Eye of Horus molded in. Inside, Shadi finds Yami, and a maze of other doors. He tries to find the right one, but winds up falling down a hole. Yami helps him up, and Shadi exits Yugi's mind, returning the puzzle, and leaving the museum.
Later that week, Yugi and company find out about the death of the curator. Solomon's old friend, Professor Yoshimori Kyōju, who was also involved in the recent excavation of the tomb, and wants to talk to someone about the death of his boss. He didn't believe in curses before Kanekura's death, and afterwards he's worried.
Sadi arrives to weigh Yoshimori's soul, but within the mans mind finds that he's waiting on Yugi, and decides to use this opportunity to try and lure Yami Yugi out into the open. He mind-controls Yoshimori and forces him to attempt to kill Joey once the gang shows up. This is a fairly decent cliffhanger to end Volume 2 on, since it would have less of an impact if it was followed by another chapter instead of punctuating the end of the volume.
Based on what Takahashi has said, he wasn't really expecting Duel Monsters to become the breakout game of the series. Indeed, he didn't expect it nor Kaiba to be more than one-offs, but fans were interested in the game, and wanted to know more about it.
The rules in the earlier, unrefined versions of Duel Monsters were closer to Magic: The Gathering than what we think of as Yu-Gi-Oh! today. (Although the game is practically unrecognizable in its current incarnation) The levels are practically meaningless, there are no trap-cards, the monster-types are basically non-existent and there are elements of random-chance introduced into the game. Not that I mind, I'd actually appreciate a bit more of those percentile chances in the game today. Mostly because the comics and television series had them, and it added strategies that could be used and tension as well.
While the MTG inspired roots of the game aren't too obvious today, what's known in-universe as "First Edition" Duel Monsters wears its influences on its sleeve. In fact, it's basically a Brand-X copy of Magic, with more interesting monsters, and better artwork. I'm glad that the game evolved over time into the one we play today, but I'd still like to see some form of the original concept preserved in the modern game as an alternate rules-set or something. It'd be kinda cool to see at least.
In the end, as we all know, fan-demand for more Duel Monsters became so great that Takahashi had to bring it back for what he thought would be one last epic arc.

Back in the story-arc, Téa whacks the professor over the head with a globe, before being possessed by Shadi herself.
Joey lures the possessed professor out of the room, while Shadi threatens to kill Téa in a successful attempt to draw out Yami. They begin a test of the strength of the heart on the roof. Shadi suspends a plank from the roof with ropes tied to Ushebti, which represent the strength of the persons heart. Yugi has four, Shadi has one. Téa has been made to stand on the end of the plank. Yugi's four Ushebti support the plank, while Shadi's one supports the Millennium Key. Shadi's Ushebti breaks, the Key touches Téa, Shadi's mind-control fades, Yugi wins. Yugi's four Ushebti break, Téa dies, Yugi loses.
The first two tests are a riddle and a logic puzzle, but the last one is versus Joey Wheeler. Not the real one, but an illusion. Not like Yugi can really know that because Shadi can control peoples minds and actions. This is a game of chance.Toss the Millennium Puzzle and your opponent moves two paces in that direction. Yami Yugi refuses to play the game, and ultimately defeats Shadi, saving Téa, dispelling Shadi's spell on Professor Yoshimori, and ultimately proving to Shadi what the puzzle means. The power of unity.
Despite Volume 3 being titled Capsule Monster Chess, that's actually the last chapter in the book. The other chapters are mostly dedicated to the Shadi arc, with a standalone single-part chapter and a standalone two-parter in-between them. The only reason Capsule Monster Chess is important is because Mokuba Kaiba makes his debut in this chapter.
Yugi uses his mad tactical skills and fast-learning to take Mokuba down a peg and promptly move on. This is probably the single shortest showdown when it comes to chapters immediately related to the plot, although it sets up possibly one of the most iconic moments in the series. One of the things everyone remembers when you hear the name Yu-Gi-Oh!
The foreshadowing to Yugi's inevitable showdown with Kaiba is diabolically brilliant, and that's all I really have to say about it until we finally get around to Kaiba's plan.

The next volume, appropriately titled Kaiba's Revenge is dedicated in its entirety to Seto Kaiba executing an elaborate revenge-plot against one Yugi Moto for beating him at a card-game and then proceeding to screw with his mind for god-knows how long Yami's illusions last.
Yugi and Joey run into a mugger in the arcade while hearing rumors about Seto Kaiba's new project. The mugger takes Yugi's Millennium Puzzle by cutting it off with a knife and legging it before Yami could challenge his ass to a game of Mortal Kombat that eventually evolved into the arcade-machine ripping the dudes spine out.
With Yami and Yugi separated, Joey takes it into his own hands to take the scumbag down a peg. As if possessed by the spirit of the Puzzle, the mugger challenges Joey to a game where they hold a knife in their teeth and try to kill each other. Joey agrees to hold one in his teeth, but he's not nearly as ruthless a killer as Yami Yugi is and demands the mugger not hold one in his own teeth. After dodging the guys punches, Joey blasts him in the face with the soda he got for Yugi and breaks his jaw with a massive uppercut.
A few minutes later, Mokuba Kaiba rolls up in a limousine and tells the duo that Seto wants to see them at his home. They agree and are treated to a Russian roulette lunch. Six dishes, two of which are poisoned (Or possibly just roofied, Mokuba doesn't really strike me as as much of a stone-cold killer as his brother is) you spin the lazy-susan and eat whichever dish lands in front of you. Joey gets the poison on the first turn and Yugi is naturally pissed. Mokuba tells him that he has thirty minutes to play the game and win the antidote before Joey dies. Yugi goes dark on him and out pops Yami, although with the sheer amount of rage on Yugi's face it's hard to tell which is which. Yami figures out the trick Mokuba is using to control who gets the poison, and smashes it with the Millennium Puzzle, stopping Mokuba's cheating and dropping the poisoned hamburger straight in front of the brat.
Yami doses Joey with the antidote and they promptly move the fuck on.
Meanwhile, Seto Kaiba continues to have nightmares about Yami beating him with the Blue-Eyes White Dragon and his continuing torture at the hands of Yami's illusions.
Despite knowing that at least one of the Kaiba brothers is out to kill them, Yugi and Joey spend the night, possibly because Yami has balls of steel or possibly because he just wants to show Kaiba up again.
Kaiba joins Yugi and Joey for breakfast before showing them to his latest creation, none other than Kaiba Land. While he's wearing a kings cape and looked on by thousands of adoring fans. Seto Kaiba has a huge ego and literally nobody is helping this.
Kaiba brings him to the dueling box, where Solomon Moto has been challenged to a game of Duel Monsters after kidnapping and blackmail by Kaiba. As fans of the show should know, Kaiba's holographic monster box scares the absolute hell out of Solomon. However, he pulls out his trump card, one of only four Blue-Eyes White Dragons known to mankind. He can wipe out Kaiba's remaining monsters and life-points with a single attack from this card. However, Kaiba has a trick up his sleeve. Or rather, three. The other three Blue-Eyes White Dragons. They ultimately wipe out Solomon's life-points and Kaiba floods the old man with holographic monsters to blackmail Yugi into agreeing to partake in the gauntlet of murder he's set up in Kaibaland. Yugi agrees and Solomon gives him his deck before being hauled off to the hospital. Joey won't let Yugi go alone and Tristan, who's babysitting his nephew at the park comes along as well.
Up on the next floor with the first challenge of the tower, they run into Téa, who works as the games guide. It's basically a form of laser-tag with a story. Evil dudes invading the space-station, drive them back, try to survive. The twist is that Kaiba has the vests set to electrocute the wearer if the guns are tuned to the right frequency. I know that's not what the comics actually said, but their explanation makes no sense. I don't know if it was lost in translation or what, but last time I checked lasers don't actually conduct electricity. Plus, considering Téa somehow wound up with a gun that actually trips the massive electro-shock setting on the vests, not to mention Tristan being able to adjust the level of voltage it trips I'd have to say this is Viz's translation at fault, not Takahashi's writing. I'll verify this sometime later on when I can get my hands on untranslated versions of these comics.
They make it through the entirety of Kaiba's crazy castle, braving voice-activated electric chairs. A literal murder mansion complete with its own version of Leatherface. A featureless room that turns into a twisted version of Tetris combined with Q-Bert. Tristan gets trapped in the room helping the others escape, and the volume ends on that note.
While having a few nonsensical moments, this volume was cool to read, and it was great to actually see Kaiba put Yugi in a position where he absolutely had to follow his plan. Plus, the tension and build-up over these chapters help to increase the impact of what happens in the next volume, although it could have been tightened up a bit with the absence of Tristan's nephew.
We only got to see a little bit of Duel Monsters in this volume, which is just enough to keep us going until the big showdown in the next volume.

Angered at Kaiba for putting the lives of his friends in danger and giving his grandfather a heart-attack, Yugi sparks with anger, blurring the lines between Yami Yugi and regular Yugi. Yugi confesses his fears about his other self to the remaining members of the gang, but they support him, and they proceed to the next stage of the tower. A game of Capsule Monsters Chess against Mokuba. There the gang catches their first in-depth glimpse of Yami Yugi in action. Mokuba has rigged the capsule dispenser to give Yami the weakest monsters while he gets the strongest. However, Yami uses the tactics and game-knowledge that's gotten him this far to utterly trounce Mokuba's overpowered army. Kaiba tries to punish his brother for losing the same way he did Solomon, but Yami busts into the dueling box and hauls Mokuba out, and heads for the final duel. Thus begins the duel that would define "epic" for the rest of time. One of the greatest encounters in all of comic-books. Goku vs Vegeta, Superman vs Doomsday, Batman vs Bane, Goku vs Frieza, Spider-Man vs The Green Goblin, and Yugi Moto vs Seto Kaiba are all moments that defined entertainment for years to come. Don't get me wrong, the other conflicts in the series all have their place on that list, but the monumental gravitas of this duel is positively unforgettable. Yugi does his best to build up a good defense to Kaiba's inevitable Blue-Eyes onslaught, but the billionaire gamer manages to cut through each of them, knocking Yugi's life-points down until he's forced into constant defense. Eventually, Yugi puts Swords of Revealing Light into play to prevent Kaiba from attacking until he can build up his defenses just as the second Blue-Eyes is played. Kaiba is beaten back upon Yugi's drawing of The Dark Magician, but as soon as his third Blue-Eyes comes onto the field, it blows it away. Yugi has one more turn, everything riding on just one card. With a hope and a prayer, Yugi draws his last card, and completes the ultimate monster. Exodia: The Forbidden One!
With the duel won, Yugi punishes Kaiba with a mind-crush, breaking apart Kaiba's psyche and destroying the evil in his soul that pushed him to where he is right now. Mokuba order's Kaiba's goons to stand down, and explains to the gang how Seto became the person he is now. Their parents died, relatives left them out to dry, and they wound up in an orphanage until Seto tricked Gozaburo Kaiba, Chess grandmaster and president of the Kaiba Corporation, into adopting them. Eventually Seto became ruthless and ousted Gozaburo as president of the company, which led to their stepfather flinging himself out a freaking window in front of Seto and the board of directors.
The next chapter is mainly important because it's the only time we ever see Yugi's mother. Yugi and Téa walk to school and she gives him a love-tester keychain. Some teacher starts giving them crap over their low test-scores (Something which makes no sense. Yugi's a certifiable genius) and then takes the keychain from Yugi. Yami challenges him to a game. Track down the keychain or be expelled. (Can teachers do that in Japan?) Yami uses deductive reasoning and Téa's matching keychain to track it down and wins the game. The main importance of this chapter was the development of Téa's crush on Yami. That's what makes this series so good, even the chapters that don't directly address the main plot are important to the characters. Plus they're usually just flat-out cool.
Can't say quite as much for the next chapter, since it doesn't really do much to advance the plot or the characters, it's just a one-off fun romp. Joey goes on a Japanese game-show (Complete with a game of Irritating Stick!) to win a million yen. The game is rigged, Yugi stops it from being rigged and exposes the producer on-air. It's cool, just not exactly necessary.
All in all, while this was easily one of the greatest volumes in the series, this is the point where the volumes start to end at points that have less impact. On the one hand, it's good that they were consistent with chapter distribution. On the other hand, I personally would have left the last two chapters out and saved them for the next volume just so they wouldn't wind up having a pair of extraneous chapters unrelated to the bulk of the content. But hey, that's just me.

The next volume marks a few historic moments for the series. For one, chapters 43 and 44 mark to first appearance of Yugi's iconic leather vest. For another, it marks the appearance of the series recurring antagonist, the spirit of the Millennium Ring.
Not to say that Chapters 43 and 44 are only good for a change of attire, but that's one of the few things that actually comes back later on in the series. Yami kind of mentions "levels" of Shadow-Game intensity, but those are never really brought up beyond this one chapter, and certainly don't come up at the end.
The next chapter on the other hand, 13 O' clock Terror is somewhat pivotal to the developing relationship between Yugi and Téa. Téa likes Yugi, but really likes Yami Yugi, and wants to see him again. A playing-card bomber attacks the amusement park they went to on their date, and Yami solves the "Clock Solitaire" game, saves Téa and they continue on.
Chapters 46 and 47 cover some kid name Imori from Yugi's school stealing the Millennium Puzzle and challenging Yugi to a game of Dragon Cards. Imori beats Yugi, and his soul gets sucked into the dragon pot, but Yugi gets his hands on The Millennium Puzzle long enough for Yami to take over and start the game anew. Yami has three months to get Yugi's soul out of the jar, which is plenty of time. Yami works out the rules of the game, gets Yugi's soul back and seals Imori's soul inside the jar. He then proceeds to seal the jar up and takes it... Somewhere it can never be found again.
Chapters 48 and 49 are a continuation of the earlier gang plot from Volume 2. Hirutani wants Joey in his gang, and baits Yugi and Joey into coming to the torture chamber. Hirutani threatens to hang Yugi if Joey doesn't join his gang, but Joey powers through and lifts Yugi off the chains.
Joey borrows The Millennium Puzzle and uses it to steal the Yo-Yo's from the gang. Yami challenges the gang to a game while Joey and Hirutani duke it out. Yami drops the gang through the rusty roof, and Hirutani throws glass in Joey's face, moving to kill him with a big shard. Joey manages to dodge out of the way, and knocks Hirutani off the roof. As the gangster clings with one hand, Joey uses his Yo-Yo to knock Hirutani's fingers out of place, causing him to fall to the ground below and presumably his death.
Come Chapter 50, we're finally introduced to the series recurring ally/antagonist, Ryo Bakura. Guy likes RPG's, and invites the gang over to his house to play a modified version of Dungeons and Dragons called Monster World. Unlike D&D, Monster World is a competition between one player who controls the monsters and the adventuring party. Find the boss, kill the boss, win the game. Or get killed by the Dark Master and lose.
They create their characters, Yami Bakura gives them their miniatures, and they begin their quest.
At a nearby inn, they learn that the dark lord Zorc Necrophades has assassinated the king and turned the world into one of frightful monsters. Within the game they run into miniatures based on other people Bakura knows, even the gym-teacher that bullied him earlier in the week.The NPC's tell them of the location of the dark creature, but they have to get there first.
The next volume was the very first volume of the comics I ever picked up, and it covers the rest of the Monster World arc, between Chapters 52 and 60. Between these chapters, they expand on certain concepts brought forth in Volume 6, namely soul separation, and the abilities of the normal and Yami versions of the host to interact with those separated souls. But that's going to have to wait until next time.
This volume appears to have been Takahashi's attempt to get the series back to the episodic beatdown format, while also creating foreshadowing for the unveiling of the series villain. Or more to the point, the concepts he would build the showdown off of. I don't know if this was his intention, but the chapters in this volume appear to be dedicated to testing out future concepts. The rest are dedicated to wrapping up loose ends.

Thank you for reading all the way through this review! If you liked it and wish to support my work, please check out my Patreon.
If you liked this, please let me know in the comments. I'm considering making this a yearly feature. If you want to see that, let me know and next September will be Yu-Gi-Oh! month all over again! I love Yu-Gi-Oh! and I really want to dig a bit further into it. Really, any excuse to talk about my favorite series.
The next article will be published on Wednesday, and I'll do my best to cover as much ground as possible. I originally intended to cover Volumes 1-12, but I ran up on the start of the month and had to cut it short. I then spent the next four days proofreading and improving the article as best I could.

Death Note (2006 Live-action Movie)

Before the animated series, before the animated movies, before Warner Bros picked up the rights to make an American movie, there were the live-action movies. I suppose I should have covered these before I dealt with the animated series, or the animated movies, but c'est la vie. I didn't actually find out that this movie was released before the animated series started until today, so that's kinda my fault for not looking this up. Oh well, we've come this far, we might as well keep going.
On June 17th of 2006, Warner Bros. Pictures Japan released Kaneko Shūsuke's live-action adaptation of  Ōba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi's comic masterpiece, Death Note. For the uninitiated, Death Note is one of the greatest pieces of fiction in history, and easily one of the best comic-books ever created. See if you can find the trade-paperbacks at a bookstore or library near you, read all thirteen volumes, and then get back to me. Seriously, you will not regret it. You might want to space it out a bit though so it's not done all in a week. This is the kind of thing you don't want to rush through.
Now that everyone's finished reading the comics, let's talk about this film here. Strangely enough, for a movie based on a comic that was as critically acclaimed as Death Note, with over thirty million copies in circulation, scores of nominations and awards, millions of fans, and near-constant re-releases of literally everything related to the series, I can't actually find much about the films production. There's a little note about how this was the first movie to charter an underground rapid-transit line in all of Japanese cinematic history. Apparently, they also used over five-hundred extras in production too, which was definitely a good idea. It helped to populate background shots, and kept the movie from looking empty. Unfortunately, we're going to dig into some rather massive criticisms before the review is over, so sit tight. Spoilers for the comics, animated series, animated films, and of course this movie inbound. As this is a Japanese film, I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. There's an English language track available, with most of the cast of the animated series English dub reprising their roles, but we'll get to that later on.
Chonologically speaking, this movie starts after Light Yagami (Played by Tatsuya Fujiwara) gets the Death Note, and after the Kira killings begin. In that regard, like many others, it's similar to Visions of a God. One could infer from that fact that the director of Visions of a God took some influence from Death Note, but I can't find any confirmation of that fact. You can tell however, that the Visions of a God director/editors stopped taking ideas from it almost immediately, since this movie starts out with a montage of Light killing criminals. From street-crime to murderers with connections, to corrupt politicians, we're shown their names being written down in the Death Note.
The Kira legend grows around the world, with some finding him a hero, and others considering him an outright criminal, no better than those he's killing. At this point, Kira is nothing more than an urban legend.
Meanwhile, at To-Oh University in Japan, Light is strolling through an incredibly chatty cafeteria with his girlfriend, Shiori Akino (Played by Kashii Yuu). Shiori serves all the same purposes as Yuri (I forgot her name and thought she was Takada originally) did in the comics and more. See, Shiori has a much larger role in this film than Yuri did. In fact, she has almost the same impact on the plot as Misa or Takada does.
Kaneko described Shiori as a character he created to contrast with Light. Her morals were intended to differ directly from both his, and L's. L has an almost amoral, ends justify the means attitude towards justice, while Light sees anyone who stands in his way as a target. Shiori is more of a means justify the ends kind of person (if that makes any sense), with a strict adherence to due process in mind at all times when it comes to justice.
She and Light discuss the urban legend of Kira, with him describing to her an encounter he had with a criminal, who bragged about murdering a kid to explain to her why he agrees with what Kira is doing. He leaves out the fact that he found the Death Note immediately afterwards.
He takes it home, and decides to test it out on a criminal involved in a hostage situation. Since the guy's already killed some hostages, I suppose he figures it won't hurt if he kills the guy.
Rather than following up on the instructions in the notebook, which say that the person whose name is written in the Death Note will die in forty seconds unless a time of death is written in, goes right to bed and finds out the guy died the next morning.
We then get to the train-crossing scene, which in the original was just Light crossing the railroad tracks, but here he sees the guy who was bragging about killing some kid earlier in the movie and he decides to pull out the Death Note, right then and there and write the guys name down.
He literally does that. In fact, he does it twice! Earlier in the film he pulled the notebook out of his bag and wrote down the name of someone else!
Let's think back to the comics, shall we? Yes, Light wrote down names in public, but he was never that brazen about it. He either used pages from the notebook, cuttings, or disguised the notebook with another book. He never took it out in public!

Then again, it's not like Light could easily hide something that freaking huge! Seriously, the Death Note in this movie is enormous! I'd reckon that it's more than twice the size it was in the comics and the animated series. I'd just like to remind everyone that Light hid the Death Note in a book that was about the size of the movie version in the comics with plenty of space to spare. You might notice other things in this screenshot worth noting, but we'll get to them later in the review.
Later on, Light meets Ryuk (Played by Nakamura Shidou), the Shinigami (Japanese for god of death) who dropped the Death Note in the human realm. Rather than asking him if he's here to take his soul, like he did in literally every other iteration of the franchise we've covered so far, Light asks him if he's here to take his life. I don't know if this was just some weirdo mistranslation for the movie or what. Could be the subtitles. Anyways, as any experienced fan would know, Ryuk says that he's just gonna follow him around for kicks. Sort of. Ryuk's motives aren't actually that well-explained in this film.
Interpol in general and the Japanese National Police Agency in particular are no closer to figuring out what's going on with the Kira killings, so they're about to toss it off to the public health agencies before the detective L (Played by Matsuyama Ken'ichi) steps in to point out that the killings absolutely cannot be natural causes, comparing it directly to death counts and patterns from actual diseases. This is rather anti-climactic, since they just tell us everything that happened at the ICPO rather than showing it to us. Here we're introduced to Watari (Played by Fujimura Shunji), L, and Soichiro Yagami. (Played by Kaga Takeshi)
L decides to confront Kira on television, using the Lind L. Tailor (Played by Matt Lagan) ruse. Light kills Tailor, and L brags about how easy it was for him to trace it down to Tokyo, and how that was literally the first place they tried. This would normally lead into what is possibly one of the most famous moments in the series, L and Light saying in unison that they are justice. Strangely enough, however, Light says he is justice after L does. That sort of takes the air out of the whole thing.
Light then figures out that he's being followed, and devises a way to figure out who's following him. This leads to him taking Shiori on a bus to... Somewhere. In the comics and animated series it was a place called Space-Land. In this it seems like Light is just taking Shiori on the bus to wherever they're going on a bus instead of walking.
For some reason, Light decides to confront the agent who's following him, even though that basically gives away the game ahead of time, and serves to undermine a point that Light makes later on in the same scene.
A criminal who escaped the police, Kiichiro Osoreda (Played by Miyagawa Sarutoki) earlier in the movie hijacks the bus, Light passes a note to Shiori saying he's about to jump the guy and take his gun, but Raye Iwamatsu (Not Penber for some reason) (Played by Hosokawa Shigeki) tells him to stay back and let him handle it. Light then objects to that, saying that he could be Osoreda's accomplice. Knowing what Light said earlier, how does that logic work? Knowing Iwamatsu was following him means that he'd have to believe that the bus-jackers were targeting him in order for those two statements to co-exist in one mind. Which would make Light one of the most paranoid people in the world. The qualifier here is that he's not paranoid since there actually are people out to get him. Plus, he's not exactly afraid of anything, he's always calm and collected, planning for every contingency, for every single possibility. I really don't know what the purpose of this was, since it's inconsistent with the character of Light Yagami, and doesn't make a lick of sense in the narrative. Light would never do this, because he would have calculated the effect it might have on the rest of his plan, and figured out that it doesn't work. I'll bet you that I'm probably not even as smart as Light is and I can figure out that saying that to Raye wouldn't have been a good idea.

Raye reveals to Light that he's an FBI agent to keep Light from doing anything stupid, and Light doesn't treat this as strange for some reason. I wasn't able to find out what an actual FBI ID looked like, since the nearest field office is in Jackson, Mississippi. If you want to know what kind of distance that is, look up a map of Mississippi, find Jackson, and then trace a straight line to the bottom-most section of the state. I also looked online, but I couldn't figure out which of the hundreds of ID formats I found were legit, and I'm already running behind on this article.
Light drops his note, and Osoreda finds it. Unlike in the comics, however, Light drops the note he wrote to Shiori instead of a substitute note with plans on it. This is incredibly stupid for a number of reasons. One of which is that while humans have a natural lifespan, free-will can still cut that lifespan short. For instance, if Osoreda had decided to pop a cap in Light's head because of that note, all of his plans would have ended right there. Fortunately, Ryuk was there to scare the hell out of Osoreda and save Light's bacon. Osoreda empties his gun at Ryuk, runs out of the bus, and gets hit by a car. Just like Light planned.
Light takes Shiori to the hospital for an IV of something for some reason. I'm... Not an expert by any means, but I do have a bit of informal paramedic training under my belt, along with a crapload of medical and anatomical research over the years, so I'd like to think I know enough to judge this scene from a scientific standpoint. Shiori wasn't hit by a bullet in that scene, and while she appeared to have suffered some sort of bruising and/or when the bus suddenly stopped, there's no real reason for her to have an IV. Speaking from experience, you don't need an IV to treat a mild bruise or whiplash. If this is some sort of cultural thing, then the Japanese triage system is seriously screwed up. Could it be for stress? Maybe, but I've always heard that stress is best handled with a good nights sleep and a bit of distraction, not drugs. I know this seems petty, but this scene literally makes no sense from a medical perspective. You know how this could be fixed? If Shiori had actually suffered some kind of visible injury. Maybe a concussion, or maybe she could have been shot. If they really needed to go to the hospital for some reason, that would be the best way to deal with it. Not like they really did though, since this whole scene could have been cut entirely without losing anything. Maybe we could have a bit more time dedicated to the rules of the Death Note instead.
Raye goes home to his girlfriend, Naomi Misora (Played by Seto Asaka [and yes, I thought Seto was a male given-name too]), and rather than discussing what went down, they just have coffee and cuddle while quoting random, inapplicable bible-verses. I don't mean from a them perspective, I mean a wider, movie kind of perspective.
One thing I feel the need to bring up right now is that while Naomi and Raye are both American FBI agents, they speak in Japanese even together. I know Naomi's parents are Japanese, and I know Raye is Japanese in this version, but they're still American FBI agents. A little, tiny bit of English between them would have made sense in-character. This is a bit of a logical issue throughout the whole film, which I'll bring up later.
Light then puts his plan to kill off the FBI into action. Since he can't just kill Raye without drawing immediate suspicion upon himself, he decides to kill all of them at once.
Raye cancels his plans for a day, Naomi follows him from the church to find out what he's up to. Raye goes to the train, where he finds an envelope left by Light. He opens it and finds a radio inside, along with a note from Light.
When Raye gets the radio hooked up, Light begins talking with him. Fortunately, he's using a voice-changer in this version, rather than just using his regular voice like he did in the animated series. Aside from a few changes here and there, this whole sequence is basically identical to the version in the comics and the animated series. I'd almost say the animated series copied it from this movie, but considering they both came out in the same year, and considering how long it takes to make an animated show, I highly doubt that.
Light kills a rapist to demonstrate his powers to Raye, but unlike in the comics or animated series, he does this in the train instead of on the street. In fact, their entire exchange takes place exclusively on the train. Light asks Raye if he can identify all of his co-workers in Japan. When Raye says he can't, Light tells him to write his bosses name down on one of the pages. Naturally, Light has written down the circumstances of death so Raye gets the names and faces of all of his co-workers. Raye then writes down their names on pages of the notebook, killing all of them.
Raye disembarks and dies, with Naomi exiting the train to check on him. Light retrieves the envelope, and leaves on the train.
This creates a cascade of events, with Naomi investigating Raye's death, and L placing video and audio surveillance on the Yagami family. Light finds out someone has been in his room through the pencil-lead technique, and from there assumes his room is now chock-full of surveillance, without asking Ryuk to map out all the cameras, although that's sort of implied. In her searching, Naomi stumbles across Shiori and Light. She then confronts Light about her suspecting him to be Kira. This is where the movie starts getting a bit stupid. In the comics, Light meeting Naomi was a coincidence, which made it even more tense. If Light hadn't gone to take his father fresh clothing, he never would have met her, and he might have been exposed. It was a work of pure art how Light figured his way around Naomi Misora in the comics, but the way this whole thing starts out is slightly, slightly freaking stupid.
Naturally, Light tells her he's going to sue her for defamation, while writing her (Fake) name down on a scrap of the Death Note. Shiori is taken aback by Naomi's confrontation, so she and Light leave. For absolutely no reason, Naomi tells Light she didn't give him her real name for absolutely no reason, telling him she was his fiance. If she suspects him to be Kira, why is she giving him all these details instead of letting him figure things out by himself like he did in the comics?
Light then decides to put on a show for L, and thus comes the famous "I'll take a potato-chip! And eat it!" scene. One thing I'd like to praise is the fact that they made the chip-bag large enough for Light to store a TV as well as a decent amount of chips. Something I didn't care for is the fact that the gravity of this scene, and of Light's actions have been significantly reduced, first by the lack of his inner-monologue, and secondly by the lack of music. This is another thing we'll have to come back to.
The next day, Light wakes up and the surveillance has been removed. The way this is set up, it implies the NPA did this while Light was asleep, which literally makes no sense. Ryuk asks Light what he would have done if someone else took the bag of chips, to which Light responds that he's the only one who likes Consomme chips.
Naomi calls up L and tells him that she's going to expose Light as Kira. She then kidnaps Shiori and takes her to the museum where Shiori and Light went earlier in the movie, telling Light to come and confess that he's Kira or she'll kill Shiori. Light goes to the museum and protests to Naomi that he's not Kira. She then tells him her whole name, telling him to kill her or she'll kill Shiori. As the cops arrive, Shiori runs away from Naomi, but Naomi shoots her. Shiori dies in Light's arms, and Naomi puts the gun to her head and kills herself. For some reason we don't see any blood from this, even though she was clearly holding a high-caliber pistol. It's not even like they were afraid to show visceral death-scenes in this movie, since they actually showed Osoreda bleeding from his head-wound onto the street. Seriously, how do you not splatter blood and brains all over the floor and walls from holding what appears to be a nine-millimeter pistol's barrel against your temple?
The police step in to clean up the mess, and attempt to give medical attention to Shiori, but to no avail. Light appears distraught over Shiori's death, but when Ryuk starts poking at him over that, he reveals his plans. Put Naomi into a situation where she would kill Shiori and then kill herself so he would then have ample motivation to join the Kira task-force, because if not for Kira, his girlfriend would still be alive. Funnily enough, that's actually 100% true. If not for his actions as Kira, Shiori would still be alive.
As the day begins to wrap up, Soichiro approaches Light to take him home, and Light tells him that he'd like to join the Kira tack-force. L steps out from the shadows to tell Light that he'd love to have him around, pulling out the same brand of Consomme chips Light was eating from earlier in the movie.
This was basically where the whole movie fell into place for me. Up until then, it seemed like they'd smashed all the life out of the comics, and while that's still somewhat true, seeing L step out of those shadows just taunting Light like he did with those heavy-metal chords playing in the background is still one of the most badass things I've ever seen.
The movie ends with Misa Amane (Played by Toda Erika) being attacked by her stalker, but he dies and a Death Note drops down in front of her. I don't really know when this is supposed to be set, since Ryuk takes an interest in her after seeing her cooking-show. Her incredibly stupid cooking show.

So, let's get back to what I said I was going to come back to earlier on. The first thing we'll cover is Ryuk. I won't say the CGI on him is award-winningly bad, but it's damn close. It would have been less off-putting if they'd used traditional animation. As it is, Ryuk looks like he stepped out of a Kingdom Hearts FMV. That's a consequence of having to insert a character with that bizarre kind of build into a live-action movie. You either go for CGI, CGI and a makeup job, or CGI, animatronics and a makeup job, and one of those is much more expensive and time-consuming than the other. At least if you want it to look good.
Second, Fujiwara Tatsuya has a chronic case of baby-face. At times, this actually takes away from him being able to play Light Yagami convincingly, but when he needs to he nails some of the finer aspects of the character. Another thing to mention is that they hardly ever have him wearing a shirt that isn't made of corduroy. I don't know why this bugs me, but it does. It might just be that in the comics and the animated series Light was always wearing either flat shirts or a suit of some kind. Also (and this is something to blame the stylists for) his hair in general looks nothing like Light's did in the comics.. It's too dark, for one thing. Light rather famously had light-brown hair. Plus, it's styled all wrong. Had he been given a better wardrobe, a hair-color and style which actually matches Light's and some more opportunities to flex as Light, however, I believe he would have been a great choice for the role. The problem is that this version of the character seems a bit too unprofessional, too laid-back for situation in both mannerisms and speech patterns, which I blame on the director more than anything. He's the one who decided to cut the characters inner-monologues out of the movie to add to the ambiguity. This also means we don't get any kind of visible shifts when the characters are doing things. I'm not asking for the full-tilt red tinges to Light's hair, but something would be nice.
One last thing about Light. He's shown playing basketball in the school-gym at one point, when it's been clearly established that tennis is his game. I can roll with it, but I wasn't really expecting him to be playing team-sports.

Next up is Matsuyama Ken'ichi as L, and I have to say he kills it in this role. He's got the look, the mannerisms, the speech-pattern, everything down. Matsuyama, like Alessandro Juliani, is perfect for this role. I don't think there's anyone else they could have gotten that played it as well as he did. There's an occasional issue with his make-up now and again, but other than that the production crew had L down pat for this film.
Before we move on to the rest of the cast, take a look at the right-hand side of this screenshot. You'll see a girl there, hooking up the televisions. One would naturally wonder who she is, given the fact that there weren't any female members of the Kira investigation until Wedy joined the team during the Yotsuba arc. She's an original character, named Sanami. (Played by Komatsu Miyuki) She literally serves no purpose. She doesn't do anything important, she doesn't say anything important, she's just sort of there every now and again. I don't even think they mention her name in the movie at all, and as far as I can tell, she doesn't have more than one name. Your guess is as good as mine if that's her family name or her given name, since I haven't gotten to names in my Japanese lessons yet.
Looking at the above screenshot, how many members of the Kira task-force can you name based on appearances alone? I'd wager two. L, and Touta Matsuda (Played by Aoyama Sota). I know there are only five people there, but I had a hard time identifying which actor was supposed to be playing which character. I still don't know which actors are which characters when it comes to the task-force beyond Soichiro, Matsuda, and L, mostly because none of the others have had any speaking-lines so far.

Since we can't cover anyone else yet, let's deal with the Chief. Kaga Takeshi would be perfect as Soichiro Yagami if he had the mustache and grey hair, but since he doesn't, he hardly looks like the character. Seriously, one of Soichiro's most famous defining characteristics is the mustache, and he doesn't have it! It's starting to look like Matsuda, Naomi and L are the only ones the production team put any effort into looking like they looked in the comics. If you look at Sayu (Played by Mitsushima Hikari) you'll notice her hair is the wrong color too. It's supposed to be a shade of chocolate brown. Their mother and Soichiro's wife, Sachiko isn't pictured here, but her hair is also black, while it's supposed to be dark brown. It sounds like I'm nit-picking, but all I'm asking for is a little consistency between mediums.

Speaking of inconsistency, Erika Toda, who plays Misa Amane doesn't have blonde-hair. Again, what is the single most obvious feature about her character? It's her yellow hair. While they got the styling and clothing down to a thread, the hair color is something that sticks out to me, especially since Death Note is an example of not only great artwork, but great designs as well. You're not likely to forget any of Obata's designs, but at first glance, if you didn't know this was a Death Note movie, most scenes would seem like they were from some random Japanese drama. Hell, the shots of Ryuk with Light look like they've been photoshopped, badly.
So, while the designs and styling leave quite a bit to be desired, the acting is exceptional. The dialogue isn't always great, but the acting works very well. Makes me wish that the Japanese casting directors for the animated series hired the cast of this movie instead of the people they did. Funnily enough, Matsuyama actually played Gelus in the Japanese version of the animated series.
Overall, the plot is solid. Moreso than that of Visions of a God, I think. While they compressed and skipped quite a few things, at least they weren't trying to cram half a series worth of content into a three-hour time-slot. In that regard, it's significantly better than Visions of a God. However, it's still got plenty of issues with presentation. The film relies a little too much on telling rather than showing, especially when it comes to public opinions of Kira, and there are a handful of small gripes I've brought up previously that bugged me. Overall, however, I think this was a story worth telling, it just needed to have a slightly tighter grip on the reigns when it came to pacing and planning out certain events. There are liberties taken with the plot that I like and ones that I don't, but overall it's not a bad way to tell the story.
Unfortunately that brings me to my biggest issue with the film. Most scenes are sorely lacking in appropriate musical accompaniment, with the few that do have music backing them up having very little. What's worse is that there are a pair of licensed songs inserted into the soundtrack. The xxxHolic theme-song, Manatsu no yoru no yume shows up in a romantic scene between Light and Shiori, and the film closes with a song from The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dani California. In that regard the animated series gets a ton of points, since they really seem to have skimped on the soundtrack for this film. What original music they have, however, is pretty sweet. Like I said before, some sweet heavy-metal chords playing at the end before they start tuning up the Chili Peppers. Just to get this out of the way, unless you're doing a period-piece or are going for a very specific feel to a movie or TV show, I despise the use of licensed music. Shows like Death Note, Kamen Rider Drive, Dragon Ball Z and Ressha Sentai ToQger have pretty much ruined licensed soundtracks for me, not that I cared for them to begin with. It's always better to make your own music for something like this, and if they'd leaned a little heavier onto their heavy-metal composers and composed character-themes, action-themes, etc, I think they could have had an incredible soundtrack. I will admit that in some scenes, the lack of a soundtrack made everything a bit more visceral. As it is, however, I was yearning for the soundtrack of the animated series throughout.
One last thing. I didn't watch the entire movie dubbed in English, since I wanted to judge it based on how it was made originally, but I did go back and watch snippets when I was done, and I have to say, the English dub is pretty bad. Ocean came back with almost all of the English cast to dub this movie, and while the performances of Brian Drummond, Brad Swaile, Alessandro Juliani, Christopher Britton and the other leads were perfectly fine, most of the criminals, extras and bit-parts are acted terribly. The DA at the very beginning of the movie is a major offender too. The whole movie might not be that bad in English, but this movie is better watched subbed, since it lets you appreciate the cast the filmmakers have chosen. Honestly, as far as the cast goes in this movie, there's not a whole lot of room for improvement. Except in one regard.
Something I notice in a lot of Japanese media is that no matter where a character is supposed to be from, they're usually played by someone from Japan. The Attack on Titan movies did this, and this movie does it as well. The one main complaint I have would be Fujimura Shunji as Watari. Watari is a British inventor, yet he's played by a Japanese man who doesn't even speak with a British accent. I actually wonder how that would sound, come to think of it. Anyways, it's not really a huge complaint, since he gets the look down pretty well, but it's still something I felt I should bring up, since this is something that bugs me all the time. It bugged me when the Russian soldiers in Snake Eater were all speaking with American accents, it bugged me when Christian Bale was putting on a phony Cockney accent in The Prestige, and it will continue to bug me when things like this happen. While he didn't have much of a British accent per-se in the animated series, he at least had some of the upper-class English inflections to his voice.
This actually brings up a much bigger issue with the language of the film, and the non-english versions of Death Note. Namely, why a British-based detective and his mentor/handler would be speaking in perfect Japanese. I think it actually makes more sense for all the characters to be speaking English, since from what I understand it's taught as a second-language in Japan, but that then brings up more issues that continue to make less sense the more you think of them. In the end, it's best to just shut up and roll with it at some point.
All in all though, I think this movie is well worth watching. It's a unique interpretation of the Death Note story, and it's by far a more enjoyable movie than either Visions of a God or L's Successors were.
In the end, I give it a 7.1* rating. Next week we'll be tackling Death Note II: The Last Name. I'm going to try and get the review done by Wednesday, but it might be a regularly scheduled Sunday release, who knows? I just need to remember to watch the movie before the day I'm supposed to review it so my review doesn't wind up going out at five in the morning next time.

Cover image from Amazon.com, screenshots taken by myself.

Death Note Relight: Visions of a God

It's been a while since my review of the Death Note animated series, and I know I've been trying to cover as many games, series and movies from 2015 as possible before the end of January, but I seem to have failed in that regard. Since I still plan to review the live-action Death Note series, I figured I should go back and tackle the two animated television movies first. Maybe I'll be done with 2015 by June of this year, who knows?
Anyways, for the uninitiated Death Note Relight is a two-part series of animated movies put out on Nippon Television in Japan, in 2007 and 2008 respectively. They present an abridged look at the plot of the animated series, utilizing stock footage and dialogue in conjunction with new dialogue and original footage to bridge the gaps. The immediate reaction one would likely have to this is "Whaa? Death Note was perfect as it is, you can't cut anything out and have it work as well as it did!" possibly followed by "Well, they might surprise me, let's give it a shot!" Unfortunately, for those of us who've seen the films, we know that our first instincts were correct. Let's dig into the first of the two movies, Visions of a God. Spoiler warning for the special and for Death Note as a whole, so go watch the show if you haven't. It's on Netflix. Just be sure to choose the English audio track, the voice-direction in the Japanese version is terrible.

This particular movie is set after the events of the animated series, and starts out with a few minutes of original animation. An unnamed Shinigami finds Ryuk, and asks him to tell him about his trip to the human world. Ryuk appears to have aged quite a bit since the events of the animated series, and agrees to tell this Shinigami about his adventures.
Right off the bat, we've got an interesting setup for the story to come. Ryuk is telling a story to a fellow Shinigami about his adventures.
Unfortunately, this is when things start to fall apart, since the following scene is a montage of Light writing things down in the Death Note, which isn't supposed to be the first thing you see in Death Note. The first thing you need to see in Death Note is either Ryuk being bored in the Shinigami realm or Light deciding that the world is rotten and needs to change. A montage of violent crime would have worked much better without giving away any massive plot details the way this montage did.
The movie gets better from there, but the montage literally didn't need to be there. The screentime it took up could have been dedicated to a few more seconds of plot. When you're adapting around eighteen and a half twenty minute episodes into a two hour, forty minute film, you can't afford to spend any screentime on something that you're going to reiterate later on in the movie. This is similar to an issue we'll see later on in the second movie, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
So, what's been changed?
First off, as one would naturally presume from the shortened run-time, most of the story has been fast-tracked to the highlights of the first half of the series, cutting down on time for character development, but hitting all the right beats for the most part. At least, until we get to around the midpoint of the film. I'm going to try and cover everything in order as much as possible, without jumping around too much.
The first victim of the cut runtime was the "How to use it" notations between scene transitions. This basically means that if you don't already know what the Death Note can do, the movie isn't going to bother explaining. Most of Light's experimentation with the Death Note has either been cut down, or removed entirely, which all but destroys the few rules-related plot-points they left in the film. All of Light's precautions about protecting the Death Note have been removed as well, at least until L starts his surveillance. They skip Light's first two kills entirely, even though those were part of Light's character development. The second one is flashed back to as part of a montage later on in both this film and the next, but it's not really given any kind of context that would give it any kind of weight. We don't see any of Light's transformation, he just goes from regular schoolboy with a warped sense of justice to mass murderer without any real inquiry into his motivations.
After Kira becomes known to the world, they skip through a lot of the ICPO conference straight to L's first confrontation with Light, which is itself sped through at a breakneck pace. Speaking of which, L reveals himself to the NPA with hardly any build-up. They just cut to the remaining NPA members showing up at the hotel with L.
The FBI sub-plot has been almost entirely excised, except for one scene where Ryuk notices Ray Penber and points him out to Light. The bus gambit was removed, which means Light would have no idea what his name would be to look up him or his commander back in the States. This is one of the only plot-holes I could find in the movie, the rest of the issues were entirely based in the breakneck pacing and the lack of decent character development. You know, all the problems the animated series didn't have.
After that, they run straight into Naomi Misora, kill her off, and then speed straight into L's surveillance of Light. You'll be happy to know that the potato-chip scene has been left mostly intact. They then cut almost immediately to the Sakura TV sequence, having cut out the scenes where Light meets L entirely, and thus erasing Soichiro's heart-attack from existence. I'd also like to point out that the reveal of him being Light's father has also been cut. It doesn't exactly induce any plot-holes, but it certainly makes things a little more puzzling until they drop some hints later on in the movie.
The removal of Soichiro's heart-attack makes his intervention in the Sakura TV incident a lot less bad-ass. Plus, since they had to compress the story, the whole situation is a lot less bad-ass in general.
After that, Light meets L for the first time. This whole sequence is original animation, and it's almost five solid minutes of exposition. They spend five minutes connecting the first half of the movie to the last half of the movie, possibly because they couldn't figure out how to adapt the college sub-plot without it taking up the entire last half of the film. It did, after all, take up at least four episodes, possibly more if you expand your scope to everything the arc affected, which is basically everything that follows it, up to and including the entire last half of the series. This removes some more of Light's brilliant gambits from the movie, since it removes his direct influence from the Second Kira case.
Rem then explains to Misa about how she got the second Death Note that Misa now owns, as well as explaining how she knows how to kill a Shinigami. This scene in the animated series was very touching and very very sad. It actually brought me to tears when I saw it, and I had already read the manga. I knew what was going to happen, and it was still sad. Due to all of the things they cut out of the scene, however, the impact of the scene was reduced significantly. They basically just pared it down to the guy trying to kill Misa and the Shinigami saving her. They also failed to explain the fact that when a Shinigami dies saving a human, that Shinigami gives the human their remaining life-span to extend that of the human. You know, one of the most critical plot-points in the entire show? Not like removing that raises any questions based on how she lived on beyond what was supposed to be her natural life-span. Based on the rules of the Death Note, she should have collapsed from a heart-attack unless she was given some kind of extension to that life-span.
Misa then shows up at Light's house (A flashback shows that Light and Misa crossed paths by complete accident at one time. As opposed to her planning to find out who Kira was through a complex manipulation of the rules of the Death Note and the police.
L then shows up at Light's school for no reason to talk to him and Misa for a bit before arresting Misa under suspicion of being the second Kira. Light then sets a plan into motion, with the movie showing us even less of the gambit than either the comics or the animated series did, with him getting locked up and erasing his memory. The scenes where he told Ryuk what to do under what circumstances are gone, as are the scenes of him burying the Death Note. This was literally one of the most important moments in the series, and it was definitely one they needed to leave uncut. Honestly, at most they would have added five or ten minutes to the film. Then again, they cut out a bunch of other critical plot-points, so who knows what the editor on this project was thinking.
Light gets locked up along with Misa for a while (Soichiro's imprisonment has been edited out), the Kira killings stop for a while, and after a little while (The timespan is cut down by a lot) the Kira killings restart. After an unexplained period of time (the sequel, L's Successors reuses the original line from the show, but based solely on this movie it could have just been two weeks later) Light and Misa are released, but kept under surveillance. There's also no explanation as to why Light and L are handcuffed to each other.
A good question to ask right now would be why L wants Light to help him with the case now? He wasn't helping him with it before in this continuity, and basically all he did was show that he's a viable suspect for the Kira investigation. It's not like he helped L put the reigns on the second Kira in this universe. It's not like they went to school together, or solved puzzles over coffee, or even really spoke to each other much in this version of Death Note.
Light and L have their little fight-scene, Matsuda feels useless, so he breaks into the offices of the Yotsuba group (because they actually bother explaining that they've linked a lot of Kira killings to Yotsuba) gets caught, and the task-force sets up a rescue mission for him. This all takes about three minutes. Since they cut out the breakup of the official task-force, they also removed the explanation as to why L and Light had to be the ambulance attendants when they picked up Aiber in the Matsuda wig from the street.
I'd also like to mention that Aiber and Wedy are introduced without much ceremony. Their names aren't even mentioned initially.
Rem then touches Misa with a piece of the Death Note when she overhears Kyosuke Higuchi, the third Kira talking about how he wants to marry Misa and possibly kill her for life insurance money. Rem then reveals to Misa who the third Kira is.
This is where their usage of stock-footage from the animated series begins breaking down. In the animated series, Misa disguises herself to get away from her police bodyguard so she can nab Higuchi with a confession. To do so, she disguises herself in a nurses outfit she borrowed from a friend of hers. But in this movie, they just cut from Misa's interview to her being in Higuchi's car, and as such, Misa's outfit changes from scene to scene. Why they didn't just use a bit of original footage for Misa's confrontation with Higuchi is beyond me.
In the upcoming scenes we can tell that the scenes where Light and L manipulate the rest of the Yotsuba murder group into cooperating with the Kira investigation have been left on the cutting-room floor. They set up the Sakura TV thing with Matsuda, and Higuchi goes off on his little quest to kill Matsuda. Long story short, they capture him and grab the Death Note, the team sees Rem, Light gets his memories back, and kills Higuchi. The difference between the animated series and this movie, however, is that the Kira task-force was never officially disbanded by the NPA, the members didn't subsequently quit, and Aizawa never left the Task Force, so it turns what was a Big Damn Heroes moment in the animated series into basically a standard police operation.
Misa gets her memories and her notebook back, but not her Shinigami eyes. This wasn't particularly well explained in either the comics or the animated series, it's just sort of assumed that you lose all of your Death Note related powers when you give up the notebook. Honestly, it didn't really have much of a purpose and could have been totally dropped without losing much. I mean, it contributed to Rem wanting to save Misa's life, but there were enough reasons for her to do that anyways that you literally could have removed it entirely without losing anything. This was pretty much the only thing which bugged me about the original Death Note comics and the animated series. Unfortunately, this isn't that kind of movie.
Misa reveals to Light that she can't remember L's real name (You see, this is why you repeat things in your head until you can't forget it.) and Light puts Misa in a position where Rem must kill L for them in order for Misa to not be caught as Kira potentially.
The people constructing this movie completely botched L's death scene, as it doesn't have nearly the same impact as it did in the animated series. It could be that we haven't had enough time to get to know L for his death to have much meaningful impact on us, or it could be how the editors constructed the scenario. For one thing, all of the scenes of L being kind to Light before his death have been completely removed. Not to mention all of the scenes from earlier in the series that were either shortened or skipped entirely of them working together. The consequence of skipping most of the Yotsuba arc is that we missed out on seeing enough of non-Kira Light becoming friends with L. That removes a lot of the shock of L's death, since you almost didn't expect Light to have him killed in both the comics and the animated series. Here, since you don't really get more than a glimpse of the differences between Light without his Kira memories and Light with them, nor do you get to see how Kira-Light and L consider each other worthy opponents, it basically removes all meaning from this scene.
Fortunately, the ending is much better, with them actually covering L's funeral, and Light gloating over L's grave, before they cut to Ryuk, staring at Light's name in his Death Note, with the Shinigami walking off to the Human world. The sound fades out, as (the first ending) begins to play.
For the most part, I'd say that the original animation in this episode was pointless. Aside from the intro and ending, there's nothing new here worth watching. While I liked L's funeral, I think they should have held off on completing the framing narrative until the end of the second movie, especially considering how weak the framing-device for L's Successors is.
In order to patch the gaps between stock footage, new dialogue has been recorded, and the English casts performance is on par with their performances in the animated series. Unfortunately, the quality of the narrative has taken a bit of a nosedive, and sometimes characters are forced to talk in scenes when they didn't talk before. For the most part they do a good job of abridging the stock footage from the animated series into a cohesive whole, but there are enough continuity errors that you wonder why they didn't use a bit more original footage. There are also times when I question why the editors left certain scenes in. For instance, Misa's singing is left pretty much untouched from how it was in the animated series, but they cut out Ryuk explaining certain things about the Death Note to Light. Plus, Light's experimentation with the notebook has been reduced to a footnote basically, which leaves certain questions up in the air which were otherwise answered in the animated series and the comics alike.
The new animation is at least as good quality as that of the original series. I didn't see any massive issues, such as transparent hair or ridiculously off-model animation. Mad House, as always, delivers on precision animation. However, for some strange reason, Misa's cross jewelry has been changed to misshapen fleur de li's. I don't know why, but they did. It's bizarre, and it looks incredibly out of place.
Then we come to the sound-design. In my review of the animated series I praised the care taken with sound cues and music, since it added to the atmosphere of the show. Unfortunately, for the most part, that hasn't carried over into the film. Track placement is haphazard, and there's not silence or light score music to give the audience much breathing-room.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend Visions of a God to a first-time Death Note viewer, or to a fan, for that matter. It's much better to just watch the animated series, as it's actually a complete story as opposed to just a highlights reel. Hell, the animated series had a ten minute recap in the middle of the series right after L died which was more complete than this movie is. The good thing about that was that it actually served a purpose in the plot. What little original animation there is is few and far between. The exposition scene towards the middle just raises a bunch of questions, with the funeral scene at the end of the movie leaving me to wonder why they didn't just include that in the animated series instead of leaving it to languish in this Frankenstein's monster of a film.
In the end, I give this film a 3.7* rating. It's well below par, especially considering how high the bar was set by the animated series and comics alike. You wanna know what the worst part is though? Out of the two Relight films, this is the good one! Tune in around Wednesday, when I'll be reviewing Death Note Relight 2: L's Successors!

Image from Walmart.com.