Yu-Gi-Oh!/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

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* Why did Yami play the Seal of Orichalcos against Rafael? If he hadn't, he would've lost the duel but nothing was at stake. If neither player uses the seal, the loser can just walk away, soul intact. For that matter, why didn't he just rip up the card to prevent it from being used on anyone?

** That was the point Rafael was trying to make. Yami was so obsessed with winning (not to mention really pissed off) that he played the Seal even though he didn't have to.

** GX and onwards refer to the holograms as "Hard Light", a fictional technology that adds a slight level of physical depth to the holograms. Also 5Ds explains this with "Momentum" ("Ener-D" in the dub, "Feel" in the manga, and "Sense" in the English translation of the manga), which is an energy that is emitted when dueling that carries over your emotional intent in the impact, creating a type of sensation over the opponent.

** Probably because the anime is over-the-top. I think in the manga version, the holograms are not as dangerous as the anime version. In fact, in Yugioh GX manga, it is implied that the players just act it up. In the manga, when Manjoume collapsed after getting direct attacked, his schoolmates (who were unaware that Manjoume was playing a shadow game instead of a regular duel and thus felt the pain) were surprised because Manjoume was not the type of person that "acted during duels". Note that the manga Manjoume is stoic and quiet, basically a total opposite to his loony anime counterpart.

** It probably has something to do with a minor form of gravity manipulation through light. Light is made up of photons, which have properties of both a wave and a particle at the same time. Space and time are relative, and the closer to light speed a particle travels, the greater the distortion is. Einstein's theories of relativity state that gravity is nothing more than a distortion of the fabric of space-time. Thus, if light particles can distort time, they also distort space, and can potentially alter gravity. It seems reasonable then, that the explosions, knockback, wind, and other various effects produced by the "Solid Vision" holograms may be caused by minor gravity fields generated by the holograms.

*** Holograms do not work that way (and light in general doesn't work that way either).

* What irritates me is this: Yes, Joey is a [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass]], and yes he acts like a dumbass most of the time. But why does everyone keep insisting that he's weak and that they'll be able to beat him easy peasy? He came second in Duelist Kingdom and he was a Semi-Finallist in Battle City. Surely that actually means that maybe, just maybe, he's actually a really good player? Aside from whatever arc it is' [[Big Bad]], Kaiba or Yugi, he never lost a single duel, Despite this, he got a reputation for being a loser somehow. Why is this?

*** Of course, said gamble deck is really a smattering of chance cards, which is meant to compensate for his lack of access to [[Power Equals Rarity|rare and powerful cards]]. Said fandom meanwhile is likely to take Kaiba's [[Bigger Stick|beatstick]] ownership for granted as much as Kaiba does, and predictably, [[You Suck|treats Joey as he would]].

** And he has lost to a lot of minor level duelists. In order, Tea, Duke Devlin, Steve (look, he had no real name, okay?), Odion (He would have won easily if he hadn't been forced to play the fake card) and Mai.

** This Troper may be mistaken, but didn't he lose to Mai ON PURPOSE?

*** Mai was in position to make the winning move, but when she realized that she didn't actually want to beat Joey, he collapsed, tired from his previous duel, and lost anyway.

** Sadly I have the answer to my own question: Rule of Cool meets Dramatic Convenience: As impractical as it is Takashi just did it because it looks badass, and similar problems are present with their previous skyscraper duel but it looks so badass, you don't really care. but it still bugs me a bit though.

** Because it was the only place with a big enough space to hold Kaiba's ego?

* During Yugi's 3rd duel with Kaiba (The one that introduces Blue Eyes Ultimate), why didn't Kaiba just simply attack Yugi's Celtic Guardian after reborning his Blue-Eyes on the turn it was reborn? Instead, he waits a turn for some reason. He could have won that duel legitimately if he had just done that, and we know it's possible to attack with a monster on the turn it's reborned because Yugi himself does it with that card all the time in the same season.

** For sake of drama. It puts Yugi in that realization that he's not the only person pulling the strings, which starts him communicating with Yami. If Kaiba ended it right there, Yugi wouldn't have secured the fact there was another presence.

** No, I'm pretty sure in the first season of the Duelist Kingdom rules, there was a clause that monsters reborn from the graveyard couldn't attack until the next turn, just like monsters that were just created through a fusion. Probably a "special summons cannot attack on the turn they are special summoned" rule or something, worded in real life terms.

** No, it was already stated that Yugi does almost the exact same move in an earlier duel by reborning a Blue-Eyes and attacking on the same turn (Yugi vs Monster Clown). And later in the same season Yugi reborns a Black Skull Dragon and attacks on the same turn.

* What the heck were Thief King Bakuras followers, anyway? Where did they come from? Why are their eyes glowing? Why do they look like zombies? If they are zombies, how did he resurrect zombie henchmen?

** My best guess is they're some of the souls of Kul Elna giving him a hand? How on earth he got them to be solid I have no idea (maybe they aren't, and they're just an illusion? I don't know, did any of them actually touch a character?), but them being the dead souls sounds good.

* If Kaiba despises his stepfather so much, why does he keep his name instead of just using his old name? He must have known it when he went to the orphanage. And why does he continue to glorify the name by keeping his company named Kaibacorp and building Kaibaland? Even if you don't despise the previous CEO, changing company name is just good sense when shifting focus.

** Well, it's possible that by making the Kaiba name associated with him instead of his stepfather and the company name associated with games instead of weaponry, he's achieving a "victory" against his stepfather.

*** [[This Troper]] seems to recall hearing that Duel Monsters would occasionally use a Game Master, much like RPGs, to illustrate various obscure effects, such as [[Rocks Fall Everybody Dies|"Castle of Dark Illusions falls, all monsters underneath are destroyed"]].

** In Duelist Kingdom, the rules appear to be that anything goes. The person who is most creative at bsing their way to plausible sounding rules or actions (THE MOON RAISES THE SEA!! OH YEAH WELL I ATTACK THE MOON!!) is the winner. Between Kaiba and Pegasus, they probably just ran about every conceivable action that any given card could be put through, and then let some of them combine. Besides, it looks cooler, and this way Yami can bs his way to victory in impressive ways.

** Thats not how her trick works. She doesn't know what card her opponent drew, she just makes them think she does. By playing her own cards by smell instead of by sight, she convinces her opponent that she's psychic, and thus makes them doubt their own strategies, meaning they never try them, meaning they start floundering, meaning they're easy pickings.

*** Yes, but at the beginning of the Duelist Kingdom arc, when she was on the ship with Rex, she asks him to shuffle her cards and draw, and then she tells him which cards he drew, right? Of course she did it only to confuse him, but still. How did she smell it from that distance? When she draws herself, she might subtly wave the card a bit, so that she can get the smell right, but when someone else draws for her? I get what the purpose of the trick is, I'm just not sure how it actually works.

** It's the same in the anime. However, I did not think at all that the arc was incomplete, and I certainly wouldn't call it a plothole (maybe an anti-climax). Also, from Jonouchi's POV, it was not about the outcome of the duel, but rather about the duel itself. He didn't want to face Yugi until he became a real duelist. Them facing off at the end means that he accomplished his goal. It doesn't really matter who wins. Personally, I thought it was a great way to end the arc on a positive note.

* I know this series is a poster child for the Screw The Rules tropes, but there's a particularly egrigious example that I felt needed to be mentioned. When Yami and Joey duel the Big Five, Lecter summons the Five-Headed Dragon using a ritual card, stating that he has to sacrifice five monsters, each one with a different attribute. He then proceeds to sacrifice all five of his deck masters. This seems to work at first, until you realize that Nightmare Penguin (Krump's deckmaster) and Deepsea Warrior (Gansley's Deckmaster) have the same attribute. In other words, Lecter not only broke the rules, he explicitly stated what they were before doing so. What the hell is up with that?

*** The Joey one might have been a bit over the top, and Duke's father's case is strange since Yami though sealed in the puzzle couldn't do much else after that.

* How much in-universe time does the series take up? The events of Battle City all the way through the Memory World clearly come right after one another (with a few days' separation in between each), since Yugi's goal once he has the God Cards is to get right to the museum. None of the major arcs seem to take more than a week. Specifically, the first part of Battle City and the entire KC Grand Championship seem to have been one really long day of dueling time with little break. The Virtual World arc is implied to take only a few hours in the real world, hence Yami Marik wandering around and not using the time to find Odion, and the last round of the Battle City Finals is all on one day. The DOMA arc is probably the longest, since they're traveling to different places and there is some actual passage of days, but still didn't seem to last too long. However, right before the events of the Memory World arc, Tea in the dub says that they've had "four years" of adventures together, and in the final battle Ishizu mentions that she hasn't used her necklace to make a prediction "in years" since giving it to Yugi. So what gives? Did they take breaks after Duelist Kingdom and Battle City to go to school for a year? Or was the dub team trying to avert [[Comic Book Time]]? Either way, nobody's aged a bit in four years, or seems to have graduated from high school (which they already attended before meeting in the anime and is only three years long in Japan). Personally, I think it's only taken a few months at most, but we aren't really told how long each arc is, are we?