vjenkins - 2017-06-26 02:37:41

While the movie was enjoyable and had pretty visuals, it ultimately disappointed me. This review is pretty unorganized but it basically starts with the good and then lists points I disliked in a random order. It contains spoilers but there’s a spoiler-free TL;DR at the bottom.

The English voices sound great (with the exception of the little girl’s voice and two or three lines from Kaiba that felt like they needed a bit more power behind them) and it’s awesome to have all the old characters and their voice actors back. There were some amazing lines in this movie, and some that while amazing felt like they belonged in the abridged series instead.

As expected of him, I really enjoyed Kaiba in this movie. He had some nice development between the end of the manga and the start of this movie (this movie takes place after the manga, not the series, which makes for two relevant differences: Kaiba didn’t see the final duel between both Yugis and wasn’t part of the fight in Ancient Egypt). While his duel style hasn’t really changed, he clearly matured as a person, feeling more calm than previously. He cooperated in the finale and accepted defeat twice, though both times he still had an ace up his sleeve. Yugi was done well too but he didn’t do that much as most of the movie focused on Kaiba and Diva. I enjoyed seeing a post-spirit Bakura and a slightly grown up Mokuba.

Most of the monster redesigns are really cool. Neo-Ultimate finally gives Kaiba’s ultimate dragon an effect so that it can outshine its previously way superior imitation, the Cyber End Dragon. The new version of the Stone Soldier is just cool, and the new design for the Dark Magician looks great.

Unfortunately, other than that, I felt that the movie was too all over the place and in some cases just didn’t make much sense.

The millennium cube (whatever they actually called it) is a weird retcon that doesn’t fit with the seven previously established millennium items and that is ultimately pointless. The teleporting is forgotten about as soon as it would inconvenience Kaiba’s personal police, the banishing could easily just have been regular shadow game magic, its world-altering effects didn’t happen, and the special dimension duel rules had no effect on any of these duels (nobody even used the rule to summon monsters with less attack points than usual!). Shadi’s involvement in the whole thing is especially weird as in the original show (and, from what I remember of it, the manga) he was always a spirit and it was either stated or at least heavily implied that he didn’t just die a few years before the story but actually waited for the pharaoh in that spirit form since ancient egypt.

Diva–a poor kid from Egypt that grew up with a protective sister and a dark-skinned friend that now serves as his moral center and who is now set to destroy the pharaoh for nothing the pharaoh ever did–is a badly done Marik rehash that doesn’t add much to the story. He’s written a bit inconsistently (he realized that the Pharaoh is the spirit of the puzzle and Yugi isn’t him, but sees a young Bakura clearly possessed by the spirit of the ring and thinks it’s actually Bakura?) and just doesn’t have much presence. His cube monsters are probably the most bullshit-y antagonist monsters the series has ever had but they lead to very boring duels. The movie wastes a lot of time showing completely irrelevant flashbacks to his past that add nothing to his character. His memory-altering abilities from the start of the movie (where it is strongly implied that he implanted memories of himself into the main cast) never come up again, though apparently memories and being forgotten are more of a central theme in the Japanese version so perhaps that’s just something the translation left out.

The spirit of the millennium ring is completely wasted in this movie, assuming it even was the spirit. Him controlling not-Odion was cool but it’s such a waste to not have him return to Bakura, and it’s much more of a waste to have him turn into that abomination that apparently actually still is Diva for the most part. His CGI skulls in the flashback looked weird too, and that’s from someone that is completely fine with CGI monster cards and thinks most of them actually look great.

The duels–while visually impressive–are very short duels focused on just a few card effects much unlike what we usually see in the series. That’s just a personal thing but I prefer the long, strategic and dramatic duels over these short ones. One interesting change was that a lot of card effects just weren’t explained, to the point where the movie didn’t tell us the name, stats, or even vague effect of the final card that was played. This feels like an over-correction from the old Pot of Greed explanations. While those did get pretty silly, some of the effects that weren’t explained just felt like they weren’t well defined, like they were just quick things thought up for the movie with no real thought put into it. The new Gaia gains strength when a monster destroyed by him returns to the field, which seems awfully specific. Or perhaps does he just gain ATK when a monster is summoned? Movie doesn’t say, he just gets some points for the sake of it before being destroyed. The new Keltic Guardian can apparently be special summoned from the hand, but what’s the condition on that? Does it only work if you have the regular Keltic Guardian which Yugi summons at the same time, or does it always work without a condition, or is it more of a Cyber Dragon effect? That super cool fortress that defended Dark Magician and could attack, what other effects does that have? Did it stop Dark Magician from attacking after the fortress cleared that field or was that just anime protagonists forgetting to finish the duel again? Did it destroy Dark Magician when it was destroyed or was that Kaiba’s card? There’s a lot of detail lost in these quick duels, and I don’t like that. They even skipped the ritual summoning for that one Blue-Eyes variant and the tributes sacrificed for Obelisk (speaking of, that was a duel where you didn’t need tributes, could Kaiba just sacrifice them anyway?). Perhaps this is a bit of a nitpick but at one point, Dark Magician Girl had her regular 2000 ATK even though there was a Dark Magician in Yugi’s graveyard that should have raised her ATK to 2300.

There’s a few more things that felt weird. Kaiba has a new and awesome duel disk prototype that is completely virtual, yet the new duel disk design he gives Yugi is a completely different model. Did he really design two new models that use completely different technology? He’s only advertising one of them! Speaking of Kaiba’s awesome new tech, all of his holo cards look purple in close-ups and blue from further away, and they all look like fusion monsters in close-ups. His amazing virtual reality is only used twice in the movie (and I loved that scene where for a second I genuinely thought Kaiba killed a man for the spectacle of it) and then gets replaced by boring shadow game environments. (Speaking of shadow game environment, I find people disintegrating into a swarm of yellow energy or black cubes incredibly boring and generic and this movie does a lot of that.)

This is a nitpick, but the Dark Magician’s redesign is weird. Not that his hologram looks different now, that makes sense, but that the art on Yugi’s card is different now. I refuse to believe that Yugi is using a different Dark Magician card now so I suppose this is just a retcon? Some of the other redesigns feel pretty pointless. Yet another Kuriboh that does essentially the same thing. Two new gadgets that replaced the original three but didn’t really do anything different. Come on!

One of the most obvious weird things about the movie to me was Kaiba’s “tournament” if you can even call it that. Twice he says that he wants to give Domino the best tournament ever, but it’s really not a tournament is it? It’s two duels between three characters. He did say at one point that he wanted a duel demonstration to show off his new tech to the world and that makes much more sense but why go with the tournament line then?

Also, Kaiba dispelling Diva’s attack at the start of the movie was never explained and never picked up on. That seems like it would have been really useful. Like, perhaps that would have worked when Diva did actually send him to the shadow realm later. They included that on purpose and made a pretty big deal about it, but just that once.

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TL:DR: While I did enjoy the movie and really liked some aspects of it, I found that the complete package just left too much to desire. Too many monsters destroyed and replaced and resummoned in too short of a time frame with little to no explanation feels like the individual attacks and each individual monster don’t matter at all (this is made worse by every second monster being yet another Blue-Eyes redesign). Too many small inconsistencies feel like there wasn’t much thought put into the movie. The villain wasn’t engaging, his monster mechanics didn’t make for fun duels, and the movie would have been better if neither Shadi nor Diva nor the cube were in it. This movie had a lot of potential with cool Kaiba tech and the focus on Kaiba’s longing for a rematch against his dead rival and his interactions with the Yugi he doesn’t care about, and it really should have just been two hours about those three points.

keebler.kirstin - 2017-02-13 17:34:18

An amazing addition to the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. The return of the pharaoh for an instant was crazy good. The duels were intense and new duel style was impossible to beat.

moen.kaelyn - 2017-02-09 19:41:56

Seto Kaiba badassing all the way. Is all you have to know. An awesome closure for the series. Also, is like a “prequel” for the mobile game Duel Links. Nice.