Your move! At some point, every anime fan experienced the absolutely crazy world of Yu-Gi-Oh!, a world in which card games mean everything. It allows multi-millionaires to rent out entire cities or islands for the purpose of massive tournaments, and utilize cutting edge augmented reality technology just to play the game.
Though the anime series has become its own separate thing now, there was a time when it stuck close to the manga series by Kazuki Takahashi. Still, even in that era, there were a number of changes to the series which had to be made, both to make it more palatable to a wider audience, and to keep the anime from catching up to its source material. This list counts down ten of the biggest differences between Yu-Gi-Oh’s anime and manga.
10 BANDIT KEITH GETS MURDERED
One of the biggest changes is the fate of Bandit Keith. Despite being skilled, the American champion was revealed to be a person who won most of his duels through cheating. Still, after losing to Joey, Keith tries to pull a gun on Pegasus to convince him to hand over the prize money.
In the anime, Pegasus makes Keith leave the Duelist Kingdom forcibly by activating a trap door. In the manga, things go...a little differently. As a penalty for losing the game, Pegasus transforms Keith’s own hand into a gun, then forces the American to shoot himself in the head. Takahashi has no time for repeat scrub characters.
9 CARDS OVER EVERYTHING
The biggest difference between both the original manga and the Duel Monsters series is the latter's focus on cards. In the original manga, Yugi was willing to play any kind of game to test his opponent's skills, eventually putting them in a penalty game for their misguided actions.
In the anime, eager to figure out how to turn the cards into an actual game, it wound up putting those other games to the side. For example, in the anime, Bakura kidnaps the group and Yugi has to win a Duel Monsters game to protect them; in the original manga, they were placed in a game which hewed closer to Dungeons and Dragons.
8 HOW KAIBA ACQUIRED HIS BLUE-EYES
In the anime, it’s never really explained how Kaiba got his Blue-Eyes cards. He shows up on the doorstep of Yugi’s grandfather’s card shop offering cash and an entire massive collection of cards, so it’s naturally just assumed that’s how he got the other three Blue-Eyes copies.
In the manga, Kaiba is a straight-up monster who pushes one man into bankruptcy to take his card. He makes deals with the mafia to acquire another (which probably didn’t have a happy ending). Lastly, Kaiba drove a man to commit suicide and took the card after he was gone. Imagine ruining this many lives for a monster that gets destroyed by a trap card like Mirror Force.
7 BAKURA KILLS PEOPLE...A LOT
Bakura feels like an inefficient villain in the show. He traps the group into a duel where they played as their favorite monsters, but he loses and spends the next two arcs collecting LS like it was his part-time job. In comparison, the character's manga version is much more ruthless in nature.
After a duel with the zombie duelist Bonz, Bakura simply takes his life using his Millenium Item. Speaking of Millenium Items, in the aftermath of Pegasus’ loss against Yugi, Bakura comes along and kills him by ripping the Millenium Eye directly from his socket. Though both versions of the character said they’d do anything to win, manga Bakura proved it.
6 MARIK WAS EVEN MORE DANGEROUS
Marik is terrifying enough in the anime version. Having never left behind the methods of the ancient Egyptian society Kaiba and Yugi’s original souls came from, his methods could often be gruesomely violent, pushing the tension of a match to another level.
Manga Marik is even more dangerous than his animated counterpart. During one of his machinations, he forces Yugi to battle his best friend Joey. As a threat to make sure it happens, Marik threatened to force Tea to swallow poison. Ouch.
5 JOEY GETS MORE FOCUS AS A DUELIST
During the anime, Joey serves as the character experiencing most of the growth in the series. Yugi has things to do and antagonists to beat, but Joey has to figure things out as he goes along. It’s meant to be a big deal then when he makes it to the last match of both the Duelist Kingdom and Battle City.
It shows Joey's growth that he is able to beat players who have competed in massive tournaments. Apparently, the manga could literally careless, as it skips over both of his last duels at the tournaments, choosing to focus on the plot rather than a supporting character’s incredible growth.
4 YUGI'S GRANDDAD IS IN A VHS TAPE
In the anime, Yugi loses to Pegasus very early on in the Duelist Kingdom saga; subsequently, as a way to force Yugi to attend the Duelist Kingdom tour3nament, Pegasus traps Yugi’s grandfather’s soul inside a card. In the manga, it doesn’t quite work out like this. Instead, Pegasus traps his grandfather inside a videotape.
Yugi even plays the tape during the Duelist Kingdom tournament to talk to his grandfather a couple of times. Still, Yugi’s grandfather gets done so wrong during this series. First, his prized card is ripped in half, then he gets shoved onto a strip of magnetic tape. Well, at least it wasn’t Betamax.
3 JOEY'S DAD IS A DRUNK
Yu-Gi-Oh! mostly takes place in a universe where parents just tend not to matter; no one ever seems to know or care what Tea or Tristan’s parents do. This mostly works out, because they spend all too much time doing things no rational parent would let their child do. They actually visited another island for several days without anyone saying anything.
In Joey’s father case though, this is perhaps for the best. We get some brief glimpses of the character in the manga, and it’s not pretty. By all accounts he seems to be an abusive man, tossing a beer bottle at the door when he believed his son had come home a little late. This is why the anime focuses just on Serenity.
2 KAIBA'S DAD DOESN'T COME BACK
The fate of Kaiba’s father is largely the same both in the anime and in the manga. Kaiba’s father was overbearing and pushed his adopted son until he turned into a cold-hearted man just like his dad. Finally, Kaiba outsmarted his father and managed to oust him from his own company.
In both versions, this pushed his father over the edge and he took his life. In the manga, he jumped out of a window and was never heard of again. In the anime, he backed up his brain on a computer which aimed to get revenge later during the Battle City arc. One would think he could’ve gotten revenge alive, but...it’s filler. Don’t think too hard about it.
1 NO VIRTUAL WORLD ARC
In the anime, during the middle of the "Battle City" Arc, the series takes a massive pause to do the "Virtual World" arc. Kaiba, Yugi, and all the major characters of the show all find themselves inside a virtual world, battling against virtual representations of actual monsters in the game.
Though this gets Yu-Gi-Oh! fans everywhere closer to that dream of having an anime explaining the actual card lore behind the series, this was never in the manga. It was a filler arc invented to allow the manga to get ahead enough so they could adapt the remainder of "Battle City."