Don’t let Yu-Gi-Oh!’s focus on card games fool anyone. The original series could get dark. Before Kazuki Takahashi started making everything about a card game that set the world on fire in the early 2000’s, Yu-Gi-Oh! seemed to be about a young boy with a sadistic other personality that enjoyed dishing out dark vengeance on those who’d somehow wronged him or his friends.
Those who owned millenium items would challenge people to games, then if they lost (and they always did), they would force them to deal with the penalty game—punishments which could range from scary but survivable to deadly and terrible. Here we’ll be looking at ten of the craziest penalty games the manga ever did.
10 BEAT FESTIVAL
In the third chapter of the manga, Yugi had to deal with a bully named Sozoji, a man who was utterly awful at karaoke, but was constantly forcing people to listen to his music.
He forces Yugi and another classmate to sell tickets to his show, but when Yugi tries to get his friend off the hook for selling tickets, Sozoji beats the classmate up, leading to Yami Yugi challenging him to a penalty game. When he loses, he’s forced to listen to the sound of his own heartbeat as it grows louder and louder, subject to the same kind of maddening noise as people forced to listen to his wack concerts.
9 BRAIN INSECTS
In the anime, Mai losing to Yami Marik leads to her being trapped in hourglass, watching while her friends slowly forget her. She got off lucky. The manga version of Mai is also trapped within an hourglass, but instead of the glass being filled with sand...it’s filled with brain insects.
These insects exist to eat her actual brain matter over the next twenty-four hours. Y’know, technically Mai won this game. She managed to get the Winged Dragon of Ra over to her side of the field, but because she couldn’t read the text on the card it cost her the duel. Presumably,this embarrassment is why Marik subjected her to such harsh punishment.
8 CLOCK TIME
In another early episode of the series, a young man known for collecting watches named Shotaro Akaboshi steals a watch Yugi was meaning to give to Tristan, who planned to give it to a girl he had a crush on. Theft is one thing, disappointing someone’s crush is another. So Yugi challenged Shotaro to a penalty game.
Upon losing, he was subjected to some horrific body horror, as he suddenly believes his entire body of watches and clock parts. Driven mad by this, Shotaro rushes home and destroys his collection of watches. A lesson in what happens when someone treasures objects so much they’re willing to harm others for it.
7 FOOD POISONING
The anime would have most of us believe that Mokuba was completely blameless when it came to Kaiba’s dealings with Yugi and the others. But Mokuba was in on all of Kaiba’s plans, and early on used to cause the protagonists nearly as many issues. During one particular meeting, he challenged Yugi and Joey to a rigged game of Russian Roulette Dinner, where a table with different food items spun around, and whichever meal stopped in front of them they had to consume...but remained unaware if it was poisoned or not.
After Yami figured out the trick, he forced Mokuba to consume a poisoned hamburger, and Mokuba only survived because his assistants had the cure ready.
6 SET ON FIRE
In the fourth chapter of the manga, a prisoner escapes from the Domino City Jail, killing a guard and stealing a gun. He finds his way into Tea’s part-time job at Burger World, and holds her hostage while demanding Yugi get him cigarettes and vodka, because he was too stupid to try to actually escape the city.
Along those lines, Yami Yugi easily outsmarts the prisoner, leaving him to drop a lit cigarette into his glass of vodka, resulting in him being set on fire. And because it’s a penalty game, this random explosion hurts only the prisoner, rather than Yugi or Tea.
5 BANDIT KEITH SHOOTING HIMSELF
Pegasus didn’t often get into the penalty game business, but the times he did were pretty clever. Close to the end of the Duelist Kingdom arc, Joey faces off against Bandit Keith, the American Champion. Despite cheating multiple times, Keith still loses to Joey. But Pegasus points out his cheating and claims he’s been disqualified.
This infuriates Keith and he tries to kill Pegasus with a gun he’s been hiding. But Pegasus turns Keith’s own hand into a gun, then forces him to blow his own brains out.
4 MONEY ILLUSIONS
In the very first chapter of the manga, Yugi deals with the bully Tetsu Ushio. He worked as a member of the class disciplinary committee, but he constantly abused his powers. He extorted people, tricking them into taking him on as a “bodyguard” and forcing them to pay for his services.
Yugi challenges him to a penalty game, and the result is him having his greed turned up to the max. He begins to see leaves and litter as money, which is probably better than the anime where he thought he was being eaten by monsters.
3 DIVINE RETRIBUTION
Shadi wasn’t as much for card games as some of his peers. He kept it old-school, sticking to penalty games for people who broke the rules. Upon noticing that Yugi solved the Millenium Puzzle, a curator named Kanekura tried to steal the puzzle from him. For this, Shadi weighed his soul on the Millenium Scales.
After asking Kanekura multiple questions to see what manner of man he was, his soul was judged evil, leaving a spirit known as Ammit to appear in Kanekura’s “soul room” and eat him alive. Though this was merely an illusion, Kanekura still died that night of “natural causes”.
2 FACE PUZZLE
Ms. Chono of Domino High School’s teachers became known as The Wicked Witch of Expel, for her history of expelling fifteen students in a mere six months. She had an awful habit of taking her frustrations out on her students, and one such incident leads to her trying to embarrass some of them for sending a girl a love jigsaw puzzle.
Aiming to put it together to see who sent it, Yami Yugi causes her completion of the puzzle to result in her own make-up turning into puzzle pieces as well, resulting in the entire class seeing her true face. You’d think instead of doing all of this someone would’ve just reported such a power-mad teacher to the principal.
1 MURDERED BY DUEL MONSTERS
Kaiba wasn’t exactly a decent person in the early parts of the manga. It was understandable, as he and Mokuba grew up orphans before being adopted by a man who turned Kaiba into a ruthless businessman. But after Kaiba steals Yugi’s grandfather’s Blue-Eyes White Dragon, it results in him being challenged to a game.
When Blue-Eyes refuses to attack for Kaiba (because it belongs to Solomon), Yugi wins the duel and sentences Kaiba to a world where he’ll be repeatedly killed by Duel Monsters until he understands the heart of the cards. No wonder Kaiba never becomes Yugi’s friend.