He's such an experienced duelist he doesn't even need to look at the cards. In the Yugiverse, drawing cards is a skill that can be practiced, and Atem is the OG Duelist.
#Yugi the destiny series#
GX is the only series to say it out loud, but all Duelists are influencing their draws to some extent. I can't really get behind this, but I see where you're coming from. Rafael is what we call a Villain Sue, but that's a whole 'nother rant.Įhh. Also, Atem used Slifer in the manga too, not just Obelisk. The lack of a destiny draw and any real defeats on Yami Yugi's part makes him look more threatening to Yugi and it's more dramatic when he loses. Again, the duel was one-sided because the point was to show just how much Yugi grew because of Atem. However, that is not to say Atem is a bad duelist, he's quite competent. FFS, he had just got done beating Zorc-Bakura without losing a single life-point. In the manga, the whole point was that Yugi grew thanks to his other self and had become much stronger than him. If the intention was to make it more dramatic, that's pretty questionable, because it already WAS dramatic. The manga didn't have to tear Atem down to make me root for Yugi, because I was already doing that. My point is that the destiny draw makes Atem look incompetent by recontextualizing all his victories and defeats, which makes me dislike him as a protagonist. To me, it's even worse than the travesty that was Season 4. The Destiny Draw is one of my least favorite moments in the entire original series, because it reinforces the idea that Yami Yugi was basically cheating the entire show. Hey, dickhead! Make Kaiba land on a conveniently-placed mattress! Draw a card that destroys all of Rafael's monsters! MANIPULATE FATE!
It essentially both takes away from the legitimacy of his wins and makes his losses look more embarrassing, like he just forgot about his ability for a couple of minutes. I think it was meant to be an "epic" moment, but to me he looks less like an undefeated champion finally being beaten and more like a cheater that finally got what he deserved. In the anime he openly gets so backed into a corner that he has to use his destiny draw, which makes him look utterly pathetic. The reason I hate this moment is because the manga duel had Yami Yugi, who had been mostly undefeated by this point, get utterly strung along and defeated by his other self, even though it appeared he was winning fairly for nearly the entire duel. He just plays BSG at a non-essential time, and that's it. Ishizu mentions that he can actually manipulate fate in his favor, and ever since then, people have been claiming that, all this time, he was never winning legitimately and using this ability to cheat, some even asking, "Why doesn't he just run a luck-based deck?" No such thing happens in the manga. However, there's something else I want to mention, and it could be one of my least favorite moments in an otherwise alright season, and maybe the whole series - the Destiny Draw.ĭuring the final duel, Yami Yugi topdecks Big Shield Gardna when he's on the ropes and plays it in defense mode, surprising everyone. See, when they made the anime, they tried to make the rules in the show more accurate to the real game, but they still kept the janky stuff from the Duelist Kingdom, which caused the first season to be kind of a mess. This wouldn't be a problem if the manga didn't have a noticeably different ruleset which had more RPG elements. The thing about these duels is that they're a mostly straight adaptation from the manga. All of this, of course, is nowhere near possible in the actual game. If you watched the original Yu-Gi-Oh! anime, you probably noticed the janky bullshit Yugi was pulling back in Season 1, like attacking his own spell card, destroying the Castle of Dark Illusions' flotation ring, or countering Kaiba's Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon with Living Arrow and Mammoth Graveyard(Although, in his defense, several other players did some of the same stuff). at least, he doesn't in the original manga.