And the marquee card for Magician's Force is the other half of the Dark Magician duo, the later-introduced Dark Magician Girl (Black Magician Girl in Japan), which is basically a sexy anime girl version of the Dark Magician. And while she's admittedly kind of a standard for anime girls, it's pretty unfortunate to note that the male Dark Magician's basically dressed in this weird robe-armour material across basically his entire body, whereas Dark Magician Girl shows off a lot of skin. Judging by the sheer popularity of Dark Magician Girl compared to her male counterpart, it's certainly a marketing strategy that works! Dark Magician Girl's a character that's been censored a whole lot of times with a lot of her alternate artwork. Not a whole ton to say. She has a lot of appearances used by Yugi in the anime and manga.
And on the flip-side, we get Ojama Green, a set of the Ojama monsters. We're going to see the other two members of the Ojama trio, a group of monsters prominent in the Yu-Gi-Oh: GX series, which are these creatures that play off of some gross-out humour. They take their name from the phrase "ojamashimasu", a phrase meaning "sorry for the intrusion", used as a greeting when you 'intrude' and enters someone's personal room or house. And these Ojama dudes' gameplay basically hinges on them 'intruding' onto your opponent's side of the board and fucking up their gameplay. You wouldn't be able to tell by just looking at the actual monster cards, though, who just look goofy, silly and pretty gross. Look at Ojama green here, with his sideways eyeball, his massive, gross mouth, his slimy tongue, his bizarrely muscular arms and legs... and worst of all, his weird little red briefs. I'm not sure how I feel about the Ojama Bros, honestly, finding them both disgusting but goofily silly at the same time. This is Ojama Green, anyway -- his two brothers Black and Yellow's going to play on different gross-out themes.
X-Head Cannon is one of three cards that sort of became used a lot by Kaiba in the later storylines in the anime and manga, the X/Y/Z robots. Which obviously combine together in various different forms, which also is the basis of the "Union" type monster introduced in these expansions. X-Head Cannon is the 'head' of the eventual combined form, but even individually he's still a pretty neat looking floating robot, just half a body attached to a sphere, with massive punchy metal arms and two gigantic tank cannons. Pretty neat!
And his two buddies, the Y-Dragon Head and Z-Metal Tank, are also obviously not quite complete robots. Y-Dragon Head is a robot dragon and perhaps the only one out of the three component forms that doesn't look out of place on its own, while Z-Metal Tank, while a pretty neat looking spider-robot with wheels and a squinty eye, does have that "yeah, this is meant to do more" feel that X-Head Cannon has.
Also, as the massive walls of text on both these cards show, they're Union monsters, which means that even without Polymerization or fusing into their final form, you can basically equip one of their other two buddies, treating it as an equip spell, in order to buff the card. For X-Head Cannon, Y-Dragon Head and Z-Metal Tank, this means that any two combinations of them can attach to each other to buff each other up, which is pretty neat, but not quite as cool as...
FUSION HA! You can just special summon these particular fusion monsters from the extra deck by banishing the component parts, which, again, is a way to cheat out a stronger form without using the Polymerization card. These smaller fusions are kinda neat, even if they kinda look pretty simple -- both XY Dragon Cannon and XZ Tank Cannon basically has X-Head Cannon's sphere part latch on to either the dragon or the spider-tank, making it look like some sort of funky knight riding on a steed... if knights and steeds are fused at the waist, and if both knight and steed are robots, and the knight has two massive fuck-off Gundam cannons on his shoulders.
The anime and manga aren't quite as organized or convoluted as the Union or alternate Fusion thing, Kaiba basically just has them fuse and de-fuse and treats it as monsters whenever he wants. Which I suppose is the "Union" effect? Eh.
YZ-Tank Dragon is a lot more interesting, with the resulting silhouette looking a bit more different. The Z-Metal Tank's spider-legs have sort of folded into what looks like weird race-track wheels, while the dragon's wings have also retracted inwards, making the whole thing look like some sort of fancy tank that could probably run around on a Hot Wheels track. This is a bit more of an interesting combiner robot result than the other two.
And, of course, when you combine all three together you get the XYZ-Dragon Cannon, which looks cool and has cool artwork. Kind of a shame that the red dragon's wings doesn't end up somewhere in the design, which I was half-expecting it would. Instead, it's just the X-Head Cannon attached to the YZ-Tank Dragon. Overall, it's ultimately a pretty neat gimmick for a set of fun monsters -- and I wonder if these actually had toy tie-ins in some way or form. They look like they would've.
We haven't had a monster plant in quite a while, have we? Vampire Orchis (a.k.a. Blood Orchis in Japanese) is a pretty interesting creature. It's only an orchid in name, though -- what it really is is a tree stump with a monster face with a whole load of fanged flowers with little vampire fangs. "Vampire plants" is such a weird combination of two different sorts of traditional fantasy monsters, y'know?
Vampire Orchis is also connected specifically to Des Dendle (a corruption of "Death Dandle", presumably short for Death Dandelion?), which is an Union monster. The artwork's not the clearest, but take a closer look. The Des Dendle is a bunch of green mold and purple vine-flowers growing on the roots of the Vampire Orchis, and you can see the Orchis's trunk and face in the background. Des Dendle is an Union monster that needs to specifically be equipped to the Vampire Orchis, and when it acts as an equip card, it basically allows the Orchis to summon a "Wicked Plant" token monster any time it kills someone. So it basically gives your vampire plant a zombie-making ability! Pretty cool, actually, and it's kind of a shame that Union monsters would turn out to be way too gimmicky to actually be a staying power in Yu-Gi-Oh's meta.
Some union monsters can alternate on which of them is the one that's the equipment, as seen with Burning Beast and Freezing Beast here. And... and I'm not 100% sure how it works with these two in particular, but okay, then, apparently the huge lava-rock stonefish is able to fuse with that one-eyed mask-faced cat ice monster. Freezing Beast is pretty damn cool, even if this sort of monster design is admittedly a little common among fantasy creatures, but I do really like how it turns out! I own Burning Beast card as a kid and until I saw this card while doing this review, I've always thought that the Freezing Beast would look basically like Burning Beast, but made out of ice. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Freezing Beast looks like something out of Digimon, instead of the weird lava rock stonefish thing we've got going on with the Burning Beast!
I'm... I'm not sure what's going on here? Giant Orc is clearly a big, angry muscular fat orc man holding a big bone. Pretty simple. But its specific Union card, Second Goblin, has this purple-skinned eyepatched Goblin be... angry at it? Did the Second Goblin beat it up from behind? Or is it a cheerleading squad trying to get it to stand up? I'm not sure what's going on, but apparently the Second Goblin is able to equip itself to the Giant Orc and get it to switch battle positions? I'm... I'm not particularly sure how that works, actually. I just find the artwork to be pretty fun.
It's not the last we see of Second Goblin, because this is one of the first times we get a "D.D." card, which is probably something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you don't do a little look-up. D.D. is short for "Different Dimension", which is the direct translation for ijigen, a series of cards in the game... but shortening it to D.D. is honestly kind of bizarre and until doing these reviews, I wasn't even sure what D.D. stands for. D.D. cards tend to have some sort of 'banish' style effects that sort of show the monsters attacking or sending other creatures to a different dimension, like D.D. Crazy Beast here, who apparently bites poor Second Goblin by his waistband and has dragged him off to another dimension, since it "removes from play" any monster it destroys. Poor Second Goblin!
Except, as the D.D. Trainer shows, apparently the Second Goblin has ended up becoming the D.D. Crazy Beast's rider, as detailed by the flavour text on his card. Hell, he even has the same level and attack stat as his original self! Look at that poor Crazy Beast, crying as the Second Goblin forces him to run around. The Crazy Beast's design is pretty weird, and honestly more than a little phallic, but I do like just how wacky his multiple eyes look, how that bizarre metal-like musculature is, and just how gross that set of teeth looks. It ended well for the Second Goblin!
Speaking of D.D... meet the D.D. Warrior Lady, another nameless human that we're going to see in a couple of cards and sort of tells of her escapades through this Different Dimension, one of the various characters in the D.D. mtea-storyline. She's... she's all right, a leather-clad warrior with a lightsaber and a cyborg arm. Presumably that lightsaber is how she banishes enemies into the different dimension.
Thankfully, not all the monsters that have a meta-plot are boring humans, and meet Gagagigo! He's a muscular Lizardman who's doing a JoJo pose, and right now he's just a generic neutral monster and frankly even for lizard-man standards he's still kinda boring, but he's going to kind of be the star of a pretty long storyline told over multiple years of card artworks. Hi, Gagagigo, your name is gloriously doofy and I love that.
We have a bunch of wacky robots! Helping Robo for Combat just looks so fun and clunky, and I really love the general weird cylindrical-robot-with-multiple-death-tools-strapped-onto-it. Except despite the insistence that this is "for combat", the Helping Robo's arms aren't like cannons or bazookas, but rather a vacuum cleaner and a pan. That's hilarious! I'm not sure if there's some kind of in-joke I'm missing, or if they just find it funny to just slap appliances on a death-robot.
Roulette Barrel is a card I own, and for a while I wondered what was so "roulette" about it. It's clearly meant to evocate Russian roulette, where the die you roll sort of shows what effect the Barrel's going to do... but it's this weird, chunky space-cannon that. Turns out that Roulette Barrel got an all-new art because the Japanese version is essentially a tank cannon mounted on top of one of those game show spinning wheels. And I kinda wished we kept the spinning wheel, y'know? Or made it more prominent?
Paladin of White Dragon is a ritual monster I have, and as these sets continue to go on, basically ritual monsters really needed to come with effects to really justify the annoying lengths you have to go to in order to get them on the battlefield. Paladin of White Dragon is apparently a white dragon-themed knight riding on a younger version of the iconic Blue-Eyes White Dragon... albeit one with a weirdly smooth, Alien-esque head as opposed to the many-spiked one we're more familiar with. The Paladin of White Dragon is a card you can tribute to tutor and summon the bigger Blue-Eyes White Dragon from your deck or hand, which is... kinda oddly complex.
Dark Master: Zorc is an interesting card. Zorc Necrophades is the big bad in the manga and the anime, a big, dark ancient spirit who's corrupted the mystical Millennium items that were the source of the supernatural happenings that happened throughout the events of the Yu-Gi-Oh show, and ends up being such a mighty creature that he was able to defeat the real-life counterparts of Exodia and the three Egyptian Gods. Also, he's got a massive dragon for a dick. Which obviously got censored for the anime and some releases of the manga, but that's what most people remember him by. Now this card is called Zorc, but he's got a more humanoid proportion and, most importantly, no dragon dong. Instead, this card and its effect is a reference to a pre-card-game story in the original manga, where our heroes are basically transformed by the Millennium items into a cross between D&D and a board game, and the main villain is also a demon king called Zorc. Which, I suppose, is foreshadowing when the character that's the villain of that arc also ends up being possessed by the real Zorc. Personally, I prefer the design that has the dragon dong.
A lot of Fairy-types show up here, and all of them stem from the decks of one of the characters in the manga, Isis (or Ishizu, as her name is translated in English versions), and it is really interesting what this universe considers to be "fairies"... or, more accurately, "angels", if we're going by the Japanese translation. Take Agido here, who is just a sphere with the Eye of Wdjat engraved onto it, metallic robot-like wings, and jointed robot arms that end in metallic crab hands. Why is this bizarre robotic-looking egg an angel? And, more importantly, why would it not be? More interestingly is that none of Ishizu's fairy/angel monsters are actually inspired by any sort of real-life deity or whatever, making them particularly interesting showcases of wacky angels.
Mudora, meanwhile, is a bit more mundane, perhaps, a musclebound man in Egyptian garb with a scimitar whose head is covered with a golden, scowling mask... but, again, he's a fairy-angel being and not just a boring old gravekeeper or even mummy. I do really like just how different this dude looks to the more obvious Egyptian guardian tropes like Anubis-headed men or something along those lines.
I'm not even sure what's going on with Keldo. Is that a massive robotic horned owl head formed out of its "hands"? It that green-and-gold bunch its true head? Which is his true head, the red robotic eyeball set onto green stuff, or the golden mask-like face? Why is that whole "head" bit detached and hovering? Is it a robot? A mechanical angel? What is a Keldo? It's a bunch of weird robotic parts that sort of hover together in a humanoid shape, and even looking at it in the anime, we really don't know much more about it beyond "it's a robot angel, I guess".
Zolga, meanwhile, keeps the running theme of metallic robot-angel things, except that this one's a bit more mundane, covering almost her entire body with a cape. Presuming, of course, there's anything underneath it. Her head and shoulders are basically a set of armour and she honestly could work as a Super Sentai villain costume or something. A wee bit more boring than her counterparts, but, again, seen in quick succession as part of Ishizu's deck in the anime, it's all pretty interesting and such a jarring break from the more traditional fantasy or Egyptian mythology themed cards that we see previously and afterwards.
Holy shit, Kelbek is straight-up just a robot, isn't it? A weird robot, too, it's got a weird mask-like head with two robotic arms and a Yu-Gi-Oh wdjat eye attached to a golden orb, with a bunch of... jet thrusters or something jutting out of the same blue orb. Such a bizarre monster, and honestly, I really, really wished they had gotten some sort of flavour text here and there. Sure, they're all effect monsters and shit, but I really wished they took in the time to give these things some lore in supplementary material or something, y'know? Kelbek's just such a fucking weird design.
Magical Scientist (Mad Scientist in Japan) is a typical crazy scientist creating fleshy abominations in the name of SCIENCE!, and in this case, he creates Frankensteined monster for you, represented by summoning lesser Fusion monsters. He's... he's kind of a stereotypical bald dude in a lab-coat with fancy glasses. He's going to kind of be a recurring character in some of the cards in the future. He's also considered a 'spellcaster', which is thanks to a pun that's lost in translation. Mado could be read as either "magical" in Japanese, or the Japanese reading of the English word "mad". This effect is apparently strong enough that Magical Scientist's been banned in official play.
Let's go through a bunch of random things I found to be kinda cool. Magical Marionette is a prety creepy being. Sinister puppetry has always been a trope that creeps me out, and the gangly, long-armed puppet holding two big fuck-off daggers is sure kinda creepy... but the fact that the actual marionette seems to be something more dangerous than a regular human also adds to the creepiness.
Magical Plant Mandragola (a misspelling of Mandragora) is... an interesting creature? Mandragoras or mandrakes have always had a fun bit of wacky superstition tied to it and its human-like roots as well as its hallucinogenic properties, but instead of going for the obvious "humanoid roots become monsters" route, we instead have the flowers sprout some horrifying Junji Ito sideways mouth and dead glowing green eyes. While perhaps just making it a boring angry flower-with-a-face monster might not be as cool as the Vampiric Orchis, it is a very creepy face.
Speaking of the Different Dimension, we get Different Dimension Dragon (Different Dimension Dragon: Twilight Zone Dragon in Japanese), who isn't formatted as "D.D. Dragon". Oh, Yu-Gi-Oh, you are never consistent, are you? I do like DDD here, though. It's a pretty neat dragon that still has a lot of features that identify it as a traditional dragon. Reptilian head, horns, wings, a serpentine body... but at the same time, the weird layout of its four wings that's not quite insect-like, and the fact that it doesn't have legs, really end up selling that this creature doesn't really fit into the same category of most non-DD dragons. Not by much, mind you, because dragons in Yu-Gi-Oh tend to get really fucking weird, but I do like the almost ephemeral dragon
Exodia Necross! It's good old "get five parts of his body and you win the game" Exodia, but he's all blackened and has glowing red eyes, and presumably is a zombified version of regular old Exodia. And in the anime, Exodia Necross has a whole lot of different effect depending on which card from the regular set of five Exodia cards are in the graveyard... but the actual card is a lot more mundane and kind of a bit less flavourful. It also doesn't let you win the game through a difficult-but-awesome-when-you-pull-it-off victory condition, and is instead is just a constantly-growing monster immune to destruction by regular means... but gets destroyed if your enemy has a way to fuck with your graveyard. I'm also not quite sure why it isn't considered a "zombie" type card considering it's like a zombie Exodia.
I have Koitsu as a card and I always wondered what kind of crazy Fairy takes the form of a slightly deformed naked blue man doing calisthenics on top of a paper airplane, showing off his naked bum for all to see. Also he's a union card with a stupidly long effect, and also a super-high-level card with a tiny attack and defense statline.
And I kinda wondered what the fuck Koitsu and his buddy Aitsu even are. Apparently, they are joke characters in Sexy Parodius, a parody of the Gradius games, and Koitsu and Aitsu are characters from that game... but in that game, they are stick figures on paper airplanes, not weird naked featureless men like Koitsu and Aitsu (their names literally mean "this guy" and "that other guy"). It's really telling that these don't even look like parody monsters from another franchise but feel like something that Yu-Gi-Oh would churn out themselves, yeah?
Maju Garzett's original Japanese name was Gosei Maju Gazetto, which translates to "Synthetic Demon-Beast Garzett". And the lack of that first adjective really ends up making Maju Garzett feel a lot less interesting, y'know? The fact that we know that Maju Garzett is actually an artificial demon-man makes his card art with the mismatched red skully demon parts and that weird... beastly hair thing on the right side of his body feel a bit more horrific. His anime counterpart, while less grisly, really shows off the Frankensteined design a lot better. Was this what the Magical Scientist was creating? An artificial demon? The fact that its effect depends on the monsters you tribute also feeds into the fantasy that Maju Garzett is born out of haphazardly combining a bunch of creatures together.
Eventually, though, Synthetic Maju Garzett evolves into Great Maju Garzett, where he's just a great demon-beast without any of that synthetic moniker, fully being symmetrical and being a massive, muscular demon-man with that red skeletal-like material ending up as his armour. It's a happy ending for Garzett since he's a full-on demon beast now, and now he gains twice the amount of attack of a monster you tribute-summoned to become him. A pretty interesting set of monsters, and in the future, Maju Garzett will keep becoming greater and greater.
We've got a couple of other archetypes spotlighted in both "Magician's Force" and "Dark Crisis", but I really don't have a lot to say about them except for the XYZ dudes and the Archfiends. Which are all "demons" in the original Japanese, like Summoned Skull's original name, but this particular set of "demons" gets translated into Archfiends because they're part of a specific set of chess-themed enemies. All the chess Archfiends have mechanics that basically cuts off their controller's life points and has effects that ties into rolling a die... even though dice-rolling has nothing to do with chess.
Vilepawn Archfiend (Hell Pawn Daemon in Japanese) represents the pawn piece, and I do like that while he's certainly weaker-looking than the other Archfiends, he still looks like he could fuck a regular dude up. The exposed pectoral muscles overlaid upon a mostly bony body does fit into the aesthetic that Summoned Skull has, and I really do like the fact that this dude's lower arms seems to be adapted to be its own sword and shield. They will literally jump in the way of any attacks for any of the greater archfiends, like a good sacrificial pawn.
Shadowknight Archfiend (Shadow Knight Demon) actually looks like a far stronger version of the Vilepawn, which I appreciate. Sure, the skull face and the glorious anime hair is far more imprsesive, and both the knightly set of golden armour and the demon wings does make Shadowknight more impressive, but the fact that he still has the same "one arm is a sword and the other arm is a huge triple-clawed gauntlet" does kind of make a sense of continuity, building into the fantasy that this Shadowknight's likely a promoted Vilepawn.
Darkbishop Archfiend (which is Water-type for... some reason) is a bit more boring than his brethren. He's just a generic skull demon dude with robes, a skull staff and the bishop hat. And that's all well and good, but he does kind of end up the most boring out of the chess Archfiends.
Desrook Archfiend (Death Rook Daemon -- as usual, the translation team sneaks in 'death' as 'des') is Light-type, which is even weirder, but probably has the most bizarre design out of the chess archfiends. Instead of a humanoid figure, the Death-Rook Archfiend instead ends up being this massive, somewhat pillar-like demon with an angry skull face, with a bunch of tentacles running down his body and making him look kind of like an octopus. Considering that skull-head, I imagine Death Rook here is almost entirely made out of bone? That crown on top of his head also does a neat job at mimicking the ramparts on a traditional Rook piece. Pretty neat design overall, and if it's not weird enough, it's a Light-type monster for some reason. What?
Shame that they kind of fail their research in assigning levels and atk/def points to these cards, though. Bishops and knights should be equal in chess, while rooks stand above them. Instead, the Desrook is equal to Darkbishop, while the Shadowknight is above them.
And finally we end with the queen and the king. Or rather, the Infernalqueen Archfiend (Inferno Queen Daemon) and the Terrorking Archfiend (the absolutely metal sounding Genocide King Daemon). Which admittedly are kind of what you expect, basically having the same sort of body design as the Shadowknight and the Darkbishop -- skeletal armour body, muscles showing up here and there, solid bat-wings. The Infernalqueen does have some fancy purple robes and the Terrorking has a neat big-ass sword plus a cape he somehow fits between his wings and body. Terrorking's got a pretty neat little neck-brace of jagged bony thorns and a neat little hat, but if not for other cards (like Archfiend's Roar) showing him from other angles -- and also showing that he actually towers significantly over his subjects -- he'd be kinda boring.
And honestly, these two would be boring and relegated to the post-break monsters if not for the chess theme.
Speaking of which... click the break for the rest of the cards in this expansion, including the Amazoness, the Guardians, the Dark Scorpions and the Magicians that have a bunch of tribal mechanics going on in this set.
We'll go through the archetypes first, and here we have the Amazoness, playing on the themes of mighty jungle-dwelling barbarian ladies. Amazoness Fighter has awesomely massive muscles while also having a pretty tiny supermodel waist, and I'm not sure what sort of training regiment she does to get that body figure. Pretty cool, and actually does feel like an "Amazoness". Meanwhile, that's the exact opposite of what Amazoness Paladin is, who is just a generic anime lady in fantasy clothing. She kinda looks like Mai Valentine, doesn't she? Or is that just same-face syndrome?
Amazoness Swords Woman's pose looks like that's not going to be good for her spine. I'm actually surprised her cleavage went on uncensored considering how much cleavages get photoshopped in the international release, but I guess they just didn't realize what's going on with Swords Woman's contorted spine? Amazoness Blowpiper fits with the "warrior ladies living in the jungle" theme for sure, even if she's kinda boring.
And we have Amazoness Tiger, which is just an angry tiger they keep around when muscles, swords and blow-darts aren't enough to keep away Hercules. Amazoness Spellcaster, for whatever reason, is a spell card instead of a monster card in her own right. She's got an interesting headgear, even if the first time I saw that face I thought it was an angry Yugi Mutou.
Likewise, I really don't have much to say about any of the Dark Scorpions. We get to see them all represented in a single card in the previous expansion, Pharaonic Guardian, and they're the bad guys led by Don Zaloog that are trying to rob the massive army of Gravekeepers. They're very generic, y'know? You've got Cliff the Trap Remover, who's got a pair of anime geek glasses for some reason. He gets killed, presumably, in the art for Trap Dustshoot, so clearly he's a shit trap remover. Gorg the Strong is your archetypal strongman. He is a strongkt.
Meanae the Thorn is the token girl, and also she has a whip. She exists! Chick the Yellow (Chick the Escapist in the original Japanese) is clearly a lot more inexperienced, and is featured in the very excellent artwork for Timidity, which I remember vividly.
Ultimately, though, the Dark Scorpions are pretty dang boring! I understand that the Dark Scorpions are actual characters in the GX anime, and that might make me have some sort of attachment to them if I had watched the GX anime, but man, even then I would still call them "generic anime crowd filler designs" regardless.
The Guardians are an archetype used by a filler villain in the anime. And the gimmick is that each "Guardian" card has their own specific equip spell card, and most of them can only be summoned if you have equipped their respective equip spell to another monster you control. Okay? Guardian Elma is just a dancer lady with a sword, and Guardian Tryce is just some dude with twin blades that apparently generate lightning.
An archetype among the Spellcaster monsters is the "Magician" (majutsushi), which does not include Dark Magician or Dark Magician Girl, because their Japanese card names had "magician" be rendered as majishan, as in the English word. To complicate matters, some cards like Time Wizard actually falls under the majutsushi category. Man, as much as I sometimes mock them, I don't envy the Yu-Gi-Oh translation team.
Anyway, these two dudes in robes and weird shoulder-cape things that look like armour are sort of counterparts to each other. Skilled White Magician and Skilled Dark Magician are essentially delayed tutor cards that will respectively summon Buster Blader or Dark Magician, two cards that Yugi uses a lot.
...and the two of them tie in with Dark Paladin (Super Magical Swordsman: Black Paladin in Japanese), the fused form between Buster Blader and Dark Magician. Which honestly, doesn't feel super impressive? Appearance wise it's just the Dark Magician holding a wicked glaive instead of a staff, with a few extra greebles and armour pieces on his set of robes. It's a pretty neat powered-up form for Dark Magician, but I really wished that they had done something more, y'know? Other Dark Magician lookalikes and variants tended to have something different to them. Like this next one!
Dark Flare Knight is another Dark Magician fusion, this time between Dark Magician and Jonuichi's Flame Swordsman. ANd this one actually looks like a brand-new monster, with a set of armour that doesn't really look like Dark Magician until you realize that it's a fusion of it... and then you sort of can see which part of the armour sort of fits into the Dark Magician's aethetic. Not sure why its chest is so prominent, it's like the car kibble in a Transformer. Pretty neat fire-sword-magician dude!
Like Breaker, the Magical Warrior! Who has a set of weird armoured-wizard look that Dark Magician sports. And while not directly connected to Dark Magician in any way, Breaker ends up looking starkingly different thanks to both his sword-and-shield combo and his helmet, while also looking like they probably share the same school of magic... or at least the same tailor. (Doroooo! MONSTAAA KAAADO)
Chaos Command Magician is another one that shops at the same tailor as Dark Magician, Dark Paladin, Dark Magician of Chaos, Breaker the Magical Warrior and Magic Hierophant of Black. Did this one ever appear in a show? He's got a neat little variant of the Dark Magician hat that looks like a stereotypical witch's hat, and generally looks like a pretty cool dude.
Apprentice Magician is basically a Dark Magician cosplayer. He's a young dude, and he gets to summon fellow young spellcasters! Old Vindictive Magician is an old magician dude, all hunchbacked with a creepy-ass face. Pretty jarring to go from all the otherwise pretty handsome or cool looking magicians to have this deranged-looking man with his gross hands stretched out to destroy any single monster your enemy controls.
Guardian Grarl is at least a bit more interesting, being a dinosaur-man identified straight-up as a dinosaur as opposed to a beast-warrior. The distinction really blurs between beast-man and any of the other animal types, yeah? Guardian Baou, meanwhile, is a demon-man, but not an especially exciting one considering the sheer amount of demon-men in Yu-Gi-Oh. Is this a reference to Hirohiko Araki's Baoh manga? It kinda could be, I feel. Both of them are a wee bit more interesting than Elma and Tryce, but are kind of just there, which is what I feel about the Guardians as a whole.
Guardian Kay'eset is a mermaid! Her mermaid tail is pretty interesting, to be fair, with a bunch of extra fins jutting out of her body at intervals from her human hip all the way to her tail. She is neat. Guardian Ceal, meanwhile, is a dragon-man pyro monster that's holding a bow that looks way too tiny for his body. I do like that the artwork for all these Guardians have the art highlight the weapon they're holding, particularly in the foil version of their cards, but man, the actual creature monsters end up looking very, very... generic, y'know? Like, these are like the options you would see in an RPG character creation selector before you actually modify them. Like, Kay'est is the most basic mermaid lady sorcerer, Ceal's the most basic dragon-man warrior, Bao is the most basic demon-man knight...
Arsenal Summoner here is a support for the Guardian archetype, and look at how ridiculous that little clarification is! Add a "Guardian" monster from your deck to your hand, except for this half-dozen cards we printed in previous sets that has "Guardian" in its name without realizing that "Guardian" is going to be used as an English word in a Japanese game that's going to be an entire archetype of its own.
Metallizing Parasite: Lunatite is... is this meant to be a weird cross between a robot, a tapeworm and a fish of some sort? It's a pretty neat looking monster, and apparently it is a union monster that can be equipped to any monster you own, and not just a specific named creature. I guess that's because it's a parasite? Pretty cool concept, if nothing else.
Skull Archfiend of Lightning (Thunderclap Demon King: Skull Daemon in Japanese) is basically a "retrained" monster, one that we'll see show up a couple of times. See, Summoned Skull is like one of the more iconic cards from the show and manga, but the actual card in the game is kind of a shitty normal monster with no effect. So here, have the exact same card with the same stats, but now it has an effect! Skull Archfiend of Lightning basically fits into the same archetype as the chess archfiends, but without fitting with the chess piece bit. He's neat.
We've also got Archfiend Soldier, who's got purple muscle-flesh as opposed to the more gory-looking flesh that the other Archfiends have. He's also got a pretty cool metal helmet and cape thing going on. Not much to say here, though, other than that.
Less of an archetype but more of a connected storyline, we start off with the level one Oppressed People, which are oppressed people that believe they'll have freedom someday. They get whipped and whatnot by an evil king's forces! We've had cards that show people being oppressed before like Royal Oppression, but here, there's the people straight-up being oppressed. And then we have the level two People Running About, which is them being chased around in the streets! I do like how the Oppressed People had shit attack but higher defense, and eventually as their frustration grows, their attack increases and their defense decreases.
And also these dudes are "Aqua" and "Pyro" types for some goddamn reason, and I'm not sure why.
And finally we have United Resistance as the people (now level 3, with a high attack and low defense) finally start meeting in random rooms and houses, planning to take down the government and maybe shout Vive la revolution while doing so... eventually leading to Huge Revolution, which can be activated if you have all three revolution normal monster cards, which will blow up your opponent's board. Literally!
Oh, hey, it's the fucking Upstart Goblin, and apparently his real name is Goblin of Greed! He's got the Pot of Greed and the Jar of Greed and he's very, very happy to be greedy and he's just sticking his tongue out! The spell card Jar Robber shows how the Goblin acquires the Pot of Greed by theft, and I absolutely love the surprised "wait, what?" expression on the Pot of Greed.
Now, the question, is that whether the goblin became rich after he got the Pot of Greed, or if he ended up becoming poor, and then getting the Pot of Greed to recoup his wealth? Or was he already greedy, which is why he started stealing the magical pots, or did the pots influence his greed? We'll never know.
And now let's go through the other union monsters. Decayed Commander is a pretty cool looking, if generic, skeleton samurai warrior. Its union buddy is a Zombie Tiger, a pretty cool looking giant mummified sabretooth tiger with half its face rotting off. In this case, the 'union' is a pretty obvious rider/mount relationship. Pretty cool duo, honestly, I just feel like we've see a bunch of these sort of rider/mount things in fusion.
Pitch-Dark Dragon and Kiryu are just two dragons that function as union monsters to Dark Blade, who's this knight dude that I guess just jumps back and forth between different dragon mounts. Pretty neat dragons for both of these, even if I really don't have a whole ton to say here. Again, it's always neat to see that even among classic European-dragon style dragons, the artwork in Yu-Gi-Oh always tries to make them feel pretty unique.
And this is their boss, Dark Blade, or his Japanese name: "Warrior of the Demon World: Dark Sword", who's a normal-type warrior monster. He's wearing the Metalsilver Armor (which is an equip card in one of these expansions) and his flavour text does note that he goes around controlling dragon. Based on a brief skim of his union card text, presumably he jumps off these dragons like Mario and Yoshi, sacrificing the dragons while he jumps and deals massive direct damage to the enemy.
Union Rider is a robot that's taking control of a poor Pitch-Black Dragon! It's basically something that's going to forcibly rip away a Union monster away from its controller and take control of it, whether it's a XYZ cyborg, a dragon, a zombie tiger... or even a naked man on a paper airplane or a zombie fungus growing on the roots of a vampiric tree. Union Rider's just that persuasive.
And now we go to the other miscellaneous cards, like the Tribe-Infecting Virus, which has a pretty spooky card art of these poor monsters being affected by a virus that bleaches their skin in a pscyhedelic combination of green and purple. It only affects a certain type of monster, which is why the surprised bunny creature in the background is just confused, horrified and traumatized for life, but since it isn't a reptile creature like the monsters in the foreground, it's not, y'know, dead.
Magical Merchant is an insect monster, and I do find it pretty hilarious. Sure, a bug-man with multiple arms and a weird no-face offering trinkets is interesting, but not particularly super-awesome... but the fact that he wears baggy Mickey Mouse pants adds a whole load of charm.
Wait, didn't we already talk about Luster Dragon? I mean, we talked about Luster Dragon #2, right? I'm sure I did. Eh. Either way, Luster Dragon is "Sapphire Dragon", as mentioned before. He's a neat looking rock-gem dragon creature, and I find the weird tattered wings to look kind of interesting, as do the weird chicken-legs that don't look like they could support Luster Dragon's weight. He's neat.
Kaiser Glider kinda looks almost robotic, and honestly kinda looks like it's a toon version of the Winged Dragon of Ra, albeit without the toon monsters' exaggerated eyes. Like, I'm not the only one who sees that, right? He's otherwise pretty neat. Not much to say.
A bunch of machines! Spell Canceller is... I'm not sure what it's meant to be. Some sort of squid-beetle robot with a massive set of panels that draws magic in? It's pretty neat looking. Dimension Jar continues the tradition of weird-ass "Jar" monsters, although this one doesn't have a grotesque mouth, just a cheeky-looking eye on one end. Apparently this dude's made out of foldable metal plates or something.
I own Battle Footballer! He's a robot footballer who runs around flexing those purple robo-muscles and having a creepy glowing eye under that football mask. Oh, Yu-Gi-Oh, you're crazy.
Acrobat Monkey is a robot monkey. It's... it's a robot monkey that has a neat looking visor-eye? He's pretty neat, but also honestly kinda bland. I do like that it's apparently got a video game controller plugged into its own back, and it's holding said controller with its feet. If nothing else, it's got an interesting pose.
Cyber Raider is a muscleman that somehow counts as a machine. I guess that bizarre head is meant to symbolize that this is a cyborg? I'm not sure what's going on with that head, to be honest. I genuinely don't. His costume kinda looks like he could be a background, Z-list superhero from DC comics.
Oh, Reflect Bounder is kinda cool, and maybe that's just because I like robots that aren't just boring humanoid androids. Esper Roba uses this thing, I think? It's a neat little thing, a mirror with robotic angel-wings and teeny-tiny hands attached to it. Like, it's just a floating robot with a mirror for a chest, an a huge weird metal cape going on, yeah? It's neat.
The Ultimate Obedient Fiend doesn't look like it's going to obey anyone. It's a pretty neat looking fiend, actually, with those multiple eyes and that massive jaw on its chest. And despite its name, it only attacks when certain conditions are met. Its name is misleading, and it's actually a very disobedient fiend!
Mefist the Infernal General is a pretty cool looking death knight style fiend, even if it's admittedly one we've seen many times in Yu-Gi-Oh. As you could probably guess, though, this dude's original Japanese name was Mephisto, which gets transformed into "Mefist"... which, in turn, makes it sound like this guy does some real kinky shit in the bedroom.
Berserk Dragon is originally "Berserk Dead Dragon" in the Japanese, and it kinda looks like Red-Eyes Black Dragon? Except, of course, with a skull-head and a bunch of random wiry white hair glued to its back. Honestly, if not for the "Zombie" tribe, the card art doesn't really communicate that this is an undead dragon. Like, I guess those metal armour plates won't rot after death, but still...
Vampire Lord is a generic vampire with a really fancy cape. Between those demonic fingers holding it together and the fact that it's a literal galaxy. He's a neat looking vampire.
Fear from the Dark and Fear from the Dark is essentially the same creature, all hooded in black-red silhouette with only the massive purple hand being visible. It's an interesting way to depict a monster, and I do like the clear progression as Fear becomes even stronger and transforms into Despair, with one gravestone turning into an entire graveyard, and one hand becoming two hands. Pretty neat, even if I don't have too much to say about it.
A pair of spellcasters! We've got
We also have Tsukuyomi, whose name is taken from the Shinto deity of the moon and some variant of "Tsukuyomi" tends to show up in most anime. This one isn't affiliated with either the Spirit monsters or any sort of tribal synergy or whatever, though, just being a standalone lady sorcerer.
Royal Magical Library is a card I own and it is always curious for me to see that the entire library is considered as a spellcaster, and not a field card or something. It's a neat fantasy library, with a bunch of random green orbs for some reason. Apparently, in the anime, the card just summons a purple-robed magician instead, which is a lot less interesting than summoning a giant magical library to fight for you.
Another spellcaster is the ritual monster Legendary Flame Lord. He's there. He manipulates flames. Is that all the spellcasters in these two expansions? Yeah, for a ritual monster, he's kinda boring.
Des Feral Imp (Death Gremlin in Japanese) is the much more powerful cousin of Feral Imp, and, man, it went from goofy into looking super-duper jacked! And has extended its neck for some reason. I guess it's a grizzlier version of the gremlins from the Gremlins movie? Eh.
We've got the Dark Cat with White Tail, which is just a typical cat with weird colouration. People are superstitious, y'all! Neko Mane King is a maneki-neko figurine, one of those beckoning cats that symbolize the welcoming of good luck seen in many Japanese and Chinese shops... except the Neko Mane King has got a bunch of Egyptian-style decorations and hieroglyphs worked in, almost resembling an Ushabti of sorts. I own this card, and I kinda love it. It's kinda wacky looking.
Des Koala! Or, well, DEATH KOALA if we go by the original intent of the card's name. What a ridiculous name to give to a koala monster, and I absolutely love that we never really learn why this particular koala is considered a "Death Koala", since we just see a regular fat koala eating Eucalyptus leaves.
Outstanding Dog Marron is very outstanding. Who's a good girl? Whossagoodgiiirl? Yes you are, Marron, yuss you arreee. She is a good girl. I love that this card exists. She's adorable.
Thousand Needles is a very, very angry hedgehog and it will fuck you up, all the while with that adorable expression on its face. Not as adorable as Marron, though. Marron is outstanding.
Gyaku-Gire Panda is a panda with narrowed eyes and a particularly angry expression. Gyaku-Gire is an expression in Japanese that roughly translates to "reverse anger", and the term means that when you get angry at someone, because they are angry at you first for a legitimate reason. I'm not sure how it translates to this particularly angry panda. Who is it angry towards? Does it have anything to do with bamboo? Is this panda just a dick?
So Great Angus is... is it a reference to angus beef? Somehow I doubt it's the case. This thing is like 90% muscle by mass, and has boar tusks or something. Pretty scary giant ogre-beast monster, but I honestly really don't have much to say here. Pandemonium Watchbear is a scary zombie demon bear with chains, exposed muscle, and what appears to be rotting flesh on its front legs. Pretty spooky monster!
Beast-warriors now, and we have Nin-Ken Dog, which is a dog-man that is also doing Naruto ninja hand seals. We also have Cat's Ear Tribe, which is like a cute series of cat-toddlers dressed up in adorable little toddler's clothes. They're cute!
The expression on Blindly Loyal Goblin is both disturbing and hilarious at the same time. Like, I'm pretty sure that this card might be a reference to a specific art style or something, but I'm way too lazy to look for it.
SONIC DUCK g-g-g-gotta go fast too fast too fast faster faster faster quacking at the speed of sound. It's a fucking duck with super-speed and a scarf! But don't worry, it knows that it should be safe, which is why it wears a bucket for a head. God I love how some Yu-Gi-Oh cards are just so stupid but also so simple.
I'm not sure why Iron Blacksmith Kotetsu is a beast-warrior. He looks pretty human to me. Presumably, it refers to Edo-era blacksmith Nagasone Kotetsu, but even then, that dude's a human, too.
We talked about Sasuke Samurai before, so here's his buddy, Sasuke Samurai #2. Which is essentially the same design. I don't have anything to say, so let's make the obvious joke. NARUTOOOOH! SASKEEEEEH!
Okay, between the full-golden armour, the massive fuck-off scythe, the impractical helmet and the massive shoulder-shield thing, Mirage Knight is actually a pretty neat design for just another knightly warrior dude. He's apparently the minion of Dark Flare Knight (Dark Magician and Flame Swordsman's fusion), and can only be summoned by it. Which means that most of the time, he's just kinda uselessly sitting in your deck and hand, and... I kinda wished the artwork showed off that he's a mirage or an illusion or is connected to either fire or dark magic a bit better, y'know?
Little Winguard is adorable. He's a tiny chibi knight with tiny chibi wings and a tiny chibi sword and two cute beady eyes like the Black Mage from Final Fantasy. He is a cute warrior dude, and I'm pretty sure he's shown up in the anime a couple of times in Jonouichi's deck. Jonouichi has a weird habit of either using the most boring looking warriors like Giltia, Gearfreed and Flame Swordsman, and really weird-looking dudes like Landstar and Little Winguard.
Shinato, King of a Higher Plane is a huge angel dude with metallic golden wings. He may or may not be a reference to Shinatsuhiko, but honestly, Shinato's just kind of just there. Not much to say here. Pretty cool, but nothing much for me to say.
I keep reading Armor Exe's name as "Armor.exe". It's meant to be pronounced "Eguze", which is the name of this enchanted armour. And... it's kind of a generic demon-man design? Which is still pretty cool, but really the most interesting thing about this card is how I mispronounce it in my head.
Storyline time! Morale Boost shows off Warrior Dai Grepher (remember him?) wielding one of the Guardian weapons, the Baou sword in particular.... which you'll remember as being the one associated with the one fiend Guardian.
Which is a bad thing for Dai Grepher to do, because Falling Down shows him mutating into a demonic, ogre form. Hard to tell it's him, honestly, if not for the distinctive Gambit-style headgear. Huge, bulging 90's Marvel comics muscles won't save you from the corruption of a demonic sword, Dai Grepher! And then he turns into a demon that blows away people with Sakuretsu Armor.
These are the Archfiend archetype-specific spells, showing off Pandemonium, the Archfiend field spell card... and apparently, the fact that "Pandemonium" is a pun on the word having "demon" in it ended up actually sneaking through the censors! Checkmate basically plays with the whole chess theme, although the card art is just Terrorking shooting a beam of doomy death at your face.
We've got Frontline Base, which shows off Dark Blade and the Pitch-Black Dragon! And Formation Union, which shows him with Kiryu instead!
Mustering of the Dark Scorpions has the Dark Scorpions do the Ginyu Force pose, which automatically made the Dark Scorpions approximately 40% more memorable just because of this card art alone. TO-KU-SEN-TAI, TO-KU-SEN-TAI.
Raregold Armor and Metalsilver Armor are featured on Paladin of White Dragon and Dark Blade, respectively. Until writing this sentence out, I didn't realize that they're sort of counterparts, being knights that go around riding dragons. Kishido Spirit also features the Paladin of White Dragon.
Also, hey, it's Exodia! You can make a Contract with Exodia!
My Body as a Shield features the Marauding Captain shielding Gagagigo from an attack. The two are buddies, apparently! Staunch Defender shows off Marauding Captain doing even more heroic things, apparently fighting against Despair from the Dark up above. It's not all well and done for Marauding Captain, though, as Battle-Scarred shows that his face got real fucked up when he fights against Terrorking Archfiend. Maybe don't fight the huge, gigantic chess demon skull man without backup, Mr. Marauding Captain?
Gagagigo isn't having a good time either, because Altar for Tribute shows him being held in place by spooky dark forces like something out of an exorcist horror movie, and apparently this takes place in Pandemonium, the home base of the chess Archfiends! Basically, don't fuck with the Archfiends is what we're learning from these trap cards.
A bunch more cards that feature Dark Ruler Ha Des! Demotion has him tell the Dark King of the Abyss where to stick it, and I absolutely find the card art with Abyss' extremely exaggerated, schoolgirl-like expression, to be pretty hilarious. I'm not sure who that dude in A Deal is Dark Ruler is, but apparently that's his day job. And Skill Drain shows that even Ha Des isn't immune to being beaten up, because, well, he got fucked by some unknown assailant in this one.
Also, holy shit, it's good old Wight (or, well, Skull Servant) in Ante's card art! Clearly the most valuable card you could offer up as ante!
A bunch of sci-fi cannons, some looking pretty bizarrely steam-punk-y, some looking absolutely modern.
Martial arts stuff! Continuous Destruction Punch features the Des Kangaroo doing what it does best, which is laying some smackdown to enemy boxers who aren't green skinned kangaroos.
More spells! Different Dimension Gate shows D.D. Warrior Lady jumping into the weird rainbow-coloured hexagonal gate attached to a bizarre machine. I do like it that Yu-Gi-Oh's world is so bizarrely insane that on one hand, you've got all of these wizards, dragons and Egyptian gods, and then you have giant machines, portals, alternate dimensions and wave-diffusion cannons.
A bunch more spell cards. Combination Attack is a weird spinny fusion between Burning Beast and Freezing Beast. Is that how they combine? Non-Spellcasting Area features the return of the Goblin Attack Force, as they are being blown away by Gemini Elf.
Oh hey look it's the sacred weapons of the Guardians, which are just weapons on top of a shrine with thei exact same names as the corresponding Guardian. Kay'est is the one that takes care of hers the most because hers is in a crystal whereas everyone else's is just exposed to the elements.
And more equip spell cards!
Token Thanksgiving is hilarious! The goblins are just throwing around Scapegoat tokens for some reason. That goblin dude in the foreground just looks so tired by so happy to be playing with the Scapegoats at the same time. Which is how I feel every day when I return home from work to play with my small dog friends.
RITUAL SPELLS! There's... nothing much for me to say. It's basically the summoning of the respective ritual monsters.
I love Cost Down and Precious Cards from Beyond. Cost Down jsut shows a bunch of daggers thrown into a fucking monster card to decrease the level by two, while Precious Cards from Beyond are just a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh cards swooping in from the void.
Final Countdown's got a creepy ass face in the clouds while a ring of 20 fire spheres appear around it. The fact that it's basically a risky gambit where you pay 2000 life points to guarantee your winning the game after 20 turns is honestly kind of an interesting mechanic, sort of showing off an impending doomsday for your opponent.
Even more machines! Pineapple Blast is a hilarious name for a card, and Secret Barrel is clearly so censored that it's less of a hidden laser gun and more a stack of crayola crayons glued together.
Physical Double has a hilarious card art, of a hilarious Lizardfolk dude with a massive maw of teeth.
We get a lot of these weird spheres with a reverse Zelda Triforce on it, huh? It's apparently called the Pitch-Black Power Stone.
Adhesion Trap Hole is actually a hilarious one. It catches goblins! Amazoness Archers is a Amazoness tribal trap card.
More trap cards! Dramatic Rescue's original card art is even more dramatic, the dude's trying to save the lady's arm from being sliced off via guillotine!
And here's the goddamned Ojama Trio, it their full glory. We'll be covering Yellow and Black individually, so wait until then.
Really Eternal Rest is when you really need to sleep for a week after working really hard. Or after writing this long, massive article. Y'know what? Next time I'll stick to one expansion per article.
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