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Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've somewhat recently made the calamitously terrible life decision to get back into Yu-Gi-Oh! after 20 years and today I stand by it being the most horrifically unbalanced powercrept piece of shit game that planet Earth has ever had the misfortune of being cursed with.
I grew up with this game, collecting the cards, playing with my friends, even going to tournaments. I tried going to a local Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament (which I paid to enter) just last year and before my first opponent was even halfway through their opening turn I wanted to reach across the table and strangle the ****ing life out of them.
It's like paying to stick your head between someone's buttcheeks so they can shit directly into your eyes. It's like what Velma did to Scooby-Doo, just the highest possible disrespect by pretending to be the thing people used to like while being an unrecognizable degenerate heinous atrocity.
APPARENTLY, some people came back to Yu-Gi-Oh! after seeing this movie, which suggests to me that it does something that stirs a bit of nostalgia for what the game used to be. How good is it?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
This movie is awful.
But not for any of the reasons why I hate what the game became.
This movie is a sequel to the original Duel Monsters era anime series which... I barely watched, and it's true to that source material to a substantial fault.
If you cared about the characters, and their voices, and appreciate what is probably the highest production value of any Yu-Gi-Oh! animation to date, then maybe you'll get something out of this, but the anime was never the reason I played the game and it represents the game horribly.
The whole problem with the original series is that there is no adhesion to actual game's rules, which, you'd think, after almost 15 years they'd be able to make a movie that actually portrays an entertaining duel faithfully, but you'd be completely ****ing wrong.
Once upon a time we said, "Wait a second, Kaiba just summoned multiple monsters in a single turn!"
But now in this movie we have a thing called "Dimension Summoning", which is literally the exact same thing, except each character "uses their spirit" to pay the cost to summon the monster, which means there's no difference at all beyond the characters going "RRRRAAAAAAGGGGGHHH" and some completely meaningless Spirit Meter appears and fills up.
Clearly they couldn't waste the precious kid's (I mean adult's) attention in the movie theater by having the characters take multiple turns or anything, which is also casually glossed over. It's not representative of the current game either because they don't talk each other's ear off for 20 contemptible minutes as they explain the Nth effect activation they're resolving while their opponent can only sit there and do **** ALL.
There were so many times throughout the movie where I'm just gesturing at the screen, questioning "What the ****" because there is so much Deus Ex Machina bullshit.
One of the only explainable moments actually requires you to have knowledge about the booster pack tie-in product they released on the same day as this movie. The final boss monster of the big bad, Crimson Nova, has an incomparable 4500 ATK and is practically immune to monster effects. Yugi topdecks Palladium Oracle Mahad which allows him to reveal it on-draw to Special Summon it, then attack for 2500 which doubles to 5000 during the Damage Step if he's fighting a Dark monster.
None of that is explained in the movie, Yugi just summons this random dude we've never seen before, with an undisplayed power level, and casually beats over the big bad, which apparently ends the duel even though he didn't run out of Life Points.
Many more things go entirely unexplained, like why Yugi stalls to complete the Millennium Puzzle, or why Kaiba's duel disk prevents him from being warped into another dimension, or why Shadi is babysitting kids, or why these kids must be gifted the power of the Plana, or why Deva even entertains a ****ing card game with his enemies when he can literally dissolve them with his mind.
This power is described as being able to bring about a world free of fear and evil, and yet it has the fatal flaw that if the user isn't a perfectly good person it'll create a world of fear and evil instead. That's seems like a fantastic power to just hand to a group of impressionable kids.
Overall this movie is super cringe, they do the whole Power of Friendship thing, there's regular flashbacks to Deva's backstory which I can't be asked to give a shit about, the "big tournament" they hype up is literally just 2 duels, and there's a very noticeable stock sound effect they use for the duel disks that sounds exactly like a Halo Banshee when it accelerates,.
The fresh animations and occasional goofy line are not worth the price of admission, whatever you're paying. Because after all, Obelisk is not a monster, Obelisk is a god.
Final Verdict: [Bad]
Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions
Sci-Fi Fantasy / English / 2016
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've somewhat recently made the calamitously terrible life decision to get back into Yu-Gi-Oh! after 20 years and today I stand by it being the most horrifically unbalanced powercrept piece of shit game that planet Earth has ever had the misfortune of being cursed with.
I grew up with this game, collecting the cards, playing with my friends, even going to tournaments. I tried going to a local Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament (which I paid to enter) just last year and before my first opponent was even halfway through their opening turn I wanted to reach across the table and strangle the ****ing life out of them.
It's like paying to stick your head between someone's buttcheeks so they can shit directly into your eyes. It's like what Velma did to Scooby-Doo, just the highest possible disrespect by pretending to be the thing people used to like while being an unrecognizable degenerate heinous atrocity.
APPARENTLY, some people came back to Yu-Gi-Oh! after seeing this movie, which suggests to me that it does something that stirs a bit of nostalgia for what the game used to be. How good is it?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"It's true, I went through a great deal of trouble to recreate the Pharaoh's deck, his strategies, even his perfectly coiffed hair. In fact, that part is what took the longest."
This movie is awful.
But not for any of the reasons why I hate what the game became.
This movie is a sequel to the original Duel Monsters era anime series which... I barely watched, and it's true to that source material to a substantial fault.
If you cared about the characters, and their voices, and appreciate what is probably the highest production value of any Yu-Gi-Oh! animation to date, then maybe you'll get something out of this, but the anime was never the reason I played the game and it represents the game horribly.
The whole problem with the original series is that there is no adhesion to actual game's rules, which, you'd think, after almost 15 years they'd be able to make a movie that actually portrays an entertaining duel faithfully, but you'd be completely ****ing wrong.
Once upon a time we said, "Wait a second, Kaiba just summoned multiple monsters in a single turn!"
But now in this movie we have a thing called "Dimension Summoning", which is literally the exact same thing, except each character "uses their spirit" to pay the cost to summon the monster, which means there's no difference at all beyond the characters going "RRRRAAAAAAGGGGGHHH" and some completely meaningless Spirit Meter appears and fills up.
Clearly they couldn't waste the precious kid's (I mean adult's) attention in the movie theater by having the characters take multiple turns or anything, which is also casually glossed over. It's not representative of the current game either because they don't talk each other's ear off for 20 contemptible minutes as they explain the Nth effect activation they're resolving while their opponent can only sit there and do **** ALL.
There were so many times throughout the movie where I'm just gesturing at the screen, questioning "What the ****" because there is so much Deus Ex Machina bullshit.
One of the only explainable moments actually requires you to have knowledge about the booster pack tie-in product they released on the same day as this movie. The final boss monster of the big bad, Crimson Nova, has an incomparable 4500 ATK and is practically immune to monster effects. Yugi topdecks Palladium Oracle Mahad which allows him to reveal it on-draw to Special Summon it, then attack for 2500 which doubles to 5000 during the Damage Step if he's fighting a Dark monster.
None of that is explained in the movie, Yugi just summons this random dude we've never seen before, with an undisplayed power level, and casually beats over the big bad, which apparently ends the duel even though he didn't run out of Life Points.
Many more things go entirely unexplained, like why Yugi stalls to complete the Millennium Puzzle, or why Kaiba's duel disk prevents him from being warped into another dimension, or why Shadi is babysitting kids, or why these kids must be gifted the power of the Plana, or why Deva even entertains a ****ing card game with his enemies when he can literally dissolve them with his mind.
This power is described as being able to bring about a world free of fear and evil, and yet it has the fatal flaw that if the user isn't a perfectly good person it'll create a world of fear and evil instead. That's seems like a fantastic power to just hand to a group of impressionable kids.
Overall this movie is super cringe, they do the whole Power of Friendship thing, there's regular flashbacks to Deva's backstory which I can't be asked to give a shit about, the "big tournament" they hype up is literally just 2 duels, and there's a very noticeable stock sound effect they use for the duel disks that sounds exactly like a Halo Banshee when it accelerates,.
The fresh animations and occasional goofy line are not worth the price of admission, whatever you're paying. Because after all, Obelisk is not a monster, Obelisk is a god.