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Thursday, October 13, 2011

Yu-gi-oh! ZeXal dub.

I've been into Yu-gi-oh! for a long time. That is to say, I really enjoy playing the card game- it's a lot of fun. I do watch the anime, but only the Japanese versions with english subs. 4kids, the company that dubs the series, has a history of censoring their shows, and the Yu-gi-oh! franchise has been completely mangled by this- crappy voices, card name changes, thematic censorship, and more have made a cheesy if fun anime into an unbearably kiddish slogfest. They never even finished the second series, GX, cut entire episodes of 5'ds because they were too dark, and generally ruined whatever they got their hands on.
The recent anime, Yu-gi-oh! ZeXal marks where I stopped watching the Yu-gi-oh! cartoons. Even in the Japanese version, the franchise reeks of jumped shark with this series. Somehow, despite being in the middle of a massive lawsuit with TV Tokyo and Konami, 4kids is somehow able to dub Yu-gi-oh! ZeXal. So how did they do? Well, it seems like they made one small improvement, and several steps backwards from their earlier schlock.
First of all, the backs of the cards FINALLY look like their real-world selves, the one improvement ZeXal made as a whole to the franchise. The life point and ATK counters remain unchanged, which is rare for 4crap. These are the only positive changes, though. ZeXal was stupid enough in it's native language, and the dialogue and characters appear to have only gotten more annoying. And what's with the monsters saying their names? What is this, Pokemon? Doesn't help that the new card types (once called Exceeds, now called Xyz for some inane reason) are retarded. Yuma is still the worst protagonist the series has ever had (he makes Judai look compelling). The Augmented Reality Duels don't make any real sense (at least Riding Duels, while silly, added new rules to the game. ARDs aen't any different from normal duels, so what's the point?).
I used to be a fan of this series, and while I'll continue to use my own deck for dueling (Dragon/Synchro FTW!), I'm going to continue to pass on ZeXal. This series, for all intents and purposes, just killed itself.

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