Review: "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" is barely Yu-Gi-Oh!, and barely a movie

Movie of the Week #18 was a bad idea

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Sigh.

I thought this was going to be fun.

I thought this was going to be an enjoyably goofy change of pace. You all know I love Yu-Gi-Oh! I’m the guy who wrote that absolutely insane 12-part Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count series going page-by-page through Kazuki Takahashi’s original manga to see exactly how many people are murdered over the course of this series about teenagers playing card games (at least 326, by my rigorous calculations). I think the manga is genuinely fantastic, and in its original Japanese, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters anime is pretty great too (at least when it isn’t deep in the throes of increasingly ridiculous filler arcs). Heck, my online avatar is a creature I affectionately call ‘Pride Kuriboh,’ taken from an episode in one of those desperate filler stretches, the one where Battle City is interrupted so everyone can get sucked into a video game. I am, it is safe to say, a fan.

2024 is the 20^th anniversary of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie, the series’ first theatrical feature.¹ I was so excited for this movie back then, at 11 years old when it released in August of 2004. I saw it multiple times theatrically, because I was that kind of kid, and I have a lot of nostalgia for it, though unlike other parts of the Yu-Gi-Oh! experience, I’ve never revisited the movie as an adult. But I got this very cool steelbook re-release of the Blu-ray a few weeks ago, so I threw it on the Movie of the Week schedule, thinking to myself ‘yeah, that’ll be a fun one.’

I am an idiot.