Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game: The Chronicles

nah this shit 3 minutes fr branded bros its so over.

I knew it was going to be short, but it really feels like they enslaved one guy to animate the entire thing overtime. They actually made a trailer to promote a trailer to promote the shitty card game that is Yugioh.

The animation itself is really nice, and the VAs they got fit their respective roles pretty well....aaaand that pretty much the only positives. The length really makes you question why we even had voice acting to begin with. The hype for the preview trailer (which was basically half the length of this animation btw) is ... completely gone.

When people asked for an anime about the lore of the cards, we wanted an actual anime and not a glorified trailer to sell product. But alas, let's not forget Konami manages this IP. Yugioh's anime historically have been tragically mismanaged somehow worse than what Bandai has done with Digimon at times. Seriously they gave fucking RUSH DUEL an entire 92 ep. anime. The Sky Striker lore already has a manga, so it wouldn't have been impossible to adapt it into a 10-20 min 12 ep anime or something akin to that.

Did they really think newcomers would watch this and go "Oh my god, I love Sky Striker Ace Raye! Guess I'll buy the cards"??? No wonder why YGO struggles to get new players when Konami is this out of touch. I take any opportunity to laugh at the clowns running the Konami circus but this is just sad.

The animation studio behind this actually got greenlit for a full anime on their JRPG title "Genso Suikoden", so good for the fans of that, but this gets a 3 min ep a month? I still watched the trailer with enjoyment and will continue to do so, but it leaves so much to be desired. Truly a Komoney moment of all time.

Alright, let's quickly talk about Yugioh Chronicles. This show in a very short span of time has already garnered quite about of negativity in the single episode it has released. So this review is purely in place to suade you to the other side.

Have we got a story? No, not really. In the single 4 minute clip we essentially received nothing. Just a nicely animated fight scene with some voice acting, no lore, no explanation for anything. I'm certainly no expert, however I have played the game and I do enjoy the show from time to time so take this from a very casual yugioh ... fan. The PV (which mind you, is longer than a single episode??) was very well done and set us up for something extraordinary which so far has been failed to be delivered on. This review may very well fall into obscurity however, I think based solely on the animation and voice acting, such a short clip isn't going to damage you at all. It's nice to look at if nothing else and since it's not super long, you're not locking yourself into something. Am I hoping for better down the line? Absolutely. But, I think it'd be fair to allow the show a bit more time before we slander it to oblivion.

I've been waiting with bated breath for quite a while for this to appear. As an avid player of the game since 2004, it was really refreshing to know that Konami wanted to make a series based on card lore and not on the next plot armored character that happened to have "Yu" as the first two letters of their name.

Roll on to today, and I am pretty much blue-balled. Expecting a 20 minute or at least a 10 minute episode setting up a world to explore over this season and getting...well something I could see more in Master Duel than in the exclusive anime. ... I don't really care much for Sky Striker lore anyway as I don't like the deck it's based on but this could have been a great opportunity to MAKE me care about it. Instead I see a 4 minute clip of what could easily have been from like episode 12/13 of a one-cour anime with no context. Sure I know the cards referenced but anyone looking to use this as a bridge to maybe get interested in the game is not gonna have a damned clue what they are watching.

Now the real question is, will the "lore" continue for Raye and Roze or will it jump to a 4-minute clip of a different branch of the game with no rhyme nor reason? I strongly suspect we are going to get a brief jump into the Albaz lore which is going to make zero sense without any world building so watch this space!

All in all, very disappointed as this has been bigged up since last year and the teaser looked great, but there has been very little new material actually since that.

I'll keep an eye on it each week, but sadly it's not the anime of the season that I was legitimately hoping it could be!

In the timeless words of a great meme: "My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined!"