Yu-Gi-Oh! 'Season 0' Had No Card Games And Was Super Dark

Yugi Mutou's life is far from easy: as timid and exceptionally short teenager, he's constantly picked on by his classmates. While he does have some friends who he cares about deeply, he knows that those relationships have their limits. Anzu, his childhood friend, is nice enough, but he can't rely on her to protect him from bullies forever. Katsuya Jonouchi and Hiroto Honda are friendly sometimes, but they cause him plenty of problems, too. What Yugi wants is a loyal friend who will always be there for him - and he gets that in the form of the spirit of an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh that dwells within the Millennium Puzzle, a pyramid shaped necklace that's one of his greatest treasures. After completing the puzzle, Yugi is possessed by this dangerous but fiercely loyal spirit. Every time anybody messes with Yugi, the spirit takes over his body and challenges that person to a 'penalty game.' Those who lose the game suffer terrible fates. This spirit might be more than soft-spoken Yugi bargained for.

In the world of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, pretty much the only game anybody is ever seen playing is, well, Duel Monsters. There are a few exceptions like Ryuji Otogi's (Duke Devlin's) Dungeon Dice Monsters, but Duel Monsters reigns supreme. This isn't at all the case in Season 0. This series, which focuses on the beginning of the manga, actually barely ever mentions Duel Monsters at all. Instead, the characters engage in a wide variety of Penalty Games - also known as Games of Darkness. These games can be pretty much anything, but many of them involve some form of gambling or chance. While the games arise for a variety of reasons, most of them are punishments meted out by Yami Yugi to people who harass Yugi and his friends.

Season 0 was an adaptation of the first arc of the Kazuki Takahashi's manga, cutting off around the same time that the manga began to focus exclusively on Duel Monsters. If you're a major Yu-Gi-Oh! buff, this season is worth watching for that reason alone - it deals with important events that the main series only depicts in flashback form, like exactly how Yugi acquired the millennium puzzle and became possessed by the spirit of the Pharaoh. Sure, you could read about all that in the manga, but it's pretty cool to see it come to life in anime form.

Most of Yu-Gi-Oh! was produced by Studio Gallop, a studio that's been around since the 1970s after being founded by former employees of Mushi Animation. Though the studio has a long history, most of their titles other than Yu-Gi-Oh! are fairly obscure - though they did work on Kiki's Delivery Service alongside Studio Ghibli. Yu-Gi-Oh! Season 0 was produced by the much more prominent Toei Animation. Toei Animation is the studio behind hits like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Digimon, and One Piece. Exactly what caused this transfer is unclear, but it's likely that Toei didn't want to sink more resources into a series that flopped.

Duel Monsters is already pretty intense for a shonen anime - kidnappings, comas, and other painful events are de rigueur. But Season 0 is far more disturbing - in fact, it could have easily been classified as horror. Many of the episodes revolve around Yami Yugi challenging people who wrong him to high stakes competitions that end in psychotic breakdowns, permanent imprisonment in capsules, physical damage, and more. While the punishments occasionally seem somewhat justified, they're often meted out for simple arrogance. The Pharaoh is cruel and merciless. Other details, like Jonouchi's abusive, alcoholic father, also appear. Don't watch this expecting the same tone as can be found in Duel Monsters, especially if you're more familiar with the heavily censored 4Kids dub than the Japanese version.

While Season 0 is definitely a lot more disturbing than Duel Monsters is, you need to read the manga if you're looking for real nightmare fuel. In the anime, a character is forced to hallucinate that he's on fire, but in the manga he's literally burned alive. The anime also cuts some concepts entirely. In one particularly distressing storyline, Yami Yugi challenges a school bully to play ice hockey over a grill. The loser has to deal with frozen chemicals blowing up in his face. He doesn't survive, and Yugi couldn't care less. Events like this make the protagonist seem less like a hero and more like a sadistic monster, so it's not exactly surprising that Season 0 decided to tone it down a little.

One of the reasons that Season 0 didn't do well with Japanese audience is that it took a lot of liberties with the original manga. One of those was taking a character who was meant to be a one-shot and making her into one of the main characters. In the manga, Miho Nosaka appears only once, when Honda (Tristan) buys her a love jigsaw puzzle. In the anime, she's a core part of Yugi's friend group. While she remains the object of Honda's affections, the jigsaw puzzle thing attributed to another character, Mayumi, who buys it for Jonouchi (Joey). While Miho was a quiet, polite girl in the manga, her anime counterpart had a completely different personality. Season 0's Miho is an extroverted, bubbly girl who can also be stubborn and quick to anger. She doesn't appear at all in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters.

4Kids is a dubbing company that's notorious for creating anime dubs that made major changes to the series they managed. While they're currently bankrupt and inactive, they introduced millions of American kids to anime - and not necessarily in a good way. They're responsible for notorious gaffs like having Brock call a rice ball a jelly donut in Pokemon - and for deciding that Takeshi should be named Brock in the first place. What's more, they cut violent moments from the series they managed: they're why people who passed away or sustained serious injuries went to the Shadow Realm in most of the Yu-Gi-Oh! series. In fact, 4Kids dubbed Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, and the first 41 episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! ZeXal before ultimately losing the license. They could have dubbed Season 0, but they decided that it was much too violent for their style of adaptation. Aside from a few fandubs, the series can only be seen in raw or subbed form.

If you've ever seen a picture of Seto Kaiba with green hair and gold eyes instead of brown hair and blue eyes, it probably wasn't a fan made recolor on DeviantArt - it was a screenshot from Season 0. Kaiba wasn't the only character who looked different from his Duel Monsters counterpart. Shizuka (known as Serenity in the 4Kids dub of Duel Monsters) had lavender hair instead of brown in Season 0, while Bakura had blue hair and green eyes instead of white hair and purple eyes. The Duel Monsters art was much closer to what appeared in the full color illustrations from the manga. Still, Duel Monsters didn't forget Season 0's wilder aesthetic choices. Noah Kaiba, a filler character who is the biological son of Gozaburo, has green hair that's reminiscent of Seto's former style.

The changes that Season 0 made from the original manga created some plot inconsistencies that may have contributed to the series' ultimate failure. For example, the abuse that Seto Kaiba suffered at the hands of his adoptive father was cut and replaced with happy memories. This makes his personality changes seem like they come out of nowhere. Another odd change was that in the manga, Bakura is clearly shown to be cheating using a spinning dice roll that makes critical roles happen more often. In the anime, he's shown dropping the dice straight down with no spin, and he does so only once. When Yugi accused him of cheating, it's hard to see how he came to that conclusion. Also, while this isn't exactly a plot hole, Yugi is much worse at games than he is in the manga or the later anime. It's hard to see why he's called the King of Games when he keeps losing all the time.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie was the final entry into the world of the series, which is actually a pretty graceful way to end a series. Unlike the TV series, the movie does focus on Duel Monsters. It follows a young boy named Shougo Aoyama who is too scared to participate in duels despite possessing the rare Red Eyes Black Dragon Card. Kaiba, wanting to get his hands on the card, sets up a tournament in which anyone who is invited must participate. With Yugi's help, Aoyama makes his way through the tournament, and gains confidence in himself as a duelist.