Yu-Gi-Oh!
review by Stefan Ulstein | posted 8/13/2004
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Yu-Gi-Oh! is a marketer's dream, the Total Media Package: action figures, T-shirts, lunch boxes, game cards, a television show, and now a feature movie. It has a fiercely loyal fan base built mostly from grade school and young adolescent boys, but it includes some girls and older youths.
Yu-Gi-Oh! shares a basic archetype with all successful children's literature: the triumph of the diminutive over the mighty. It's not hard to see why little boys, tyrannized by a world of older brothers and schoolyard bullies, find escape when Jack defeats the Giant, when Frodo helps destroy Sauron, or when the kids in Narnia come out victorious.
Yu-Gi-Oh!—the movie and TV show—has much in common with the Harry Potter series. Both Harry and Yugi are grade school boys with magical powers which they use for good. Each has a nemesis in a better looking, more popular older boy. Harry's imagined world is drawn from pre-Christian European myths like good and bad witches, flying broomsticks and black cats. Yugi's is a more eclectic blend of Asian and Egyptian beliefs, suffused with science fiction and transforming robots.
A surprisingly sophisticated trading card game is the basis for the franchise; the movie gives adults a good understanding of how such games are played. Each card summons up a magical spell or a monster. Each card can be trumped by another if it is well chosen. Like poker, it relies on the luck of the draw, concentration and strategy. Like chess, it requires that the player be one or two moves ahead of the competition.
The movie is based on an epic game between Yugi and his rival. The game takes place both in fantasy and in real time. As the players summon up their monsters and spells, the monsters actually appear, battling one another and roughing up the players. It's a little bit like war: You can send in your helicopters to smash the other guy's tanks, but he can shoot you down with a Stinger missile. He can hide his troops during the day but you can give your guys night vision goggles for when they come out at midnight.
Yugi's rival is a more popular boy at school but he has never defeated Yugi in a duel—because Yugi has some secret "god" cards that give him a supernatural edge. As they play, we see that Yugi has an alter ego that speaks in a strong, adult voice; apparently Yugi was an Egyptian sage in a former life. As Yugi channels this ancient wise one, he becomes more and more powerful. The game gets more and more real, and soon it becomes evident to Yugi that this is more than an adolescent grudge match.
An ancient god who was defeated and sealed up when he tried to take over the world five thousand years ago is using the game to re-enter the world. Yugi's alter-ego is the god's nemesis, and Yugi's erstwhile game foe is an unwitting pawn. This story plays out to the end, which we won't divulge here—but you can probably guess where it's going.
It's hard to know how impressionable kids will process a fantasy movie like this. Many teens, for instance, see The Matrix as diversionary fun; I teach it as an example of allegory and archetypes in my college and high school film classes. Most kids will see Yu-Gi-Oh! as fantasy and have no trouble separating it from reality, but some may get lost in a world that, frankly, is more than a mere nod to the occult. The world of Yu-Gi-Oh! includes more than a fair share of spiritual darkness, and the trading cards—while not exactly a role-playing game along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons—sometimes can suck kids, unwittingly, into that world, sometimes to the point where they blur the lines between fact and fiction—and even between good and evil. Some Christians have denounced Yu-Gi-Oh!—and other, similar Japanime franchises—as a proverbial "foothold" for Satan (Eph. 4:27; also 2 Tim. 2:26). (Here are a couple of articles from a Christian perspective worth reading.)
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