Background: I'm Anthony Sitko from Capes on the Couch, a show that examines the mental health issues of comic book characters, part of the Guinea Geek Network. Just like the show you're checking out now, shows on the network are individually owned, and opinions expressed may not reflect others. Find other stupendously geeky shows@guineeknetwork.com. dot.
Chris Osborne: And welcome to Play comics, where once again, we are here looking at a video game based on a comic property and how well it represents that source material. This time, I've got a really special episode coming here because we're looking at two games, and we're looking at it with a guy who can just tell me why I missed out on Yu Gi oh. And why that has make me a horrible person and maybe what that means about my mother.
David Arnold: Wow. Wow.
Chris Osborne: Today we have Dan Arnold from are you my mother? And various other podcasts, but that's the one that I listen to.
David Arnold: Um, Chris, it's so great to be here. I don't think you're a terrible person for missing out on Yu Gi oh. I think a lot of people did. I think that's perfectly fine. I have drawn a lot of ire from my friends and family when I told them I have watched the entire series, that I have read the manga, but I think it was all leading up to this moment to meeting you and being able to contribute to this conversation. And these two vastly different in quality Game Boy advance games, that is probably.
Chris Osborne: The nicest way you can compare them. But let's take a look at the Yu Gi oh background first, because my background is still very much just blitzing through the manga to get through the Luke hair episode and just telling Luke, hey, what happened? And shutting up for 45 minutes. What is it that really got you into Yu Gi oh, that's.
David Arnold: You know what? I think it. I think it might have just been. Well, no, I know what got me into it. I don't know why I was blanking on this. I was dating a guy in college who was, like, dead set. Uh, Yu Gi oh head. We would go to tournaments together. He had a massive collection. He was trying to get, like, every first edition card. And so, like, you do when you date someone, you kind of get into the things that they got into, and it just never left me. So before long, I was the one who was, like, on eBay trying to find Chinese rips of the Japanese anime that they had dubbed in very dubious English so that I could know what happened next because I wasn't sitting around waiting for four kids to tell me what was going to happen next with the United States, it's released. So I tried to get ahead as long as possible. I would watch them in the morning before I went to work. And eventually I thought, I need to get to the source here. So I bought the japanese manga. I do not read fluent enough japanese to read manga, but I was certainly enjoying the concepts that I saw on the page. It really resonated with me. And I became a card collector and player as well. I never did a tournament play like the guy I was dating. That felt like a bridge too far for some reason, even though I think we've passed a couple of those toll booths already. So I. But I. But it remains, you know, it remains a special part of my heart, I suppose.
Chris Osborne: There's just something about Yu Gi oh to me, that seems like it's for kids, but then it gets super, super dark, super quick. And how the heck did that pass any of the censors here in America?
David Arnold: I'm kind of amazed because towards even part of what we'll end up talking about today, which is the battle city arc, things start to get pretty dark where there are people who are going to get their legs cut off if they lose this card game, which does feel like two hive stakes, but here we are. And what four kids ended up doing is they said, oh, that's a soul blade. And if it touches you, you'll lose your soul. And, like, clever. But it seemed like a lot of work to try to make this a little bit more palatable for a United States audience, whereas something like Pokemon, it was pretty easy to bring that over to the states. So it was pretty surprising, especially as I kept watching it, how very dark it would get. I mean, it's an anime, so at one point in time, like, characters are being crucified, it just happens in anime. And we never got to see that in the states because they wrote the whole episode out of that arc of the four kids dub.
Chris Osborne: Wait, are you saying that four kids isn't, like, the definitive version of anything that I've been watching?
David Arnold: Listen. Well, no, you know what? If it's definitive to you and your childhood, then that's awesome, and you shouldn't let me take that away from you.
Chris Osborne: So are you saying there's essentially bonus content? Because I grew up watching some of.
David Arnold: The four kids stuff, there is definitely bonus content. It might require you to start from scratch, but there's a lot more to enjoy, I think, in almost any arc, if you watched it in the US.
Chris Osborne: How many episodes of one piece is that going to add onto it? There's already 3 million episodes.
David Arnold: I can't speak to that because it is so uncomfortable for me to think about watching one piece because I know that it's just all I'll do for the rest of my life. So I have never even. It's kind of like the thing they told us. I was born in the early eighties. I feel like I'm almost being a d a r e r e officer to your listeners. Don't even try one piece one time because it's all you'll do for the rest of your life and it'll ruin you.
Chris Osborne: I was born in 86 and we at least were starting to get the dare as a complete joke.
David Arnold: Dare was always a complete joke.
Chris Osborne: So for anybody who is unfamiliar, what is the basic premise behind Yu Gi? Oh yeah.
David Arnold: So the basic premise is that this is a society that has created this card game. The cards, their images and all of the lore behind them actually date all the way back to egyptian times when powerful wizards would summon monsters out of giant stone tablets. And that was recreated in small cardboard card form for people to enjoy in fun little games. A young boy named Yugi completes a small artifact that is a puzzle and upon completing it, he is possessed by the soul of an ancient pharaoh who cant remember who he is. And he has the same power to unlock the souls of these monsters contained in the cards that ancient wizards from Egypt used to have. And we spend the entire of the first series, which is Yu Gi oh, exploring his identity, figuring out who he is and the journey that Yugi and his friends take along the way. Playing against businessmen, elite card players throughout the world to try to both figure out who the pharaoh is and to have fun playing cards.
Chris Osborne: So this is essentially the gathering mixed with Jumanji.
David Arnold: Yeah, there is a little bit of that because these people are often getting stuck in precarious situations in which their lives or souls are on the line, which, I don't know, it's a good stakes that are the. It's a little bit wild to think that these cards are super valuable because they're just walking around with them like they're nobody's business. And they are valuable in our world too. But people take great care of any of the trading cards that they have in our world. And I think relevant to this conversation, a couple major arcs have happened in the series. The first was the duelist kingdom arc, in which Yugi and his friends were invited to duel against the creator of the card game duel monsters. And that was that first season, essentially. And then the second arc is Battle City, which is where both of these games really take place that we're talking about today, one of which is, like, clearly battle city, and one of which is a much better version of the game but doesn't have all the city.
Chris Osborne: Mechanics this far into everything. Is Yu Gi oh something I want to start watching, or is this like, I better really start watching it?
David Arnold: Yeah, I think you'd. I recently rewatched it because I had access to Crunchyroll, and so I wasn't reading very strangely translated English, which was a much better experience to watch on Crunchyroll with the subtitles being the correct language all the time. And so I had a blast doing it, but I already knew that I loved it, and even me, a lover of it, it does drag at certain points of time, and you are really committing yourself. I think that we just talked about Dragon Ball Z not too long ago on the Gimmicks podcast, and we were talking about a filler episode, and Yu Gi oh has a ton of filler because it was a pretty new anime based on the manga, and so the story hadn't been written yet, so there was a lot of padding between major arcs of the story. So if that bums you out, then, wow, this series is definitely not for you. And even then, I think you could watch through Battle City and be like, oh, we never figured out who the pharaoh is, but it's fine, you're done, and it's okay.
Chris Osborne: So what are the chances of this getting, like, a dragon Ball z kai treatment where they just cut the filler out?
David Arnold: I don't know the answer to that because they kept moving on. There's so much more Yu Gi oh. They moved on to a whole new cast of characters in a duel academy. They've gone even further than that. We're into the fifth or 6th iteration of the series now, so I don't know that we're going back to Yu Gi oh original just to get the pharaoh's storyline, but I think that plenty of people have published how to do your own kai based watch theory. But I think it's kind of a shame. I mean, I talked about it in the Dragon Ball Z episode because we covered where Goku learns to drive with Piccolo, and I love a filler episode. I think that they're fun, but they are for Yu Gi oh in particular, they are long. They are brand new arcs that are introduced that are not based on the main story.
Chris Osborne: That's something that's new to me. Even going through one piece, you'll have your here's what everybody does on their time off in the city kind of filler arc, but it's four or five episodes and that's it. So it's sounding to you full on season, story arc, length of stuff?
David Arnold: Yeah. I mean, the biggest one is that we weren't ready to finish the battle city arc by the time we got there. And so they just had all the characters stop and go into a virtual reality in which a malevolent AI challenged them across. It would have been five battles, two episodes each. Then there was a climax. It probably was an 1822 episode arc. Totally wasn't based on the manga. Lift it right out. It doesn't have any impact on the story. At one point in time, the main villain shows up and is like, everyone's in computers. I guess I'll go to sleep. Which is funny. It's a good laugh, but it's, you know, it could be frustrating if all you care about is moving forward. I particularly loved it. I think some of the best jokes of the series are there because one of the malevolent AI's is a sort of perverted penguin character who looks up the girl's dress. And I think, you know, that's funny. It's not my thing, but it got me to laugh quite a bit.
Chris Osborne: What is it about anime and manga and looking up girls dresses? I don't know if I even want the answer to that.
David Arnold: Yeah. And you've met the girl. Cause she is one of the people that we can duel in both of these games.
Chris Osborne: And Yu gi oh is still going now. So kind of like Pokemon in that you're gonna have 5 billion more things than when you had from when you were growing up.
David Arnold: Yeah. And I think a little bit different than Pokemon is that we're not still with Ash or we're not still with Yugi, but then he shows up, and it's a big fucking deal when he shows up. So if you keep watching the series and you're like, oh, where's Yugi? He will show up. Then. Everyone gets kind of excited when that happens. So it's a little bit more like they're constantly spinning off of each other, and then they'll bring back the main characters for a big hoorah.
Chris Osborne: How much do you get to actually play the card game now?
David Arnold: Me? Not at all. When we moved. So my husband and I moved in May of 2023 outside of the United States. And when we were moving, obviously, we had to be really cognitive about how much stuff that we took. So when we were getting rid of everything in the house, I looked at all of the cards that I had collected and even the decks that I had built, and I thought, I think I'm just going to throw these away. I don't think they have any value. And my good friend Kevin said, you might want to check that online. And that led to this whole process of us actually getting the cards professionally graded. And then we brought all of the graded cards with us along with a couple that I kept just for sentimental value that I didn't get graded because they weren't worth anything. But I don't play the cards anymore. It was fun playing these games so that I could remember the sort of battle style. I think it is a fun tabletop game, but I had a lot of fun when I played it. I had a great group of friends that I played it with. I obviously dated a guy I played it with, but beyond that, I don't miss it anymore. My husband's not like, hey, we should play Yu Gi oh. But I bet if we wanted to, we could go buy decks. Even here, we would just have to learn a different language because they probably wouldn't be in English.
Chris Osborne: So essentially, Yu Gi oh is the story of, hey, let's go fight people, and then let's go fight more people. And I'm doing it with little pieces of cardboard and magical things happen and then we're going to go fight some more people and then somebody's going to die in some super gruesome way. But that's okay because it's for kids.
David Arnold: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It gets a lot of whitewashing in everything you see in the US, but there are some very gruesome things that happen in the japanese version. There's also some other arcs that will come up. Yugi's best friend Joey is always trying to get on his level. So they've got that nice little rivalry thing. Yugi's got this corporate rival that he's always against, Kaiba, and they've got sort of a big brother, little brother thing. So we do get to explore those other themes that you would typically see in a sports anime, which I think is kind of fun to include here. But again, we're not talking about sports, we're talking about cards.
Chris Osborne: It's kind of a sportish. No, none at all.
David Arnold: It's kind of a sport. I've seen people sweat at tournaments, but I don't think that was necessarily related to physical activity.
Chris Osborne: Well, we're gonna ponder over that one while I drop some promos for a few other things, and then we'll come back and talk about these games.
Promos: Dragon Ball, one piece, Naruto. All things that we love. All manga that were originally published in the legendary magazine Weekly Shonen jump. But not every series can run for 300 chapters and have a hit.
David Arnold: Anime.
Promos: This is David. This is Jordan. We're the hosts of Shonen flop. Each episode, we look at manga that ran and jumped that didn't quite make it. We discussed what it did wrong, what it did right, how the series could have turned itself around, and ultimately, was it a flop or not? Run all your favorite podcast apps and you can find us@shonenflop.com. dot keep on flopping floppers.
I am Connor from the house of L. And I am Rey from the House of Zod. We are two of the many, many survivors of Krypton's destruction. And we have made our home in Australia and dare I say, have become Australians, for better or worse. But we have also decided to read Superman comics. Read Superman books, watch Superman shows, cartoons, movies, basically everything. Superman. And from an australian perspective as well. Whether. Whether you're a seasoned fan like me, or whether you are coming in fresh, wide eyed, and wanting to learn more like me, then this podcast is for you. Join us for our bi weekly adventures, available on all good podcast catchers. Just search for last Sons of Krypton. A Superman podcast will be coming to you from Australia or some cosmic dimension, wherever we are that week. Up, up and away.
Chris Osborne: That was some great stuff to check out. But first, let's finish up here. David, we kind of are spoiling the listeners here a little bit because we're talking about two games.
David Arnold: Two games, really?
Chris Osborne: One of them is. Yeah. So maybe one in a quarter of a game.
David Arnold: Yeah, yeah. Wow. Sacred cards was hard, right? Sacred cards was a hard game to play.
Chris Osborne: And I was thinking more like, eternal Duelist soul is the one that's. I mean, they're both kind of. Which way do you want to look at it? Because the basic essence of both of the games is, hey, here's the card game. Go play it.
David Arnold: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And no, no frills, no strings, in two very, very different ways. With eternal duelist soul, I think you've got a much better play environment. But then when it comes to selecting players, you're like, oh, I battled everyone. What the heck do I do now? But I suppose it was in, like, the printed book. You have to then play people over and over and over and over and over again until you fulfill two unexplained conditions. One, you've battled enough times and won enough times. And two, you've unlocked a random card that the machine is just waiting for you to get before it unlocks the next level and you never know what that is.
Chris Osborne: And then in sacred cards you're in more of an rpg environment going around, but you're essentially doing that exact same thing. So I guess it's like what do you want to have? Do you want to have just pure gameplay go at it? Or do you want to have gameplay with a rpg game skin on it?
David Arnold: Yeah, and I would also say sacred cards is using a different rule set than Eternal Duel of soul, in that sacred cards is using a little bit more of the playbook from where all the kids went to the island. It's depending on where your character stands, there's a different field effect which changes the effect of the monsters. A monster of light origin can beat a monster of dark Origin even if they have the same power. And those are not official rules of the game, which is strange because they didn't come out at drastically different times. And we're talking the Game Boy advance. The tradable card game had already been around so that a known rule set was available.
Chris Osborne: The date I have on these games is the 16 October 2002, which I'm pretty sure is the eternal duelist souls date. And then I just didn't put another date in here because that's just how I'm organizing things to keep the list straight.
David Arnold: That was eternal duelist soul, which I know for prop related reasons that I have here for later in our record, but I looked up sacred cards and it was earlier that year I think, but not like January.
Chris Osborne: These games were made by Konami Konami all over the place. Konami Konami. And not ultra but Konami.
David Arnold: Yeah that's fun. I like seeing a Konami logo on a GBA because it makes me think that I'm about to play Castlevania, but I am not about to play Castlevania. I'm about to play these games.
Chris Osborne: And like we said, this is a GBA game. So there's some amount of hand waving pass along on the story and everything that I've come to expect. But I grew up with one of the big gray bricks so Im used to that kind of thing. Im used to a short game that I can dont tell my mom, take the game boy into the bathroom and beat while Im in there. Having something like this is not a problem for me.
David Arnold: Yeah, I agree. I remember. I mean, I played my gba, not the one that came out first, but the SP. The one with the backlit screen. Man, I took that thing everywhere. And maybe the battery life wasn't good and my memory is just failing me, but I felt like I never had a problem with memory life. So this was one of the games that was in my rotation. I owned Eternal Duel of Soul. I only played sacred cards on an emulator. And I guess I'm glad for the decision I make. Maybe it made me a little bit more biased in the review and how we're talking about it now, but I've spent a lot more time with eds than I have any other Yu Gi oh game. I never played the PS one version, but I loved hearing you all cover it earlier in the history of the podcast.
Chris Osborne: But one thing I want to make sure that I'm understanding here is you're not really playing as anybody in these games, right?
David Arnold: Yeah. Which is so it makes it in hurl duel of soul. It makes it a lot easier because you're just playing one of five opponents in sacred cards where it is a lot more rpg and you are following the story of Battle City. But it's the characters in the show have done all of these actions that you, the player character, are then doing. So every time you beat someone and you get their locator card, that's something that Yugi or Joey or even Mai would do in the show to eventually make the one of eight spots on the giant blimp, which is the end of sacred cards story, and then it just finishes the overall arc. And it would take much longer for the anime and story to do that.
Chris Osborne: I think this is the first game we've looked at here where you're not really a character from the game. There have been a couple wherever. I know there's one of the men in black games and I'm blanking on which one, but you're like some random new agent, but at least that's still putting you in some kind of mindset. This is the first one where I think it's just completely your blank slate. Have fun.
David Arnold: Yeah. Which is so funny because then you look at all of the characters that are surrounding you. Like one guy's got a literal ancient soul living inside of this thing he wears around his neck, and one guy's a billionaire who makes all these cards. And then there's you who's just like, I don't know, some kid down the street who's just like walking around being like, I can win. I can do it.
Chris Osborne: How does the gameplay in these compare to playing in the actual card game?
David Arnold: Yeah, so for when these games were released, eternal duelist Soul is almost 100% faithful to the rules of the trading card game at that time. So much expansion has happened there with synergy strategies that are almost impossible for me to even get my mind, let alone explain, because I, like, learned the original rules versus sacred cards, where the rules are a lot different. The cards are actually a lot different. Things that would normally have effects. Don't any traps you lay down auto trigger, which takes away a little bit of the player strategy. It is a much different experience. You can only have five cards in your hand when the rule is actually much higher than that. And that makes a big difference for how players approach the game and how they would typically deploy a strategy. I think that's why maybe Eds was a little bit more popular as well, compared to sacred cards, and why more people invested in and purchased it. I guess from the reviews that I read online, most people's experience with sacred cards is they bought it to get the free promotional cards and then they played it and then never picked it back up.
Chris Osborne: Yeah, that's what I was seeing, too. And just the idea of getting free promotional cards with a game, I think, is something that kind of I wish would come back, but also not, you know, I see them at my local comic shop having to say, you can only buy one copy of this game that has the code for something for Fortnite.
David Arnold: Wow, you're not even getting, like, a tangible thing. You're getting some skin in Fortnite. How the world has changed so much.
Chris Osborne: And of course, that's the one where they let me cheat a little bit, because if I want multiple covers, they'll let me do it. But I also go late in the day.
David Arnold: Right, right. I will say that because I bought eternal duel soul, I do have the promotional cards. One of them was good enough to get graded. So I do have a graceful dice card here, which we got evaluated. It is in near mint condition, if you're not familiar with. I know. I loved how they did holograms on trading cards in this era. I've got some pokemon cards that have some great holo on them, too. You know, it's a grade eight. If you're not familiar with PSA grading, that's a near mint, which is just a made up way of referring to, like, the quality of a card. I have a couple that are rated one, which I think is, they call them poor, I call them very loved. Should this have been graded out of ten, it would have been a lot more valuable. I think that the entire idea of value around all of these is some sort of scam of somebody definitely embezzling or like money laundering in some way, shape or form, because it makes no sense that I should be able to sell this card for $35. That is almost the price of the game.
Chris Osborne: Looking back at everything now, any thoughts that you wish you would have gotten? Sacred cards instead of eternal duel of soul.
David Arnold: You know, I think being invited to come and talk about these games was a great opportunity to relive the first time I emulated this game, and I pushed myself to go a little bit further in the game than I went the first time I tried it out on my old, like iMac, I guess is what I was having in college when I played that. I don't regret that I got eds. I think it was the better game for me to play and enjoy. I think that sacred cards looked so good for the rpg element. I loved walking around the city. I thought the sprite work was particularly well done for the characters. I think they looked it's really, really good. I just hated the card games. I hated their design, and because I emulated it, I was using save states and stuff, and I hated that there was a pretty hard state RNG. So if you were screwed out of a game and you had saved your game and went back to play it, you were going to be screwed again. And so the only way to sort of reset that was to go play some random nobody tried to reset your odds and then finally take on that gosh darn dual computer was just spanking me every time.
Chris Osborne: And hearing all this just makes me glad I didnt get into Giyo, the card game, because I would have been super all over having cards all over the place, getting all the games. It was bad enough when I was playing magic, and thankfully my second time quitting, that has actually stuck.
David Arnold: You know, I played magic as a kid too, and I regret that I probably sneezed on the cards because we would have been playing second and third edition. So I'm sure that there are actual things that we held in disgusting germ covered fingers that may have some sort of value now, and God only knows where they are with magic.
Chris Osborne: Some of those cards are still playable. Are any of the Yu Gi oh cards from way back then still playable?
David Arnold: A lot are. I think a lot of the fan favorites, including things that I really loved, have been banned because there's a huge balance issue with some of the cards. One of my favorite cards, Fiber jar, which pretty much just like, resets your duel, but you keep the same life points, was like, banned one tournament after it was being played because pretty much everyone had it in their deck because it was a sort of like, if you could really knock your opponent down and then you could sort of reset things to set yourself up back for success, it was just a little too imbalanced in gameplay. So there are. The banned list from earlier expansions is pretty significant, but I think it's probably just like magic, if I'm being honest, Chris. Like, I am amazed when I look at modern magic cards when maybe somebody posts them on Twitter or something and there is word on, there's words on that card that I just. I have no idea what these rules are anymore. And I think that the same would be true to yu gi oh if I sat down at a table today. So you said you've given up magic twice, but did you get back into it? And we're like, wait, what happened? Why is trample called something different now?
Chris Osborne: Thankfully, when I got back into it, it was planeswalkers were still kind of new, so not everybody was using them all over the place, but they were well established to where everybody was expecting you to know what was going on. So that was my only real big adjustment.
David Arnold: Yeah.
Chris Osborne: And outside of that and some strategies that I'd used before that just weren't viable anymore, but I was expecting that one to happen just from the card rotations.
David Arnold: Yeah, that makes total sense. I just, you know, I love people. I have friends with a lot of people who are still into magic, and I love them posting about, like, this new commander that they found. But the idea of even having a commander doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know what that is, which.
Chris Osborne: Is funny, because that's like, it's just a whole different way of playing the game. And that one, if I was going to get back into it, that's how I would play, because that is just a giant, let's have a hundred card deck and have fun.
David Arnold: Of course, because I was a kid, I didn't have any strategy. So I do think my deck was table high, and I just wanted to have as many cards as possible. And now I know from both dating this guy and then playing Yu Gi oh on computer games, you really want as slim of a deck as possible so you can get your strategy and lay it down and be done.
Chris Osborne: We've kind of danced around a lot of things about the game, because most of these games really are just play the card game. Like if you're into that, it's great. And if you're not into that, then there's not really much else here for you.
David Arnold: Yeah, and the gameplay is pretty standard. You each, each player gets a turn. You play one monster per turn. You can set as many spell or trap cards as you'd like. Those all have different effects. There's a total ten spots on the field, five for monsters, five for spell and trap. Higher level monsters require you to sacrifice a lower level monster in order to summon them. So there is a little bit of a balance. Like the first round is not going to be as intense as the 7th round, which is really nice. I think the difficulty scaling is funny in both of these. In sacred cards, when you take on a random town person, they're playing a power ten card and you can just obliterate them with anything in your deck, but you take on any sprite that's designed a little bit better and you've actually got to think about what you're doing. Same thing is true with eternal dual soul. You've got sort of your lightweight players like Tristan and Tea, who are friends. They're just along for the ride, and anytime they play cards in the anime, they get slaughtered by whoever they're playing with because they're not very good.
Chris Osborne: Comparing this to this manga and animated source material, what do these games really get right about?
David Arnold: Yu know, I think they get right the idea that the characters are on some sort of journey of discovery. You can see it a lot more in sacred cards than you can eds, because sacred cards actually explores some of the battle city plotline, which is that we're sort of finding these sacred God cards and trying to collect them because that will unlock the pharaoh's memory. And that's what Yugi's trying to do for this trapped soul that's walking around with him. Where I think eds gets it right, where eternal duelist soul gets it right is the characterization of the pre and post dialogue is really on point, especially with the english dub of how these characters are imagined. I can hear the Joey Wheeler character with this sort of Brooklyn accent, which I think is a lot of fun. I do think that as you get into the deeper villains and the fifth stage, you're getting sort of the buoyancy of the Pegasus characters coming through, who's high camp with everything that he does, and then the really scary Merrick, who's the big bad of the battle city arc. And I don't know. It's just that part is well done. Characterization is very well done for trying to shove a really complicated story while keeping a pretty complex programming set. To have 900 cards in a game that are all playable and have synergies with each other and shoving it all onto a GBA card. I don't know. Props to this. Even though I didn't have a great time with sacred cards, I think it did its job really well.
Chris Osborne: What do you think these really get wrong, if anything? Looking at Yu Gi oh, yeah.
David Arnold: I think the manga had set the rules really, really well after the folks reached battle city. That's when the sacrificing monsters to summon higher level monsters mechanic was written into the manga. That's when it shows up in the anime. If you were reading the manga in sort of the first few, well, the first few are really about him playing totally over games that have nothing to do with cards and then stabbing people when they got them wrong. So if we just. If we just look at Duelist kingdom, which is them on the island, man, they're. They're summoning 3000 hit point monsters right off the bat. Like, they're just no. No fuss, no muss. And if you drew the wrong card, sorry, you're dead. And so the. It makes a lot more sense in the anime, and so it's great to see that reflected, even if you're getting some duelist kingdom rules in sacred cards. I think the other thing that gets wrong, though, is just the card effects, which is really hard for sacred cards because there's so much that's known about these, and they are sold so people will have an actual real card in front of them. And for you to get that wrong in your programming is a little bit hard. I don't think EDS suffers from that as much. But EdS also has the password system, so every Yu GI oh card has just a set of numbers in the lower left hand corner. And if you type those in to the password system of any of these games that have the password system, you get that card in the game. So just rewarding blatant capitalism right off the bat. Eds can't get that wrong. It's got to match the card that you put in. I think what EdS gets wrong is telling the player what to do. I think EDS is a rough design of a game because you just never know what you're supposed to be doing next to be successful.
Chris Osborne: If you could take any muppet and it's a monster, except for animal, because I think that's the cheater answer because it's so obvious. Which Muppet would it be?
David Arnold: I mean, I think Miss Piggy would have some excellent flip effects. I think that on flip summon, Miss Piggy would lower the attack power of all monsters on the other side of the field. And so she would be an excellent deployed strategy to lower your opponent's offenses and really wipe the floor with them all, all while hiding coyly underneath a facedown card. Did you have an answer to your question? Did you think about a Muppet card?
Chris Osborne: Think Gonzo. Just doing something crazy. But I don't know what the crazy thing would be.
David Arnold: Well, Gonzo can be a spell card. He just shows up and everything gets obliterated. He's my fiber jar. Gonzo is my returned fiber jarved. Bring me back Gonzo.
Chris Osborne: Well, David, it has been great talking to you about all this. If people want to hear more from you, where else can they find you? Around the Internet?
David Arnold: Yeah. If you want to hear more of the podcast that I'm on, I'm on a couple. I do a podcast called Gimmicks with my buddy Derek where we talk about high concept, experimental and structure breaking episodes of tv. And then Chris mentioned this earlier, but I have a podcast called are you my mother? Where we talk about mother characters on film, television, video games, really everything under the sun. And some of them are big stretches. So when a guest comes on and says, I want to talk about Jenova from Final Fantasy VII, when we really did a job on that and then coming out, actually right after this podcast recording, I'm launching a podcast, my friends merrily and Tyler about scary movies and tv called Fear coded. And you can find all those podcasts@glitterjaw.com. if folks want more of me directly right from the source, that seems pretty frightening as is. But you can follow me on Twitter imooma 22 or Instagram imooma.
Chris Osborne: And as always, well have links to all that down in the show notes because clicking links is so much easier than trying to remember how to spell things for real. And as always, if you want to hear more from me, you can head on over to playcomics.com where theres links to all the social media things. Still reluctantly on Twitter. Eventually I might leave somebody. Give me a good place to go to though, because I need to be where the people are or something like that. If you want to help support the show, the best thing you can do is to tell people about it, which, you know, could just be telling them about it or could be leaving reviews on places like Apple Podcasts or Podchaster or anything like that. You know, just let people know that the show exists. Or you could be like, oh, no, Laclaas or Dan McMahon or Carlier Antonovic and give the show money. That's always cool, too. Don't forget the play. Comics is a part of the Guineek.com network, home to such other wonderful shows as legends of S H I E l D, where we are continuing to go through evolution. I still haven't seen up anything past the episode that we've talked about. If you like the music that I'm rudely talking on top of right now, head on over to soundcloud.com. best day to check out best days music. But most of all, just grab a game, grab a stack of comics, and go find yourself a new favorite character. So what is it that really got you into manga? Wow. Let me try that again. What is it that really got you into Yu Gi. Oh.
David Arnold: And I thought, great. But, like, I can't watch Star Trek because I'm gonna learn words I do not need. I do not need warp drive on a daily basis.
Chris Osborne: You love us to live a really boring life if you don't need warp drive on a daily basis.
David Arnold: That's true. I really should work on that.
Chris Osborne: Send me promos for everything you have, and I will use them.