Ever since YuGiOh The Abridged Series by LittleKuriboh came out it seems like every semipopular anime has to get an abridged series eventually. Unfortunately I think Dragon Ball Z Abridged laid out a really cringe loud unfunny tryhard humor style template that basically every abridged series since has followed. I will always maintain that LittleKuribohs wit and dry British humor is the whole reason abridged series even work. Making fun of the silly stuff that happens in the show hes abridging works because the actual show is hard to watchespecially these days. In theory this YuGiOh anime is supposed to advertise the cards so Konami can jip people out of their money while hopefully having good characters and a solid story. Well they did succeed in making the cards look cool when theyre on the field. Theres a reason that despite all the meta changes people always find a way to casually play Dark Magician or BlueEyes White Dragon decks and they continue to get a ton of support from Konami in both the trading card game and the anime. For better or worse YuGiOh is a kids show that gets surprisingly dark at times. People who grew up with the 4Kids English dub will make fun of things like the Shadow Realm especially because of the abridged series but anybody with a brain knows this whole story is literally about people willing to kill others through Egyptian artifacts and a card game. That just creates a hilarious secondary layer of ironic entertainment after the cool trading card monsters of course. As the abridged series has consistently pointed out theres a lot of cheesy poweroffriendship stuff which isnt unexpected from a shounen. But in the original show some of it does kind of hit emotionally since there are a few cases of actual interesting character developmentmostly related to Joey/Jonouchi and Mai. Unfortunately this YuGiOh series fumbles in a lot of important ways which makes it hard for me to recommend in its original form whether thats the Japanese version or the English dub. Since the anime was meant to sell the trading card game youd think it would actually follow the rulesbut instead the characters constantly do things that you cant do in the real game. The first arc Duelist Kingdom is the worst about this. It had some weird beta version of the rules where you could just summon any monster at any time you apparently couldnt attack life points directly and the characters just randomly making up monster rules on the spot. It created a lot of hilarious scenarios but none that reflect what you can actually do in the trading card game. The second arc Battle City finally lets the series use a sort of version of the official rules but even then some abilities are way more overpowered in the showlike everything related to the Egyptian Gods and the Seal of Orichalcos. But given this was before broken mechanics like Synchros existed the way characters got powerful monsters on the field was just way too convenient. So many characters also just used straightup bad cards that its really hard to watch. While I mentioned that a few characters like Joey and Mai get decent development the vast majority of the cast just isnt that interesting. Yugi/Yami Yugi is your typical overpowered shounen protagonist Ta/Anzu and Honda/Tristan are literally just boring cheerleaders and Kaiba and Yami Bakura are funny mostly because theyre cheesy overthetop antagonists. Everyone else is either forgettable or annoying when you strip away their Abridged personalities. The show is over 200 episodes which is rare. Only a few longrunning series stay consistently entertainingstuff like DBZ and One Piece. Meanwhile YuGiOh Duel Monsters Season 1 is not consistently entertaining. Sure there are some hype duels usually in the climatic ones in each major arc but so many side duels are either pointless or focus on antagonists or side characters no one cares about. Plus theres way too much filler sliceoflife episodes weird side plots or even entire filler arcs Noah Kaibas arc was especially egregious since it literally interrupted the Battle City finals one of the few consistently good arcs in the series. Im all for series not taking themselves too seriously but YuGiOh Duel Monsters Season 1 constantly mixes serious psychological character development with cheesy friendship speeches and crazy magic all for a trading card game. Its really hard to take seriously especially with how ridiculously slowpaced some episodes and arcs are. LittleKuribohs YuGiOh Abridged didnt help but these days its hard to unironically enjoy the original show. Its so slow has too many boring characters and the novelty of recognizing certain cards and cool attacks only goes so far. At best this is a series for hardcore YuGiOh fans only. Casuals would probably have a better time with later YuGiOh series that actually follow the games rules and have fasterpaced more interesting stories. If you just want to see how ridiculous the plot and characters get just watch LittleKuribohs YuGiOh Abridged on YouTube. He somehow still hasnt finished it as of 2025 and at this rate he probably wont finish the entire series until the 2030s. But its a much quicker and much more entertaining way to enjoy the trading card game monsters aspect of this show.