Yugioh 1-6: A review on the original manga series - Henry

 Yu-Gi-Oh! (literally "king of games" in Japanese) is a manga series written by Kazuki Takahashi in 1997. The story focuses on a boy named Yugi Muto, who is one piece away from solving the hardest puzzle he has ever encountered, the millennium puzzle, and it is said that no one has solved it in 1000 years. After solving the puzzle, Yugi wears the pyramid-shaped puzzle as a necklace, but little does he know, that it holds the spirit of a pharaoh which can possess him at times. The story continues around Yugi and his friends encountering new games and evil people who abuse them. This results in Yugi transforming into the pharaoh-possessed Dark Yugi and playing penalty games with them. Penalty games are special magical games where the loser or cheater gets punished by dark magic. These games show the "darkness" and evil inside the hearts of people with everyone either losing to Dark Yugi or cheating and getting punished. 

Since Dark Yugi played many games like this throughout the entire manga series, I will only give you one example. The first penalty game played in the manga series involves a bully who is asking for money at school. He brutally beats up people who don't give him money, including Yugi's classmates. Yugi transforms into Dark Yugi finds this bully at night and plays a game with him. The game involves putting a stack of money on the back of your hand and stabbing at it with a knife. The money you pick up with the knife is yours, and both players take turns. The risk is that being too greedy will lead to you getting stabbed. The bully, realizing that the money pile is very thin and that he might stab himself, picks up the knife and tries to stab Dark Yugi instead. Dark Yugi uses the millennium puzzle and casts an illusion that makes the bully think that leaves are money. The next day, while students were walking to school, they saw the bully in a pile of leaves yelling and shouting, seemingly insane.

While Yu-Gi-Oh! has seemingly the same plot every time with Yugi and his friends discovering a new game, meeting an enemy, and Dark Yugi beating them and punishing them. However, the main plot in the first six books revolves around Dark Yugi and Seto Kaiba. Seto Kaiba is a rich, smart, and young man who owns a big company. Their rivalry begins with Kaiba challenging Dark Yugi to a game of duel monsters (a card game). Kaiba steals Yugi's grandpa's most powerful card but still loses and experiences a penalty game where he becomes a card in the card game and dies repeatedly at the hands of monsters. This causes Kaiba to construct a series of cruel games known as Death-T designed to kill Yugi and his friends. After lots of struggle, Yugi and his friends beat all levels of Death-T besides the last one, where Kaiba challenges Dark Yugi to another game of duel monsters. Eventually, Dark Yugi defeats him once again and experiences a penalty game known as mind crush, which destroys his evil side and puts him in a coma.

Yu-Gi-Oh! was one of the first mangas I ever read and it is certainly one of my favorites. The mangas tell interesting stories while having a dark and deep theme about morals. It is very interesting to read about Dark Yugi playing games against his opponents and revealing the "darkness" inside of them. This "darkness" could be pride, jealousy, abuse of power, etc, but the game is always related to this "darkness" and the games are designed for them to reveal their true nature. The punishments that Dark Yugi gives with his ancient Egyptian magic are also very interesting. The punishments rarely involve physical harm but rather illusions of their "darkness" exemplified and turned against them. Overall, I would give this series a solid 9/10 and I recommend it to anyone who loves manga and/or games.