If you don’t believe me about it being disgusting, just look at the banner. Or at this:
Trading card game art from the boom years is something else. Talk all you want about the unrefined art of early Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering, but I don’t think anything will beat Yu-Gi-Oh for sheer quantity of “gross” and “huh?!”
But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about the secrets of this unconscionable art.
There’s another big reason why Yu-Gi-Oh’s countless, unusably useless early wimpy monsters look so odd. Sometimes their art is simply hard to read.
Let’s look at a tame example: Cosmo Queen.
What is this? A woman with a HUGE hat and HUGE collar, with hands holding up that collar. Makes sense. Except that the proportions are hideously wrong. According to the old “if your hand is bigger than your face, you’re diseased” playground prank, Cosmo Queen should be dead five times over.
Then again, she is some kind of hellish monster. For something released in mainstream America, Yu-Gi-Oh is unabashedly occult. I know the dub changed all references to death and Hell to “the Shadow Realm,” but there’s still a smoggy air to the game. Children unambiguously summon demons and pseudoreligious figures. They don’t look like hellspawn; they look like monsters from a plane yet to be imagined.
Not even the cards themselves can imagine them. That’s why they float in vomit voids.
I grew up with many of these cards sitting around the house in various shoeboxes. I never dueled with most of them, of course. They sucked. But I was left with unresolved questions that you’d think would be obvious, such as “are Cosmo Queen’s hands really big, or is that just a horrible attempt at perspective?”
Well, we may actually have an answer. Through a game called Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links, we can see the full art of many of those cards. And thanks to the generous, scrupulous Yugipedia and the Yu-Gi-Oh Wikia, I can share highlights with you. That will provide most, but not all, of the art I share in this post.
So what about our first mystery?
That might actually raise more questions.
Let’s try something else. What’s Jinzo #7 really look like?
Before: hopelessly zoomed-in cyborg humanoid with some kind of pink growth extending from the translucent blue headcase.
After: that growth is clearly a hand, attached to a lanky arm. Who would’ve guessed this creature was secretly eighty feet tall?! Clearly they zoomed in to show us the cooler details of the monster, but at the risk of us having no clue about its build. I always thought it was built like a linebacker.
I’ve categorized further findings below…
Lovely Legs
Some of these monsters, like Jinzo #7, were hiding luxurious limbs.
Okay, this wasn’t that dramatic, but I like the Bistro Butcher, so I had to include him.
These hurt me. Zooming out made them so uncool. Not that they were that cool to begin with.
Sad: rectangle legs.
Twist: NO legs.
Similarly: TUBE for legs. It’s on-theme, though.
Last but not least…
Weapon Reveals
They had no chance of showing all that spear action in the full art. Why would they even draw it that way?
This is a weapon reveal AND a ball reveal (or mount reveal).
Those kelpy tendrils in the background were part of Star Boy!? Next you’ll tell me Hoshiningen uses rainbow streamers as pathetic whippy arms (which is very possible, with ridiculous stuff like Bolt Penguin and the Twin Long Rods duo out there).
Those Are/Aren’t Hands?
This one’s my fault for being an unobservant child. I always thought the shoulder pads on Ha Des’s power suit were clawed arms…
This next one might also be my fault. I only ever saw it in illustrations or in passing as a shiny holographic in disorienting light. Again, I thought his shoulder things were hands. But this time, they totally look like dino claws holding up a cowl. And “D” of course stands for “dino.”
But what about this shit?!
Duel Links Can’t Show Everything…
Sometimes I’m just out of luck, or I realized checking on a particular creature was a fool’s errand.
This is kinda cool, but the one-arm-on-the-ground-as-I-charge pose is still just as disorienting as it was before. What was I expecting? The card art already got everything but one fist in the frame.
Incidentally, did you know Pale Beast has a counterpart called Synchar? It’s just the same monster, but red and even worse. They look nearly identical, yet does Synchar have…pants? It’s a question that can never be answered.
And why is most of Tomozaurus’s art not Tomozaurus but a dead dinosaur that Tomozaurus is eating? Either that, or Tomozaurus is a wimp.
Here are two more mysteries that are completely ontological. Never to be resolved.
Stone Dragon is…probably just a worm. Or it’s like Palafin and its feet are at the very end of its tail there. Either way, it looks much less like a dragon than it does a T. Rex, with the paltry arm length that implies.
And The Melting Red Shadow is more proof of the Yu-Gi-Oh Occult.
New Duel Links Art? Why?!
For some reason, a few of these monsters (including a couple you’ve already seen) have artwork that’s apparently original to Duel Links. These aren’t hugely popular monsters, either. They’re stuff like Cockroach Knight.
Similarly, we have new artwork of the world-famous, jaw-droppingly astounding monster MINAR.
Wait, hold on. This might actually reveal something. Look at this clunky muddy mess:
And now the Duel Links image:
OHHH. Those were four arms, not two arms and not armor, and the creature has legs, not just a wormy lower body.
But you might wanna sit down for this next one. For real this time. This time, there’s new art for a monster people DO care about. Only ironically, but still.
We’ve got Shapesnatch.
For the uninitiated, this card is slightly infamous for its description, which begins, “A bowtie with horrible power.” Like many monsters of the time, it truly does have horrible power—stats so low that it’s trash on sight.
So the monster is just the bowtie? Well, it’s apparently controlling an interesting humanoid of some kind. But we can barely see it—just a cyclops eye, a metal hand, and a nice family-man hat. It looks less like a coherent entity and more like a shop window. It makes you wonder if the designers had a plan.
But apparently if you zoom out…
…he’s got round spiky shoulders, a swanky white suit, grisly red torso full of exposed guts (or a face???), and TWO hands…one of which is actually at the end of a cane. And giving you a thumbs-up! Thanks, bud.
The mystique of Shapesnatch only builds.
I have one last Duel Links reveal, but after that, I have a few bonuses. Bonuses that are a really big deal. You ready?
No, let me ask you again: are you ready?
(If you’ve seen Kumootoko, don’t spoil this for the rest of the readers.)
Hunter Spider
Let’s move on.
Final Mystery (1/4): What’s a Gate Guardian?
This is a lowball. Many people who watched the anime already know about this, but it’s so disturbing to me that I’ll still include it.
Gate Guardian is a shitty monster made from three other monsters. You’ll never keep them all on the field long enough. Gate Guardian looks like this:
But the parts that come together to make it look like this…
Okay, that could be a torso, but with all these blacks, browns, and strips of yellow, the color contrast is awful. It doesn’t help that this creature has a kanji where its face would be.
Wait, but that’s also a torso! It just doesn’t have a head. It has two balls…cheeks…um, joints? Random circles on the front of it. Wait, that’s breasts.
When it’s fused into Gate Guardian, the arms of Kazejin disappear to parts unknown. I guess the idea is that when it’s unfused, it needs SOME way to fight and attack others. Hence the mystery arms and the odd face. But it’s a bit too clever, and we’re probably too zoomed in.
Okay, what is this? It’s a dino head and two dino arms coming out of blue curtains to salute a circle with another kanji inside. How the heck is this fusing into an entire Gate Guardian, let alone fighting enemy monsters on its own?
Well, if you look at Gate Guardian, the answer is…it doesn’t. It just shapeshifts into mechanical hips and legs with a monster crotch. Really sad. At least there’s logic to Kazejin.
Final Mystery (BRONZE RANK): What’s a Servant of Catabolism?
Look, I don’t even know what a catabolism is. I have no chance of figuring this out.
When I was a kid, I thought it might be a back view of a maiden with a headband in her streaming blonde hair holding an arm out and channeling the elements. Which elements? Um, purple mystery orbs.
In Duel Links, it’s…another Cosmo Queen situation. That “red dress” extends into nothing.
But in one of the other video games, it’s…
Okay, so it was a side-view of a George Lucas alien. The swirly thing filled with purple elements was its ethereal hair. The headband was its eyeball. And just out of frame were its endless cyan abs.
…Wait, this doesn’t match up with the Duel Links art. Here, the “red dress” is a muscular shoulder, and it’s of normal shoulder size. But in Duel Links, it’s an endless flow. What’s going on?
One has to assume that Yu-Gi-Oh monsters don’t all have rigorously maintained, rigorously shared models. That makes sense, since most of these cards are both useless and insta-forgettable. There’s just so many. Potentially millions by now!
But it means that sometimes designers, even on higher-profile projects like video games and anime—the very well-known anime—the anime—are just guessing.
Final Mystery (SILVER RANK): What Are These Two Eaters?
Here are two cards that really bugged me:
Souleater is apparently a tiny sea slug occupying about 40% of its card art. It’s framed by what might be coral and/or sharp magenta teeth. In the background is, I guess, a frilly seashell, plus a psychedelic music video. This card is a Fish type, but its attribute is Earth, for some reason. Just to taunt you, the description reads, “A living wonder of mystery.”
Timeater doesn’t even get a description. It looks like a busted clock with arcane symbols…but that’s not really a monster, is it? It’s just an object. It has no face or limbs, evidently. But the image is so close up that it could be hiding anything.
Let’s see them in some random video games!
Get the fuck out of here with this. Souleater is like 5% of this entity. That tiny fish thing is floating inside a translucent ball which is actually the ponytail of a demonic-armor-wearing humanoid torso with a Sauron eye for a face. Then below that is an orange ball with pink sausages swimming within, and from that orange ball extend various spider limbs. I’m about to lose my mind. Why the fuck would this be Souleater? Why would you make the card art that way?!?!
Now let’s go look at Timeater!
Well, at least Souleater was probably still Souleater. What you saw in the card art was probably the entity controlling the rest of that thing, using wacky powers. But this? Timeater isn’t even Timeater. It’s an accessory on Timeater. Timeater itself is just Frankenstein with a Flava Flav-esque accessory. Or maybe it’s a vest? Hm, probably a vest.
Final Mystery (GOLD RANK): What Are These Dragons?
Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon. Two-Mouth Darkruler.
Back in the day, you couldn’t make a good deck without a few copies of these bad boys.
With a whopping 900 Attack, this three-star behemoth swept in the early game. Also, it had only one visible leg. Or arm.
But in the late game, you were summoning this. 2800 points of sheer power…which you could only receive by sacrificing two weak monsters, which themselves could only be summoned if you sacrificed two weak monsters. They called it “the bulldozer.”
Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon looked nothing like Thunder Dragon, yet it was a fusion of two of them. It looked entirely like Two-Mouth Darkruler, because Yu-Gi-Oh made many, many pairs of cards with designs that were literally palette swaps. Add or subtract a star, remove an arbitrary amount of Attack and Defense Points, and by golly, you’ve got yourself a full set in no time!
THTD actually appeared in the anime. Will it look coherent there?
It looks kind of…normal! It’s a dragon with two heads. The dang CARD ART doesn’t even have two heads.
Hold on, it also appeared in the PlayStation game Forbidden Memories, and–AAAAAAAAAH!
This looks more accurate to the card. Horribly, horribly accurate. Except for the orange eye and the searingly cyan tongue and legs. I don’t know where they got that from.
Either the anime creature designers didn’t share the same model sheet, or they ignored it. They knew that shit looked too bad for TV, or maybe that it would scare all children.
Thank you for reading, my friends, and Patrons, thank you for Patreonning.
For more frights, learn about Pokémon Red, one of Yu-Gi-Oh’s accursed rivals. Or lift your spirit and learn why small-time artists oughta know that your core audience isn’t out to get you: they really just want to like you. Alternatively, read about anime boys?