Okay so the new Master Duel update seems to have come packaged with what seems to be just clips from the upcoming Chronicles Anime.

That, or Konami Animation is just going to be doing FULLY ANIMATED CUTSCENES for the story-modes now.

Either way, we have full-blown Sky Striker Anime scenes now and it is FUCKING WILD XD

This is so fucking cool XD

Fellas, is it gay if one of your eyes turns the color as those of your rival-turned-partner as your bodies and spirits become linked through a connection of your mysterious magitek cybernetic powers which you are now sharing with one another? And of course the same thing happened to her too? XD

Something I especially love about the newly released Sky Striker animations and what we can almost certainly expect from full release of the Chronicles series:

This all looks and feels absolutely NOTHING like a ‘normal’ Yu-Gi-Oh anime.

There is not so much as a whiff of cards, lifepoints, duel-disks, monster summoning or ANY other kind of visual touches that call to mind what you might expect from a Yugioh anime.

I have no doubt that if you showed this to someone who didn’t know the franchise, or better yet, someone who was a big Yugioh fan years back and doesn’t know about Sky Strikers, they would have NO IDEA this is based on Yugioh cards.

This doesn’t feel like a ‘card-game anime’. It feels like a mecha/magical-girl action series.

And I feel like that is just the PERFECT way to approach an adaptation like this, you know? Just let this story and characters be their own thing, separate from anything having to do with a card game.

Something rather interesting about the Sky Striker clips that were just released and what they imply about the full story we’re going to be getting as part of the Chronicles series is that it looks like we have a bit of a ‘diverging adaptation’ situation going on here.

Because as it turns out, the Sky Strikers story has actually been previously adapted into a non-card-game medium.

Specifically as part of the Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG Stories anthology manga.

This is notable because the Sky Striker manga already made quite a deviation from what was implied about the original Sky Strikers story in the sourcebooks and even the cards themselves. Like the setting being changed from a pseudo-modern/near-future war between two ambiguous nations with Raye and Roze being the most elite soldiers, to a post-apocalyptic war between two rival factions of robots/androids where Raye and Roze are the only two human beings left.

Or the context of certain scenes depicted in some cards like ‘Sky Striker Mobilize – Linkage!’ being massively changed. Or in the case of one monster, ‘Surgical Striker – H.A.M.P.’ not appearing the manga at all.

Now on the one hand, just from looking at the new ‘Sky Striker’s Burden’ Solo-Mode story in Master Duel, which CLEARLY seems to be composed entirely of clips and screenshots from the upcoming Chronicles anime, we can see that it is being MUCH more faithful to what we heard about in the sourcebooks and saw with the cards. Which implies that the Chronicles anime is simply going to be a straightforward ‘Truer to the Text’ adaptation.

But on the other hand, we also have an interesting wrinkle to all this.

Namely that a sizable chunk of Sky Striker cards, effectively the entire ‘second wave’ of support for the archetype, are based on characters and events FROM the OCG Stories manga.

So that raises the question of how exactly the Chronicles anime is going to handle this adaptation?

Are they going to focus entirely on the ‘original’ Sky Striker elements and fully ignore anything and anyone introduced in the manga? Notably, in the Master Duel story mode we actually see ALL of the ‘first wave’ of Sky Striker cards represented in one way or another, while getting no sign of any of the manga cards.

Or might we see characters and elements from the manga tweaked and ‘reverse-adapted’ back into this version? In the first clip we DO repeatedly see Raye accompanied by a pair of robot buddies who could conceivably be retooled version of Aileron and Pylon, Raye’s training buddies/surrogate-younger-siblings in the manga. In which case we could likewise see human versions of Ciela, Akash and Himmel as Raye’s caretakers/handlers/mentors.

Though there is one thing I think we can be pretty safe in assuming: We are almost certainly getting MORE than just what we see in the cards/sourcebook/manga. As I said, what we see in the Master Duel actually covers ALL of the pre-manga Sky Striker cards, ending with Raye saving Roze from the Zeke module and preparing to face off against a squad of new H.A.M.P. mechs. So unless Master Duel simply recapped everything from Sky Striker that we’re going to see in the Chronicles anime, which I kinda doubt, we will be seeing the story CONTINUED past this point and get genuinely new Sky Striker stuff.

Which I’d say has already been hinted at with the alt-arts we’ve been seeing lately of Raye and Roze fighting together while sharing different components of their equipment.

And why am I so confident in this?

Why, because that would give Konami the excuse to print more Sky Striker cards of course! XD

So I think it is extremely funny/awesome that for the big debut of Konami finally doing an actual 'Yugioh Card-Lore Anime' adaptation, the two stories we are getting are;

What is almost certainly a Yuri Magical-Girl series disguised as a mecha-action show*.

And what is basically a Shoujo-Romance Fantasy Adventure story that people have mistaken for an isekai-esque action show**.

I mean, given what they could have adapted, I just think that's really fun and cool XD

*Which admittedly is still going to have a bunch of mecha-action lol

**Particularly given how Eccelsia and Albaz are shown on the poster in a way that all but states that Eccelsia is meant to be the actual protagonist.

You know I feel like nothing sums up my relationship with Yugioh quite like my reaction and ‘priorities’ towards the first look at a card like ‘Prototype Sky Striker Ace – Amatsu’. If you look at the comments on that page and almost certainly any others featuring this, you’ll find basically everyone commenting with theories on what this card might do. Or just bitching/moaning/whining about Sky Striker being popular.

As for me? Yeah, frankly I couldn’t care less about any of that and would MUCH rather analyze the artwork and theorize about the implications it might have on the lore. ESPECIALLY in regards to what this might mean for what we could see in the Sky Strikers anime coming out next month.

So let’s do that XD

The first thing that sticks out to me is that we can see that Amatsu is the long-alluded-to ‘X-001’ armor among Raye’s combat modes, with the other four LINK monsters we’ve had up to now being labeled 002-005.

Design-wise, Amatsu definitely seems to be following the classic ‘Super Prototype’ school of thought seen in countless mecha anime. In that it’s basically a mashup of all four subsequent models. We can see one of Shizuku’s shields on the left shoulder, Kagari’s sword on the right arm, a cannon reminiscent of Hayate’s sniper rifle on the right shoulder, and one of Kaina’s claws on the left arm. I have to assume Amatsu is meant to be the ‘too awesome to use’ prototype.

Amatsu is also a whole lot bigger than the later models. If we look closely, we can actually see what seems to be Raye plugged into the chest, making Amatsu a proper mech rather than power armor. Even more interesting, this almost certainly makes Amatsu Raye’s counterpart to Roze’s Zeke mech, though Zeke is notably a LINK-2 as opposed to Amatsu being a LINK-1. Which could have all sorts of fun lore implications like Zeke potentially have been directly based on Amatsu.

I do think it’s kinda weird that Amatsu is a DARK monster instead of LIGHT, as that would have both neatly rounded out Raye’s forms covering all six attributes (Raye herself being DARK and her other armored forms being WATER, FIRE, WIND and EARTH), as well as making Amatsu a nice contrast with Zeke being DARK.

Finally, there is the timing of this reveal, particularly that the rest of the card info will be revealed next month. Like I have no doubt that we will be seeing Amatsu in the anime. All of the alternate artworks we’ve been getting recently have been seemingly taking place after the events of ‘Sky Striker Mobilize – Linkage’, showing Raye and Roze fighting together with a mishmash of Raye’s Sky Striker equipment, presumably against the squad of H.A.M.P. mechs we saw at the end of the preview clips released in Master Duel last month. So maybe this is also when Raye decides to break out Amatsu as well?

Should be fun, and gets me all the more hyped for whatever we might see in Chronicles this year.

It’s funny, for all that I’ve gotten interested in Yu-Gi-Oh! the card game and all it’s intricacies and playstyles over the last year and some change, when you get down to it, that’s all really a secondary interest to what I’m REALLY interested in:

All the characters, stories and lore behind these cards, and the hope that we might get some kickass animes made out of them XD

You might say “Raye and Roze did a fusion dance.”

I say “What if she’s their daughter from the future?” XD

It's just funny to think that if you want to play a yuri deck in YuGiOh! you got OPTIONS.

I haven't played in a while but I absolutely loved the Labrynth deck.

Demon queen loving to play cat and mouse games with little miss knight.

Arias is really hot too 😳

the reason "robot racism" is often a really stupid metaphor is the same reason that like. discrimination against demons or vampires or whatever doesn't work, is because there's often a pretty justified reasons humans are scared of vampires or robots or whatever, in a way that doesn't apply to real life minorities, like a fantasy author will be like "the reason vampires are discriminated against is because most of them and kill and eat people for fun and pleasure, and so humans respond by trying to kill them, isn't that so sad" and like no that's a perfectly fine reason to not trust vampires i think.

sci-fi writers will be like "every robot on earth randomly decided to kill all humans for no real reason, and now people don't trust robots, and this is a metaphor for racism" and like no you just wrote a metaphor for white people actually.

i have midterms tomorrow and here i am 

Happy 10 year to Ponyo loves Revolution

may we all live and love as a form of revolution for another 10 year

reverse gatekeeping. I am on my knees begging people to engage with the source material