Thread: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal

When you get to OP 3 and ED 3, those do the same sort of thing, so be on the look-out for added characters. ^^

Of course, you're a ways off from that. XD (They start episode 50)

Originally Posted by FinalArcadia

The one thing I'm really hoping for is that Konami will finally release some DVDs for 5D's and Zexal, preferably with both the English dub and a sub of the Japanese. I realize that they probably either a) don't think it would sell enough to bother or b) the people buying it don't care if subs are there or not, but it would be a nice change from 4Kids.

And if they did release DVDs, and did it in a way where it was in 13 episode chunks or so, I would be incredibly pleased.

If Konami could market it in the right places and advertise well on websites, I think it could justify a release.

DVD releases with both the dub and sub would be pretty cool, especially when 5D's never got a DVD release at all. They would probably be more interested in selling Zexal DVDs more than of the any other series and I don't know how likely it is that they would include both versions on the DVD. They might not think it would warrant an inclusion on the DVDs if its up online and that there wouldn't be enough demand for it to make up for the extra expense it would take to include both versions on a DVD release. It would be nice to buy some Yu-Gi-Oh! DVDs again and they could do a better job advertising it. Personally, I'm hoping that they release the anniversary movie, so that I don't have to try importing one and I think 4Kids was trying to get it released here before their legal/financial problems with the license came up.

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

*skipping all the spoilers because I'm only on ep 19*

Why did the ending get updated to give Kotori a kimono?

My guess is because they wanted to make her look cuter. That's basically her role in the show, along with looking scared and crying out Yuma's name every chance that she gets.

Yeah, she's a lot like Winry in that sense, but more toned down and even more helpless. Although I tend to like those characters. While comic relife character annoy me, Sokka from A:TLA comes to mind.

The odd thing is, Kotori is my favorite main female protagonist out of any Yu-Gi-Oh! series.

Even though she doesn't duel, I still get a real sense of personality from her, and she gets enough screen-time as it is without even dueling. Her strong-willed, blunt personality is a nice change from Aki, who I found to be incredibly boring, especially the longer 5D's continued.

Anzu and Asuka were also just incredibly dull to me. Their role as "love interest" was almost too pushed, whereas with Kotori, it doesn't seem sudden or overly shown.

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

Yeah, she's a lot like Winry in that sense, but more toned down and even more helpless. Although I tend to like those characters. While comic relife character annoy me, Sokka from A:TLA comes to mind.

I'm not sure if I'd compare the two. I agree that she's even more helpless, but with Winry, she actually had some kind of impact on the storyline beyond being the obvious love interest for the main lead. I don't think that's happened with Kotori yet. You can cut her out of a good chuck of episodes as the series progresses, especially in the WDC, and nothing would be drastically different or lost.

Originally Posted by FinalArcadia

The odd thing is, Kotori is my favorite main female protagonist out of any Yu-Gi-Oh! series.

Even though she doesn't duel, I still get a real sense of personality from her, and she gets enough screen-time as it is without even dueling. Her strong-willed, blunt personality is a nice change from Aki, who I found to be incredibly boring, especially the longer 5D's continued.

Anzu and Asuka were also just incredibly dull to me. Their role as "love interest" was almost too pushed, whereas with Kotori, it doesn't seem sudden or overly shown.

I feel the complete opposite about the character. Kotori is easily my least favorite of the main female characters. Her personality is so boring to me. Nothing about her really stands out beyond her role as the token female lead/best friend/obvious love interest to the main lead and even then, I've seen other better characters in that role, even in previous series. All of her screentime is basically being Yuma's personal cheerleader and basically his shadow. We don't know anything about her as an individual, but only through her relationship to Yuma, which makes her like an extremely flat and boring character. Admittedly, this is a flaw that I think most of Yuma's friends share as we don't see them as individual characters so much as we do see them as Yuma's circle of friends. It really doesn't help Kotori out when she been in every single episode and she hasn't made nearly as much of an impact on the storyline to be in so many episodes.

As for Aki, I thought that she was really interesting during the first two arcs of 5D's. She had more personality than the last female lead, was clearly the best female duelist and had more depth with her conflicts and backstory. But that all kind of disappeared after the Dark Signer arc and she became a much less interesting character as a result of that. She's my favorite of the female leads, but I agree that she did become boring after the Dark Signer arc. Anzu was okay. She was basically Kotori done right in my opinion. She was the obvious love interest, but she also did a better job as person who helped keep the group together, as I rarely see Kotori interacting with anyone who isn't Yuma or Tetsuo, and she did seem more like an individual wit having her own goal. It wasn't really focused on that much at all, but the fact that she just had one makes her more of an individual character than Kotori. I wasn't a huge fan of her character, but she was okay. As for Asuka, before Kotori, she was easily my least favorite out of the female leads. She had potential with being the first female duelist in a main cast and the whole searching for her brother, but that quickly disappeared with her dull personality, rarely dueling, although that happened for most of the GX characters that weren't Judai, and not being that involved with helping her brother.

In terms of being love interests, I think that they focused on Anzu going back and forth between liking Yugi and Atem for an internal conflict in her character, especially near the end of the series, but I didn't have too much of a problem with it. I never really cared much for Asuka's role as Judai's love interest since I didn't think that they clicked much beyond friends. It was pretty obvious, although the dub made it even more apparent, but I thought it toned down as the series progressed, especially season three, even though she was absent for a good chuck of that season. With Kotori, it doesn't feel sudden because it was established from the first episode that she liked Yuma. Just the expression on her face while he's explaining his key and catchphrase to her is more than enough to show that she likes him. It feels like they are pushing that she clearly likes him more than they did with Anzu and Asuka, but to be fair, it might just feel like that because prior to the semi-finals, they were rarely apart and she's become his shadow during this tournament. Though, I honestly can't understand why one girl would have a crush on Yuma, let alone three. He's pretty annoying and is so stupid that he didn't know what clothes he was wearing for days until he looked in the mirror. Though, given how the audience for the WDC have acted since the finals started, maybe everyone in Heartland isn't that bright. It honestly would explain a few things for me.

Originally Posted by Hidden Mew

Though, I honestly can't understand why one girl would have a crush on Yuma, let alone three.

I've actually wondered the same thing, to be honest. XD

While I do actually like Yuma, I have a hard time believing that he'd be in such demand to the girls. Especially with how oblivious he is to such things.

@Hidden Mew; True, but that was the only basis of comparison I could think of at the moment. XD But I have seen people say that Winry is arguably the most useless character in FMA(B). Which I don't really believe. I doesn't help that I tend to fanboy over her. ^^;

Anyway, I looked at some of the dub titles compaired to the original and most of them are just "Bland title Part 1 & 2". And then I tried watching the first ep dubbed. I turned it off when I heard Yuma's voice. I also got mad at the OP, it annoys me when dubs make new OPs. And then I saw a dub change that kind of made an inconsistency. Although I may try it again to hear Astral's dub voice.

I only watch the dub for laughs. Seriously. While it has a couple of good voices (Kaito, Astral, Takashi), I can't completely take the dub seriously.

But some of the ridiculously stupid one-liners make it worth it anyway. XD

Originally Posted by FinalArcadia

I've actually wondered the same thing, to be honest. XD

While I do actually like Yuma, I have a hard time believing that he'd be in such demand to the girls. Especially with how oblivious he is to such things.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one confused about that. I know that it's typical for young male leads to be kind of oblivious, especially when it comes to love, and Judai was pretty clueless about that too, but Yuma is clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, so seeing him get his own harem of love interests doesn't make sense to me. At least when Jack got his own harm of love interests, he was already a famous professional duelist and he was awesome. Even though he shouldn't have had love interests fighting over him when he clearly loved only Carly, but it still made so much more sense than Yuma getting three girls that clearly like him for some odd reason.

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

@Hidden Mew; True, but that was the only basis of comparison I could think of at the moment. XD But I have seen people say that Winry is arguably the most useless character in FMA(B). Which I don't really believe. I doesn't help that I tend to fanboy over her. ^^;

I can kind of understand where people would be coming from with that argument, but I don't really buy it either. If anything, I'd lean more towards the chimeras for that category.

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

Anyway, I looked at some of the dub titles compaired to the original and most of them are just "Bland title Part 1 & 2". And then I tried watching the first ep dubbed. I turned it off when I heard Yuma's voice. I also got mad at the OP, it annoys me when dubs make new OPs. And then I saw a dub change that kind of made an inconsistency. Although I may try it again to hear Astral's dub voice.

That's normally how they handle dub titles for episodes that last for more than an episode. I'm just kind of used to it. Yuma voice sounded okay to me in the first episode, but then it quickly started to be annoying, which actually kind of mirrors my feelings towards the character when I first started to watch the original version oddly enough. I forgot about the opening. It's pretty bad. It's poorly edited with random pictures, most of which don't really fit the song, and the lyrics are pretty bland and boring. The openings for the other series were kind of cool, or at least had some decent amount of enthusiasm. Hyper Drive, the dub opening to 5D's, is catchy and has a nice beat. This is just weak. As for a dub changes, 4Kids had done a lot of unnecessary edits that creates inconsistencies later on. One of them that stood out to me in this Zexal was with Shark being banned for life from tournaments for "cheating", despite how it was clearly a setup, when it was only a year in the original version. Not only does that create the issue of Shark participating in the WDC, but it just sounds ridiculous. Now, if it was something like what Tokunosuke did twice in the WDC arc, then that would be different and in fact, that should have actually happened to Tokunosuke. It would have been much more satisfying than what actually did happen to him.

Astral's dub voice is easily the best out of the cast. The calm, cool and collected tone works pretty well with the character. It's too bad that Shark doesn't have a good voice for the dub. It started to sound better during his tag duel with Yuma, but then with his next appearance, it didn't work for me. To be fair, having a ten episode gap in-between his appearances probably didn't help. I watch the dub for the heck of it and I'm just used to watching the 4Kids version of the different series at this point. I still really wish I started watching both versions with 5D's instead, but I'm glad that I eventually did start watching the original version as I was getting tired of each dub being incomplete after DM.

I also don't get Yuma's mini harem.

Yuma isn't exactly deserving of a "mini harem". One girl would be okay, but not like, three. XD

I'm slightly surprised that there wasn't any excitement over III and his brothers finally waking up from their comas. Though, my attention was focused more on Tron. I felt kind of bad for him, even with everything he's done. Despite being cruel and hurting everyone around him, I thought that he actually had a justified reason for going after Dr. Faker. He did basically destroy Tron's live, along with his sons indirectly, and at this point, I still wish he was the final villain instead of Dr. Faker. Considering that Tron has had much more focus and a stronger presence in the show, it does feel like he fits that role much better than Dr. Faker does.

Though, I've been thinking about one aspect of Yuma that really annoys me. It's his outlook on dueling. He claims that after he duels someone, they're friends. I'm sure that this is supposed to be taken as sweet, but it comes off as ridiculously naive to me. Friendship is a major theme to this franchise and dueling causing people to be friends can and has happened, but he's saying that regardless of the nature of the duel or the nature of the person, having a duel automatically makes them friends. This has been a problem to me with the start when he said that about Shark, but it just gets worse with every other character he claims is his friend like with Kaito and I think III. It just makes him look more stupid if he honestly believes that he's friends with characters like Kaito and ignores anything horrible they've said or done to him and/or his friends just because they had a duel. Plus, it can make him look more self-centered to me, such as when Yuma got upset after Shark vs. III not because of his friends being sent to the hospital or that these Number cards are putting people's lives in danger, but because Shark was going against his dueling philosophy. I see where they're trying to go with it and to be fair, it kind of makes sense to have an easily forgiving character in a storyline that revolves around revenge, but I think that they could have done this in a way that doesn't make Yuma look more annoying and naive to me.

I know I was excited to see the Tron brothers up again~ Yaaaay! And yeah, I feel bad for Tron.

Hmm.... Well, I do think that is naive, but I can't really dislike it. X3

So... the dub voices for IV and Tron?

I'm really liking Tron's... It's very cute. XD Thank god it's not like Lucciano's or whatever his name is from 5DS. ._.

I don't have much to say for IV's.... Other than that it sounds extremely familiar, but I just can't think of what it reminds me of.

Yeah, Tron's is pretty adorable. X3 But I also liked Lucciano's... XD

I don't think IV's voice fits him at all in the dub. Too sane and normal sounding. I just don't like it very much... IV deserves a better voice.