Ever since Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series by LittleKuriboh came out, it seems like every semi-popular 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 LittleKuriboh’s wit and dry British humor is the whole reason abridged series even work. Making fun of the silly stuff that happens in the show he’s abridging works because the actual show is hard to watch—especially these days.

In theory, this Yu-Gi-Oh! 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 they’re on the field. There’s a reason that, despite all the meta changes, people always find a way to casually play Dark Magician or Blue-Eyes 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, Yu-Gi-Oh! 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, there’s a lot of cheesy power-of-friendship stuff, which isn’t 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 development—mostly related to Joey/Jonouchi and Mai.

Unfortunately, this Yu-Gi-Oh! series fumbles in a lot of important ways, which makes it hard for me to recommend in its original form, whether that’s the Japanese version or the English dub.

Since the anime was meant to sell the trading card game, you’d think it would actually follow the rules—but instead, the characters constantly do things that you can’t 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 couldn’t 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 show—like 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 straight-up bad cards that it’s 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 isn’t that interesting. Yugi/Yami Yugi is your typical overpowered shounen protagonist, Téa/Anzu and Honda/Tristan are literally just boring cheerleaders, and Kaiba and Yami Bakura are funny mostly because they’re cheesy over-the-top 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 long-running series stay consistently entertaining—stuff like DBZ and One Piece.

Meanwhile, Yu-Gi-Oh! 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, there’s way too much filler slice-of-life episodes, weird side plots, or even entire filler arcs (Noah Kaiba’s arc was especially egregious since it literally interrupted the Battle City finals, one of the few consistently good arcs in the series).

I’m all for series not taking themselves too seriously, but Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Season 1 constantly mixes serious psychological character development with cheesy friendship speeches and crazy magic… all for a trading card game. It’s really hard to take seriously, especially with how ridiculously slow-paced some episodes and arcs are.

LittleKuriboh’s Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged didn’t help, but these days, it’s hard to unironically enjoy the original show. It’s 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 Yu-Gi-Oh! fans only. Casuals would probably have a better time with later Yu-Gi-Oh! series that actually follow the game’s rules and have faster-paced, more interesting stories.

If you just want to see how ridiculous the plot and characters get, just watch LittleKuriboh’s Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged on YouTube. He somehow still hasn’t finished it as of 2025, and at this rate, he probably won’t finish the entire series until the 2030s. But it’s a much quicker and much more entertaining way to enjoy the trading card game monsters aspect of this show.