So, after Toei’s anime was cancelled after adapting the first seven volumes like total spazzes, Konami and Nihon Ad Systems decided to make their own Yu-Gi-Oh! adaptation two years later. Only this adaptation was made to be a pure advertisement for their card game. This was their plan: skip the first seven volumes of the manga, remove everything unrelated to Duel Monsters before and after (or make them related), and go straight to the first story arc where Duel Monsters take center stage as the main game – Duelist Kingdom. King of “Games”, my ass.
Problem is, it doesn’t completely skip the first seven volumes, per se. They decided to mesh up elements from the early manga and re-imagine them in their Duel Monsters-centric anime (such as characters), creating one of the worst introduction sagas in an anime to ever hit television. Ever. To name one, Seto Kaiba, the #1 gamer in Japan and poster boy for Magic & Wizards (as the card game is called in the Japanese manga), had his whole arc rewritten as the first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters.
Basically, the whole first episode is a “kitbash” of his two introduction chapters from the manga and the Death-T saga, a story revolving around his “amusement” park of deadly games – all designed to kill Yuugi and his friends in the name of vengeance. Needless to say, skipping seven volume’s worth of details and rewriting one volume’s worth of events into one anime episode will always result in one thing:
Total. BS.
