Yu-Gi-Oh! The non-airing season in Japan is also the anime’s weirdest, shifting the focus from card games to Pokemon-style adventures.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is an incredibly weird show, but surprisingly its weirdest season never aired in Japan. This is shocking since the rest of the series aired in Japan before it was shown internationally, but the US anime’s dub company commissioned a special season for international release only. Far from being one of the show’s best moments, this US season has changed the series’ winning formula in confusing ways.
4Kids Entertainment named Yu-Gi-Oh! in the US, and for all of that dub’s flaws, it’s generally been well received. While other 4Kids dub shows like One Piece have completely altered the anime to moderate it for Western audiences, the over-the-top nature of Yu-Gi-Oh! Camping style. This is part of what made the show so popular in the US and may also have been a factor in 4Kids’ decision to actually put a whole new season of the show overseas. Fit for a season voiced solely by 4Kids, it’s far more exotic than any other season of Yu-Gi-Oh! that came before it.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters is weirder than any other season
This part is called Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters and it doesn’t quite fit into the show’s overall timeline. In it, Yugi and his friends win a trip to India, where they stumble across a mystical game in a magical temple. The game is similar to Pokémon in that the characters travel across different fantasy worlds to collect capsules with monsters inside that they can use. Each world has some kind of puzzle to figure out or challenge to overcome, and after completing this the party can move on to the next level. At the end of all that, Yugi and his friends discover that the events of the season were orchestrated by Alexander the Great, whom they must defeat in order to leave.
This is super weird and even barely related to the overall plot of Yu-Gi-Oh! it’s him. While the Capsule Monsters that Yugi and his friends collect are based on monsters from the game Duel Monsters, they are used for a different purpose here. Other than that, this part adds nothing to the overall plot or arc of the characters. While the anime has had other spin-offs such as Virtual World and Awakening the Dragons, those seasons have at least developed the characters of Yu-Gi-Oh! in fascinating ways. In Capsule Monsters, Yugi and his friends could be characters from a completely different show without affecting the story.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters never aired in Japan
This may be the reason why Capsule Monsters was never released in Japan, as it was Yu-Gi-Oh! season in the name only. But while this part may not have had a broader impact on the plot, it’s still an interesting movie to see how weird it is. Yu-Gi-Oh! fans owe it to themselves to watch the series’ weirdest season, even if it never aired in Japan.