Anyway, today had no title reveals, and I'm not really expecting the August TCG set's title to be revealed this week, though that might still happen.

There likely won't be a Twitter reveal this week, since there are only 3 cards to showcase from Duelists of Brilliance (LIGHT Duelist Pack), so we will have to wait for the next week.

So yeah, we are done with YGO for the week for now.

I guess I can talk about the Takato/Juri relationship, but Konaka flip-flops with it, and given the later canon stories he wrote for Tamers timeline, I'm pretty sure he felt rather disappointed that he didn't default for the main guy/main girl ship with Takato/Ruki. Kind of shame really, considering how well the relationship is written.

Also, though Konaka put lots of thought to Ruki's character for the early part of Tamers, it seems some of the remaining resentment from Adventure 02's production left their mark, since he didn't realize her initial arc is kind of a speed-run of Ken's Kaiser storyline. This gets funnier since due to executive meddling, we insert Ryo to Ruki's story, just like how we did with Ken.

In the same vein, given Willis's later characterization in the 02 post-canon stuff, I wonder if there was some weird cross-pollination between his character, and Jiangliang's. Jiangliang's later characterization in the aforementioned post-canon Tamers works is quite different, so I suspect there has been some cross-pollination, but that didn't stick of course.

Of course, we may need to discuss about Guilmon. Its design was made way before Tamers, during Adventure 02 era, same as other main Digimon (of course, besides Impmon, rest of the partner Digimon are straight up Adventure era Digimon that didn't get much screentime, so Toei could reap the merch, and use old character reference artwork). However, in-canon its design is humorous, since it is literally an older-looking Agumon, but with Devilman wing ears, and Unit-01-like Berserk Mode. Of course, as others noted, it is indeed one of the edgy Virus-Types, used by the Adventure villains, and Ken's partner Wormmon. Considering Devilman inspiration for most Devil Man Digimon, this implies Takato reads Go Nagai's very erotic stuff, and outside of his friend circle, is actually an edgelord. He is truly the Digimon fanbase's collective manifestation.

Another thing, though the Dub is more explicit about this, Takato, and to a lesser extent, his friend group, are supposed to represent the cross-media aspect of Digimon, specifically the animé, and toy merch, similar to how Ruki represents the TCG, and Jiangliang represents the video game part. JesuOtaku's commentary would give you to wrong idea, as it is true that there are no explicit references to Adventure besides Hirokazu's shirt (and Cathode Tamer reference in the Japanese original), but it is pretty obvious that is what being referenced. The fact that they don't explicitly reference Adventure is a good thing, though, since otherwise the cast would be too savy about the upcoming events (and basically undo most of the plot before it occurs), but there would be big continuity flub with Ryo, bigger than the currently existing one. (Ryo was planned to be added to third series beforehand, but Konaka's statements imply he didn't initially know this, so this obscuring of Adventure references was likely not planned in advance.)

That said, if by random chance they gave the option of making a Tamers reboot to Atsuhiro Tomioka, I can immediately expect for him to make an entire season about these weird continuity flubs, and make Tamers gang too genre savy, only for them stumble into weirder stuff, turning Tamers from Evangelion for Kids to RahXephon for Kids. (Also Tomioka would probably give all the Devas their Ultimate/Mega forms to match Andiramon, just like how he expanded various antagonist Digimon lines in the Adventure reboot.)

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Another thing to notice, which we briefly mentioned, is of course Guilmon's creation is directly reused by YGO GX for Neos cards' creation. I don't know how much of a popular trope this was in 2000s, the fans of the franchise bringing their OCs into their reality to become major parts of franchise in-universe, since both YGO, and Digimon utilize a lot of fan art contests for making new cards, obviously less so these days, due to legal complications.

Big difference, of course, Guilmon was designed as the protagonist partner Digimon way before Tamers was greenlit, whereas Neos, and its associated cards were designed in part to look like a fan's creation, with Neo-Spacians referencing DC's Super-Friends alongside various older animé, and Western Animations, and Neos predominantly referencing Ultraman in-universe, despite being conceptually, and visually based off Guyver.

Anyway, given the fact that most of Action Cards in ARC-V are similar to early first iteration of Digimon TCG (there are multiple iterations of Digimon TCG, you see) in being rather small buffs, I'm fairly certain that their initial concept was inspired heavily by Tamers, given other Tamers inspirations in ARC-V as well.

Thankfully, Action Cards would eventually progress into more complex effects seen in proper YGO cards, so people wouldn't catch on to this.

And as I discussed elsewhere, Ursula's Gabite's Stone Edge animation is based off Renamon's Koyousetsu attack, which is rather amusing considering Atsuhiro Tomioka, main writer of Diamond & Pearl, later became the main writer for Adventure reboot. All according to keikaku etc.

Either way, always remember to take from the best.

That said, I now wonder how much KH2's prologue's inspiration was actually from Matrix, and Tron, and how much was from other stuff like .hack, and Tamers.

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Another topic, the card reader of the Tamers Digivices is obviously inspired by the card reader mechanics popular at the time, but the most common variant of that, e-Reader, was more prominent with Pokémon, which never did anything with the concept in non-video game stuff, and most of the additional stuff you could get with e-Readers in games (particularly in Pokémon Emerald) were limited to Japanese players.

I don't know if any of the V-Pets did mechanics with this, though I would suspect some of the Tamers era toys had mechanics with the card game.

(Digimon World 3 has the Card Game minigame as a prominent part of the game, but that is a bit different.)

This is somewhat amusing retrospect, not just because of the card reader aspect, but also due to the fact that popularity of Digimon TCG had ups, and downs, but it is now the most internationally popular aspect of the franchise, far more so than animé proper, and that popularity basically came out of nowhere, while Vanguard, and YGO were busy fighting each other.

Another to thing to add, I'm surprised that ignoring Nintendo's amiibo there isn't many Japanese developers that are interested in reviving this mechanic with NFCs, or ideally, QR codes. This is unlikely to happen to YGO, since being based off Konami's older video games, OCG already has the password mechanic, but other franchises can utilize this. Of course, due to modern demands, it would have to be a some sort of mobile game that could be ported to Android TVs, since modern console developers are becoming more, and more hostile for third-party developers, and trying to assume direct control over their second-party developers, simply to execute power, not realizing this excess stress is causing developers to produce less polished stuff.

(And if any developer is reading this, avoid official digital stores, the rents are simply too high for a project like this. Just let people install the APK directly from your site.)

I will probably continue to talk about Digimon a while, but I kind of find interesting that there is an interesting point of confluence between YGO, and Kingdom Hearts.

In all three franchises, the first three series, or in KH's case, the first three games take praise, or attention, whereas the latter series don't get as much attention.

In think this similarity is largely due to respective endings of the series, which is part of why I won't praising Adventure reboot, and Ghost Game despite the involvement of our Lord, and Saviour Atsuhiro Tomioka, since from what can I tell, both series had very rushed, largely unplanned endings, largely due to TV Tokyo's insane policies.

Also somewhat interesting that all original trios have a series, or game that is considered as the awkward middle child in them (02, CoM, GX), though reasons for those are more complex, and heterogenous. This is of course amusing to me, since those are my personal favourites, or in CoM's case, among my favourites.

Among them, I would say Digimon probably fares the best, since Frontier, Savers, and original Xros Wars have a lot dedicated fans, followed by KH since Days, and BBS are still praised well, and Re:Coded is praised not for its story, but its tight gameplay.

Either way, inability for the latter entries to a sufficent ending seems to be real Achilles Heel here. Having a good story that has a bad ending means the entire story proper will be spoiled, but a good story can handle a below average ending, and a below average story can be elevated with a good ending. So it seems the Yoko Taro approach of writing story backwards seems to be optimal route for long-running franchises (which to be fair, in the case of Digimon, seems to be how both Ryo's WonderSwan games, and Hacker's Memory went with their writing approach).

Starting a casual watch of Tamers, immediately I was reminded of one of the things that weirds me out, which is the term for Blue Cards, Blue no Card. Coming from ARC-V which was written at a time when younger Japanese audiences were more familiar with English, and other major European languages, it will continue to rub me wrong that the cards are not simply called "Blue Card"s.

I suspect this might an intentional pun though, since Blue no Card, ie. Card of Blue, sounds similar to Card out of the blue, which makes sense considering these are literally intentional Deus ex Machina devices, made by entities that would be considered heavenly by the specific lore of Tamers universe.

Another thing, I suspect part of the reason why Anglophone audiences prefer the dub over sub is likely due to Toei's preference for casting female voice actresses instead of male voice actors for main goggle boys (a recurring trend for all of the Toei works, and the reason why Goku, and his sons have female VAs in Japanese), which often causes for more sexual tension to be projected by the audince between the main character, and their Blue Ranger, over their dedicated romantic interest, and except for partially the original Adventure, Savers, and Hunters, there is always a dedicated romantic interest. It should be obvious why it is difficult to showcase believable romantic tension between two straight female VAs over two VAs of opposite gender.

(YGO generally intentionally avoids by casting young sounding male voice actors for main male protagonists (both in Japanese original, and English dub), and relegating masculine sounding female characters to minor antagonists.)

(Counter example would be some of the earlier black-and-white movies, which often casted not-so-closted gay, and lesbian in heterosexual relationships. Needless to say, they were as convincing the romantic tension between two female VAs, ie. not that much, despite the fact many of those actors were clearly more talented their contemporary examples.)

(Conversely, this is why a lot of 2000s romantic shows/movies actively tried force the main actors to be in a relationship, and many magazines often spread rumors of such a relationship occuring, since that would make the relationship more convincing. This is part of original Raimi trilogy, and The Amazing Spider-Man have good chemistry between main actors, since in both cases there were actual real life relationships going between actors, even if they obviously didn't last.

I can't imagine any teen, and child actor having fun in this period though, being shipped IRL seems like the worst experience possible.)

Anyway, Spectre coming to Duel Links means we will likely get remaining VRAINS Decks in future special sets, since Animation Chronicles are too short in slots to feature the larger Decks.

Most likely Blood Shepherd will be next, but Lightning might wait until after April 2026 due to Link Spells. In which case we will likely have Windy before Lightning.

As we discussed before, it will take an even longer time for Bohman, and Haru's Decks to be printed, but they are not a priority comparatively.

May Duel Links unlock is confirmed to be Spectre.

This means next VRAINS unlock (most likely for August) will be Akira, and next month's update will likely be DSoD Honda, so I guess it will take a while to get to Vector, and Utopia Ray Victory.

Final card for Infinite Forbidden is here, it is a Continuous Spell.

Next week will likely not have any major reveals.

5 of the 6 remaining cards are:

**An Equip Spell

**A Spellcaster Tuner

**A Winged Beast Tuner

**A Continuous Spell

**A generic Beast.

It will take a while for final card to show up.

Edit:

Corrected the last link, and the translations are here:

Infinite Forbidden Twitter reveal schedule:

Pre-release week 1: Wednesday (27 March, 2024)

Pre-release week 2: Wednesday (3 April, 2024)

Pre-release week 3: Wednesday (10 April, 2024), Saturday (13 April, 2024), Sunday (14 April, 2024)

Pre-release week 4: Wednesday (17 April, 2024), Saturday (20 April, 2024), Sunday (21 April, 2024)

Release week: Monday (22 April, 2024), Tuesday (23 April, 2024), Wednesday (24 April, 2024)

Edit: This was in my drafts, but now that pre-release reveals are over, it is now posted.

Anyway, since the next set for Duel Links has Arc Rebellion Xyz Dragon, here's the list of Series 11 cover cards that are not yet in Duel Links:

Lightning Overdrive: Ultimate Dragonic Utopia Ray

Dawn of Majesty: Shooting Majestic Star Dragon

Burst of Destiny: Borrelcode Dragon

Battle of Chaos: Master of Chaos

Dimension Force: Odd-Eyes Pendulumgraph Dragon

Power of the Elements: Elemental HERO Shining Neos Wingman

Darkwing Blast: Black-Winged Assault Dragon

Photon Hypernova: Number C62: Neo Galaxy-Eyes Prime Photon Dragon

Cyberstorm Access: Firewall Dragon Singularity

Dennis doesn't have many lines for characters, but he has lines for Yuri.

Today's reveals are new Illusion cards.

This batch features our first Illusion Link Monster, and our first Illusion Trap Monster.

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With this, all of Infinite Forbidden's pre-release reveals are over.

There are 6 cards remaining, and the last card from commercial, which will wait for 26th April, 2024.

The remaining 6 cards are 3 Main Deck Monsters, and 3 Spells.

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With this, we are only missing an Illusion Pendulum, and an Illusion Ritual. Illusion Pendulum might wait for until next Yuya support, and Illusion Ritual might wait until next Pegasus retrains.

We will discuss what else is missing when those come.

Today's reveal is the Normal Trap that leaked a while ago. Forced Katakana reading of the Normal Trap that leaked a while ago is Dominus Purge.

Tomorrow should be the last card from the commercial.

Edit:

Translation is here.

Rewatching JebZone's KH3 video, apparently during the final cutscene of base KH3, when Riku talks about going back to Yen Sid to find out what to do for Kairi, Roxas has a little head nod.

Because of everyone just kind of idling, I didn't notice this, but it is cool. Kind of a cool character development showcase for both Riku, and Roxas, and constrasts nicely with Sora's current situation with the context of Roxas's foolhardy attempt to use Kingdom Hearts to bring back Xion at the end of Days.

Anyway, since Infinite Forbidden had a Level 12 Drytron, and Legacy of Destruction had a Level 12 Centur-Ion, I guess Rage of the Abyss will have another Level 12, or Rank 12 Trancendosaur.

Messing around with Paint a bit, apparently the card layout for Rank stars makes it impossible for 14th star to be added, even though there is theoretically enough space, since first Rank star is a bit more near than first Level star.

Conversely, a Level 13 is somewhat possible, but unlikely, since the 13th star moves out of the bounds of the card name box. You can actually add a 14th Level star, but it would have to be before the first.

Either way, this means Rank 13 is highest limit we can achieve for a while.

Also, this strongly suggests that my assumption of Shin Yoshida suggesting this beforehand might be true.