This is kinda a bizarre take. The original manga had the main character literally kill people via molotovs and just shooting them in the head with a gun when they lost a "penalty game," and they played a bunch of different games. It was supposed to be like "what if you challenged the devil to play DnD? Or Magic the Gathering?" Then they made the anime but toned it down and turned it into a vehicle to sell the knockoff Magic cards, refocusing the show specifically on the one game, and then 4kids toned it down even further when they dubbed it.
True. And what my post is trying to get across is that clearly Yu-Gi-Oh!'s cultural relevance and popularity was at its peak when 4Kids was at the helm, toning it down. Whether or not someone enjoys the OG Yu-Gi-Oh! manga or any of the OG unotuched Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh! animes is personal preference; but it's undeniable Yu-Gi-Oh! peaked when 4Kids was in control of it. I personally enjoy every variation of Kazuki Takahashi's OG Yu-Gi-Oh! story for different reasons and recognize that each one has their individual strengths and weaknesses.
The reason the card game turned out the way it did was because initially the cards weren't even designed with actual rules in mind, they were just MTG spoofs. I think the oldest gameboy game actually predates the physical cards and have completely different rules that work more like the Pokemon TCG. That's why the rules are so bizarre, the main one being that monsters have levels 1-8 but functionally there's just three levels: 1-4, 5-6, and 7+ (until later cards started doing things with those levels), and it's why you have cards like Red Eyes Black Dragon that were already outclassed by Blue Eyes White Dragon in every way when it was released. Even the first booster's Secret Rare card isn't as good as the less rare Blue Eyes from the same pack.
Also true. In fact, you touch on an aspect of Yu-Gi-Oh! that I consider incredibly important, SACRED even: Kazuki Takahashi was ALWAYS mixing things up, tweaking things; his passion, as was originally intended, was games at large, he wanted to demonstrate the immense breadth and diversity and fun of all sorts of games. Yes, the Magic rip-off became incredibly popular and he agreed to center that story around it as a result, but he was always tweaking and playing and modifying with what the actual game was in the spirit of F-U-N, and he still managed to squeak in other games like Capsule Monsters into his story.
I believe Yu-Gi-Oh! began losing its way once the experimenting ended, once rules were written down as commandments, once the subsequent stories and video games stopped being exploratory and instead became hard-coded, forced, digital manifestations of what the game developers had decided it would be. If the original spirit and guiding light of F-U-N that Kazuki Takahashi poseesed had been preserved and continued, Yu-Gi-Oh! could today be more than a bunch of competetive mid-20 to mid-30 year old man-children arguing over the semantics of a sentence in a novel-length card text like corporate lawyers; it could have actually been "a children's card game".
The reason the game is the way it is now is also driven by a desire to sell cards: the standard MTG ruleset only allows you to play cards that have been released relatively recently, which is good for MTG because you have to keep buying cards in order to play, and good for the players because you can always get the best legal cards in the game by buying packs that are currently being sold on the shelf. Yu-Gi-Oh has mascots from the anime and whatnot, though, so they don't want to hard cycle out old cards. Instead, there's an enforced powercreep where each new booster has to have cards better than anything else that's ever been released, otherwise there's no reason to buy new boosters. It has a pretty similar effect where most of the best cards are available by buying new packs, but it has the downside that the games get shorter the more cards are released due to the powercreep, to the point where most games typically never get further than turn 3 today.
True again. It was certainly incredibly foolish for the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game to go down that competitve path, or, at least, to EXCLUSIVELY go down that path. There was no reason the card game couldn't have been something that was both competitively
AND CASUALLY enjoyed. In fact, both the Americans and the Japanese have realized this at various points: the TCG between 2012 and 2014 attempted the
Battle Packs campaign (alternate rules for a more casual experience),
Duel Links and later
Speed Duel attempted to simplify the game and manifest something closer to the original fantasy sold by the show. Ultimately, Japan went the route of a whole new game for casuals (and children) via
Rush Duel that the Konami of America seemingly decided never to import to the west. Ultimately, unfortunately, casual Yu-Gi-Oh! is esentially non-existent.
Look what I'm trying to say is: there are many ways to sell cards, because there are many ways to play a card game. Konami ultimately for foolish, short-sighted reasons imo, decided there is only 1 single way to play Yu-Gi-Oh! and therefore they can only sell cards that cater to that single way and its (competitive) players, and as such, they mainly just power-creep and (the TCG) gatekeeps the power-creep behind hard to acquire rarites to force people to buy more product, but it didn't have to be that way, Yu-Gi-Oh! could have been so much more, like Pokemon.
Look at all the ways Pokemon branched off and made games for all kinds of fans, Pokopia for example is nothing like the OG gameboy games, Yugioh could have been similar under better leadership. Pokemon fans don't know how good they got it with Nintendo.
