Yu-Gi-Oh Manga: 320 The Ultimate Shadow RPG!

No no, I can't. I can't make mildly snarky commentary on the nature of this title when there's this racket going on over my head. Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited to have a new roof on the house; we chose a dark green metal one to replace our shingles, which are apparently about 20 years old and are liable to be punctured fairly easily when the surrounding forest drops its branches in heavy winds during fall/winter. With a metal roof, there is VERY little chance we'll have to pay for repairs over the next 30 years, and it's far more environmentally friendly. But right at the moment, I'm getting a bit of a headache from all the banging and clanging above, and I have to frequently comfort poor little Grimalkin, who is huddled in a high corner looking every which way nervously. Who knows what she thinks of all this, probably something akin to the end of the world.

At least this might be a welcome distraction. Slight as that may be. 

As Yami and asshole!Bakura glare at each other over the game table, asshole!Bakura wonders how Yami likes the setting of ancient Egypt for their game, a setting he recreated painstakingly from Yami's own world of reign as pharaoh 3,000 years before. He monologues about how the Millennium Items are artifacts that transcend time, or an eternal vessel for the wielder's memories and soul. As has been demonstrated throughout the comic, I suppose. Asshole!Bakura reiterates that two souls were sealed into the Millennium Puzzle, and both have been released into the little game world he created. They are representatives of light and dark, these souls, with two sets of memories guiding them and the game. 

And given how ZN has already been referred to as the dark evil god, I think our cute symbol-reversal of light being bad and dark being good toward the beginning of the story has been fully flipped now. A shame, really.

Asshole!Bakura asks sardonically who will win the game and survive the World of Memories. Yami is convinced that this has been a trap, a shadow game devised by asshole!Bakura to discover the secrets sealed in the puzzle. He recalls being in the museum with his friends and the moment they were all surrounded by a bright light when he held up the god cards in front of the stone slab. An image of Yuugi falling through a black void is followed by his assertion that he was separated from Yuugi in that second and placed at this table. His hand appears semi-transparent against its edge, so as to make clear that he's not actually in a BODY right now. Free-floating, but there's not really an explanation as to how or why. 

See how massive this place is, and how elaborate its setup? Asshole!Bakura claims this is a hidden room behind the Egyptian exhibit at Domino City Museum. I call BULLSHIT, man. There is no way that this museum is hiding THIS MUCH space behind a single exhibit that can allow for a weird inverted pyramid table over a dark hole in the floor attached to weird throned platforms! I've WORKED in museums, pal, you can't pull this shit on me!

Okay, now that Writch has finished having an apoplectic fit over this impossible space issue, we can move onto the next panel where asshole!Bakura adds that his host's father owns the museum outright. Alright, so daddy bought a museum in which he built a massive room with a strange pit in the center for... reasons? I guess rich people ARE in the habit of doing the weirdest shit, so this isn't completely out of the realm of possibility. Still...

Asshole!Bakura also explains that this diorama they're playing over was created for the ancient Egypt exhibit in the OTHER room, and just when I'm thinking none of this is any handiwork of his as I had supposed before, he amends his statement to say that he'd actually had his host make the diorama in anticipation of their little game here. I guess regular-sized Bakura just THOUGHT he was doing it for the exhibit. Asshole!Bakura encourages some praise of what a good job his host did, as the DESTINED HOST of their thousand-year battle. 

Yeah, I don't know either.

Yami grimaces at asshole!Bakura, calling him a fiend with his accursed ring and asking how much he's going to abuse Bakura before he's finally satisfied. Asshole!Bakura ignores the question, asking Yami if he remembers the little "warm-up" game they'd played together a while back. Yami says he does remember, and puts on something very similar to that shit-eating grin of his I missed so much when he adds that he also recalls the utter humiliation asshole!Bakura faced when he and his friends joined forces to defeat this evil spirit. Chuckling, asshole!Bakura seems to not be bothered at all by this version of events, and says his next explanation should be fairly simple. When he's opened his eyes from his good-natured laugh again, they're wild and psychotic, and he asks Yami if he ALSO remembers how he trapped his friends in the RPG game world before. Yami responds with disbelief, and asshole!Bakura invites him to look off to the side.

I swear, this fucking room just keeps getting bigger. 

And yes, those ARE the bodies of Yami's friends, including Yuugi, in those coffins. We've discussed this in the comments of the previous chapter's review, and I think we're all scratching our heads a bit as to how this works. Yami isn't quite so concerned with the HOW of the matter, though, just the fact that it's happening. Perfectly reasonable, under the circumstances. He stares at his partner and friends in shock and horror, while asshole!Bakura says with a sneer that these bodies in coffins are just soulless vessels. Not sure that needed to be clarified, dude. After all, that's generally the idea of coffins, right? Receptacles for the body after the soul has left?

I guess we can thank him for not completing the NEXT common step, and put these coffins in the ground too.

Asshole!Bakura tells Yami that his friends' spirits are wandering the World of Memories, forever lost. That grips Yami in even MORE panic, while asshole!Bakura points up at the puzzle hanging over them, explaining further that the gang transcended the maze in the puzzle and went into the game world looking for YAMI himself. Yami remembers the images he saw of his friends when he was helped to summon Ra, realizing these weren't just his usual daydreams of support at critical moments, but the ACTUAL HONEST-TO-GOODNESS SOULS of his friends, who risked their lives to enter the game world. He recalls Jonouchi giving him a thumbs-up, promising to recover his true name for him.

He's got that William Shatner rage going on now.

Indeed, he yells asshole!Bakura's name in this exact manner on the next page, which tickles asshole!Bakura greatly. He just responds airily that the only way to save Yami's friends' souls is to defeat Zorc. Good to know that that whole "lost forever" bit above was just hyperbole. Yami growls in fury, fist shaking, while asshole!Bakura deigns to introduce the final player and his personal partner in the game. 

You didn't fail to notice that thing looming in the background, did you Yami? Hell, it's the FIRST thing I noticed at the end of the last chapter!

Asshole!Bakura launches into another explanation: this game is a simulation, based in truth of the real occurrences they've been playing this whole time, with some MINOR changes. While Akhenaden is currently just a corpse on display, he really did place the Millennium Items in the mold tablet 3,000 years before and became the High Priest of Darkness (TM) through the evil god Zorc's power. And asshole!Bakura admits that his goal here is to kill Yami now, in accordance with the will of the high priest, bringing the game to a painful end. Sweatdropping, Yami isn't really in a position to refuse, caught between many a rock and hard place.

Question: aren't games supposed to be FUN? This whole thing is very decidedly NOT fun to me. 

No time to worry about that, I suppose - we're launching into the rules that PROBZ should have been given a while ago at the very beginning of the game. Asshole!Bakura following the noble precedent of his predecessors once again. Basic rules are thus: Yami is represented by the "Pharaoh" card, while asshole!Bakura is represented by TWO cards, "Bakura King of Thieves" and "High Priest Akhenaden". So... one card then, considering that first guy turned to sand. Characters can act independently within the game world, which I assume means that they don't need direction from the players to go about their business. 

Each player has a deck of cards, the face of every one of which is blank, so that the image of someone or something from the player's memory can appear there when said player does some reminiscence. A blank card is shown in hand for demonstration purposes, while asshole!Bakura gives his example of the pharaoh thinking of a priest and that priest's stats appearing on the card. Shada appears upon the card in this case, and asshole!Bakura makes sure to point out the most important statistic to pay attention to, the "Ba Gauge" at the bottom which, once depleted, will take the character out of the game by way of graveyard. As was demonstrated many times before this moment, asshole!Bakura says that priests can summon ka by paying from their Ba Gauge to engage in battle. The little characters on the table stand with their cards next to them, and asshole!Bakura confirms my assumption from before; the characters will behave autonomously when not being directed by the players according to whatever motivations they had in their actual life. Or, whatever motivations that asshole!Bakura perceives them to have had through his own perspective. But we no doubt won't be commenting on personal lenses in this children's comic, lol.

Asshole!Bakura almost makes an AFTERTHOUGHT of the seven Millennium Item cards, which started the game in the hands of the pharaoh and his priests, but, as the bloodied Akhenaden having pulled out his eye demonstrated before, this isn't really relevant anymore. Asshole!Bakura waves a hand over the cards all in a line on the invisible barrier over the table, and his eyes bulge at the little Akhenaden standing over the tablet mold, announcing that all the items have fallen into Akhenaden's hands and he places them in their respective slots. Yami, much like his pharaoh representation in the game, stares helplessly in shock.

He's certainly going to be the biggest pain in everyone's ass. 

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? The big question here, as discussed a little in the comments of the previous chapter's review, is how this whole setup WORKS. It is explicit in the chapter that Yami is not currently in a body, as was confirmed in both the fact that he's been presented (briefly) as semi-transparent at the table, and Yuugi's body is currently laying in a coffin. BUT asshole!Bakura, the room, the table, Akhenaden's mummy, etc, is all suggested in multiple ways to be solid and part of the real world. The Millennium Puzzle is also hanging above the game, an accessory which has been removed from Yuugi's person before in games and has PREVENTED the manifestation of Yami in those cases. WHAT is making him appear right now? Why not just have him manifest through Yuugi's body as per usual? Wouldn't that be easier and more consistent than creating this whole new presentation of Yami that simply doesn't follow any of the old rules of how he showed up before, and implying that there are NEW rules that are not being elaborated upon? Or is the visual of Yuugi lying soullessly next to his equally soulless friends in coffins worth the complete break in logic from before?

Another related issue brought up in the previous review's comments was how Yami appears to have his consciousness split between the pharaoh in the game world and his ghostly presence outside of it. It's established at this point that there can be multiple Bakura consciousnesses within and outside the game because the Millennium Ring has the ability to split one's soul, but there was no such setup for asshole!Bakura doing the same to anyone else at any point, let alone Yami specifically at THIS point. I WOULD have thought it possible that the Yami we've been following up until this point was merely the character in the game, since it's established now that these game pieces/cards have their own autonomy according to how they behaved in the past... except that the character in the game had memories of Yuugi and friends from the future, interacted with them in the game world familiarly, and Yami at the table recalls seeing them WITHIN the game world. It might have been interesting if, in following Yami's facsimile in the Memory World, he came across Yuugi and friends only to be confused as to who and what they are, because that would have clued us in that there's something odd going on here. Then Yuugi's little revelation at the end there that this might be a game world would have just a TAD more reason behind it too. But as it stands, it just seems like Yami is both outside the game world and within it, on some sort of consciousness split screen, and it's VERY incomprehensible. 

And the SIZE of this room, the setup, is just straight up BRAIN-BREAKING for me. I can't make heads or tails of it, which is a very uncomfortable position for me to be in.

Though the mechanics of all this seem highly wonky to me, I do LIKE a couple of the finer points of the chapter. It's really good to get clarification that this isn't supposed to reflect the real events of the past exactly, and that our characters have some autonomy to adjust to whatever crazy shit happens in the game that isn't necessarily true to their lives. I like to speculate, as I implied above, about how ACCURATE these approximations of the motivations and personalities of third parties are, and the implications that can have on how the perspective of events from one or two sources color the broader picture and its recollection. Recreating these people from hazy memory of an outside perspective could explain why the some of the replays in the game seem a little hazy as well. There might be a statement in there about how one can never have the COMPLETE picture of historical events, or even the events happening around us at the moment. Then again, it could also just be a statement about how big a time-crunch KT was under that he couldn't really remain consistent or reasonable in characterization of the side characters toward the end. As I said in the comments of the previous review, I prefer the former interpretation, but there is no real way of knowing one way or the other, which is probably the best illustration of the point of my view on the matter, fittingly enough.

I'm also glad that we got to return to the RPG as a game to examine in the comic, since it was so obvious that this was REALLY what KT wanted to highlight in the beginning of the comic. Since the idea of a spirit possession directing a young boy to carry out judicious actions is so uniquely suited to the mechanic of an RPG, there's SO much you can do with this concept. I am really looking forward to seeing how Yami is able to use game strategies to defeat an ancient evil god, because I think there's a lot of potential for some satisfying plays in that respect. 

And the reaffirmation that regular-sized Bakura is just the "host" to asshole!Bakura is heartbreaking. You feel bad for the guy, being made to do all this work for a spirit that will call a MUMMY his fucking partner in the big culmination of the plot. Not that regular-sized Bakura seems like he would be interested in being partner to ushering in a dark age, but considering he HAS to be, the least asshole!Bakura could do is refer to him as more than a machine that pumps out game-tables for him. That guy can eat a whole bag of dicks.