Yu-Gi-Oh Transcend Game: Part 1

Additional content for unambiguously finished stories rarely goes well. The other story I'm covering on this blog is a VERY unfortunate example of that. But, since I literally started this blog because I heard Dark Side of Dimensions was coming out and followed the Yu-Gi-Oh manga's canon, I couldn't very well ignore it like some *other* sequel attempts out there. Besides, this one was actually written by Kazuki Takahashi, and the panels I've seen floating around on the internet since it came out have been STUNNING in their style. That alone should ensure that this very late installment in the series is a good time.

I'm still a TAD apprehensive, given my experience with these things, but I'm nothing if not stubborn in my conviction to fill out this blog with every last opinion I can form on this series, so help me!

I see Kaiba has acquired 0 chill since we last saw him. 

So, there's infinite darkness, but the BEWD is dispelling it, so that Kaiba can see Atem's name in the midst of it? I'm having a little trouble following this, and that's not the BEST sign for the beginning of a chapter. 

Goodness, it's a good thing it's so pretty. 

I have to assume that this is some sort of semi-dream/fantasy sequence, because after the two-page title spread, things seem a little more grounded in some sort of reality when we're shown an outside shot of Kaiba Corp Tower. A text overlay tells us that the events in this particular story all started with the advancement of a project a few months before, accompanied by a speech bubble telling Kaiba that it's time for his meeting with the R&D Department. The project is identified as "Operation Neurons", and given a couple of exclamation points to add emphasis, while Kaiba sits at his desk with a bunch of holographic men floating out of a projector on the edge of the table. Kaiba hums and tells these men he's on his way, going to put on his iconic sleeveless white studded coat, which had been previously hanging on a rack behind him in front of a giant window. Odd, those are USUALLY put next to doors, but who am I to complain about the nonsensical places a dipshit richie puts his furniture?

*Ahem*

Kaiba narrates in the text overlay how "Operation Neurons" is the code name for the development of a new Duel Disk boasted by the company, and they've tried countless test versions at this point, but only a select few have made it through the testing process to be declared as their next product. Wouldn't it be nice if companies ACTUALLY did extensive testing before they put something on the market? Damn, that would eliminate like 90% of consumer problems right there! Too bad it only happens in a few lines of fiction.

Kaiba passes a few cases housing the various versions of the Duel Disk over the course of the Yu-Gi-Oh series, and pauses at a pedestal with what looks like a big egg on a trivet, a test version of the Neurons VR system that Kaiba characterizes as basically scrap on a garbage pile. Pure trash, except...

So, NOT pure trash? Could you make up your mind, dude?

He arrives at a door labeled with the R&D department plaque, behind which he walks down a very sci-fi corridor with a crowd of department heads telling him all about their data collection efforts as of late - they apparently advertised to the world at large that they were looking for test applicants, and got over a million of them in response, 200,000 of which were in their target demographic of duelists under 15 across racial and cultural lines. Mark Zuckerberg is permanently green with envy. After a remark about every network branch of the operation sending back data around the clock, Mokuba happily points out how much it says that duelists all over the country (world?) are falling all over themselves to see the virtual world his older brother has created to test it for them for free. Assuming they have basic LEGS on their avatars, the bar is basically on the floor.

Also, Mokuba, my murder child, what have you done to your HAIR? If you're going to try to slick it down, CUT IT FIRST, for fuck's sake. 

Kaiba unnecessarily tells the guy next to him with the immaculately sculpted white facial hair, whom I'm pretty sure we first saw right before the Battle City arc began, to monitor the subjects very closely for any medical shit. Immaculate facial hair guy gives an enthusiastic affirmative, because fragile billionaires always need to be treated like their most mundane ideas that can occur to ANYONE with half a brain cell are fucking genius and original. Immaculate facial hair guy puts his hand on a pad that admits them all to a door into a skybridge fitted down its length with observation windows into a massive open room.

Oh wow. That's just CREEPY. And Kaiba manages to make it even creepier when he looks down his nose and smiles at grand collection of helmeted children he's amassed, chuckling that they're truly charming little eggs. It's difficult to express how DEEPLY DEEPLY uncomfortable I am with this whole picture, it's just... unsettling. 

A department head explains how the electromagnetic coils of the neurons gear on these kids' heads detects brainwave activity and change them into electromagnetic signals, linking up the image in the child's imagination with Kaiba Corp's crystal cloud to complete the VR Solid Vision. My favorite part is how we jump directly from detecting brainwave activity to uploading a fully formed image from the imagination into the cloud. How do we get from point A to point B? MAAAAAAAAGIIIIIIIC. 

The kiddos down below are gesticulating and reaching every which way, grasping at mere air, while Mokuba gushes about Neurons Systems around the world interacting with each others' frequencies, dueling each other in VR space when they've never met in the meat-o-sphere. Mokuba admiringly says that this is what his brother has created: the world of DUEL LINKS, populated by kids with egg helmets. 

Oh man, I actually haven't played that game in a while. Maybe I should open it back up...

A panel with flying Duel Monsters cards is overlaid by a speech bubble talking about how duelists are are sent card data from the cloud to create decks in response to several different attributes. It's not clear if it's still Mokuba speaking or if it's one of the R&D guys.

How much you wanna bet that the moment Kaiba releases this as a commercial product, there will be ads plastered over every inch of it for shitty cereal and quizzes to find out what your fucking DUEL PULSE is?

Someone announces that the it's the "Airborne Dragon Knight Guild"'s turn, facing "Giant Fortress Beast, Gairon" at 2400 attack. One of the kids on the deck of the pirate ship on which the guild plays summons a "Space Mineral Dragon, Stone Head Dragon", at a whopping 3600 attack. Is it just me, or are the names of these monsters getting a little unwieldy? A kid on the opposite team is in disbelief at the massive "pulse" attack points of this new dragon, just before the summoner commands an attack. The Space Stone Dragon Dragon Whatever vomits fire on Gairon, with someone shouting that the Gairon has been destroyed. The airborne pirate ship of the winning dragon declares victory, in a sort of awestruck way. 

This doesn't seem to work in the same way as the regular card game does, does it? The explanation here is that the attack power of the monster a player summons is determined by the value of the BRAINWAVES AND THOUGHT SIGNALS summoning it - the power of the player's consciousness is the key to making monsters stronger, in other words. Uhhhhh... I have a LOT of questions, and I don't think I would like the answers to them if they existed. 

Cut to Kaiba adjusting a sort of "headset" affixed to the side of his head, and thinking that the hardest issue faced in any game is how to maintain "order". Presumably, "order" here is CODE for "fairness" or a level playing field considering all players and their level of ability in conjuring these, basically, thought-forms, but there's not a lot of context for how the word is being used. Maybe it's a translation thing, I don't know. Kaiba goes on to philosophically muse on how one might say that order being destroyed is the way of the world. I mean, yes, entropy is a thing, but in a closed system.

Is... is this a closed system? 

I thought it was kids under fifteen that were chosen for these tests? What's this grown-ass woman doing in here?

We're not treated to the actual minutia of this duel, but a single summon that said grown-ass woman does of "Meteor Direction World Device, Duja", at 8800 attack points. The previously cocky dragon guild stutters in disbelief at the several thousand points of attack that she conjured up. While Kaiba interjects with his overlay box that this person would have to have a brainwave frequency that transcends that of a normal man, and will destroy everything. What, does not having some sort of control over the cap on a monster's power like in the regular game does not work out so well for playability? 

The grown-ass woman calls out for her OP monster to attack, and it basically dissolves the dragon guild's pet into a fine blood mist with one punch. She announces that the Stone Head Dragon is obliterated while its remnants fall all around her floating chair spaceship perch. Holding a gloved hand up above her head, she sits in her curved seat, bragging that the Airborne Dragon Knight Guild isn't so tough as they puffed themselves up to be. Then the chair zooms off somewhere else into virtual space.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!

Oh by the gods, this guy has never stopped being the most enormous dork in the history of fiction. I can't even with it. 

It looks like elder Kaiba isn't the only one with the headset affixed to his ear; the heads of R&D also put them on, but they haven't really noticed the dramatic duel that Kaiba did. They're mostly just oohing and ahhhing about how incredible their newest Solid Vision design is, how it's nothing like they've seen before, as if they too exist in this virtual world. The immaculate facial hair guy spreads his arms wide in a gesture toward the monster/dragon filled world of Duel Links. He then turns to Kaiba and declares that the new Duel Disk's trial version development is without a doubt a huge success. 

Without even a fraction of the excitement he's being shown, Kaiba tugs off the headset and says that the system is still only at 50%. He explains that he's seeing some unexpected distortions in the VR images, then instructs the team to give him a report on the brainwave data of the subjects by EoD. He's given a hearty affirmative, but he's not really paying much attention to them again.

Had to put an ankh on her, just in case there was a CHANCE we wouldn't catch on that she's the one flying around on space chairs and connected to the wider ancient Egyptian background radiation of this universe.

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? A lot of this is coming off as somewhat dystopian, and I'm getting heavy "Neuralink by Elon Musk" vibes. It certainly doesn't help that these kids that are testing the Duel Links VR are essentially just crowded cattle-style on the floor of a billionaire's dingy basement. I don't even know if it would be better if they were given chairs, because all-in-all, the impression is very creepy and doesn't sit well with me. Per Mokuba, these kids aren't getting paid. Are they missing school for this? How long is this test session? What are the potty/food breaks like? I just... I know I'm not supposed to be focusing on these things, but Kaiba himself brought up monitoring the medical angle, and if I know corporations in real life, testing their products come with a lot of abuses that go ignored for years, if not forever. A massive room like this keeping a ton of children huddled together for hours on end doesn't seem like something the R&D guys would be able to handle humanely, is all I'm saying. It's some Junji Ito shit. 

This isn't SUPPOSED to be a horror comic, right???

Then there's the pop-science angle of the thing. VR manifesting our wildest fantasies has been a popular idea for a long time; everything from recording our dreams to Holodecks for active daydreaming have been conceived of for lots of fiction. The thing they all have in common is they kind of have to IGNORE that our brains don't really produce sharp and clear thoughts/images like they would need to in order for technology like that to work the way it's written in sci-fi. Anyone who has developed a meditation and mindfulness habit at any point can tell you how wildly your ability to control your monkey-mind can fluctuate between days, and a lot of folks give up after a while because they feel like they're getting nowhere with it. And this is GROWN ADULTS we're talking about here.

The notion that a CHILD can put on a helmet, produce clear and sharp enough mental images that CAN be interpreted by a server coherently enough to integrate into the existing information in the system, and do that consistently over hours at a time, maintaining the level of mental effort to imagine up monsters that don't just flicker and die after a few seconds is just a little far-fetched to me. This isn't even to mention that, even if all the above WERE a believable thing for this helmet to do, the potential damage that could be done to a kid who can't get the hang of manifesting their monsters in virtual space fast enough is pretty big. Imagine being a kid who isn't very good at visualization - you want to play Duel Links with your friends, but you can't produce monsters with high pulse points because the value the servers put on YOUR brain waves is less than on those of your friends, so you just can't play on their level. Because the pulse points would HAVE to depend on a value judgement by the system on your level of thought, you basically have a world-wide virtual world telling you that you're too stupid to play this game. All because KAIBA thought it was a good idea to assign a number to your fucking brain functions. Fuck, right? 

So, yeah, not very fond of this. I think it's kind of funny Kaiba is caught between being excited about a vast intelligence wiping the floor with his test subjects on one hand, and probably having to truncate a power like that in the final product so people don't get discouraged from using his product by the pointlessness. He's so disappointed that he has to make his product accessible in order to make it profitable, lol! What a douchebag. Otherwise, the chapter is largely disturbing, and I'm just as uncomfortable about the near certainty that I'm not supposed to find it so as the content itself. 

Capitalists don't make super great protagonists, I gotta say.