Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V S1E4: “The Only Hope”

Mmmph. gotta do another one of these yugiohs. i dont want to. but its my job. fucking capitalism.

So, voice summary of last ep. OP. Come back to Yuya being psychologically crushed by the sight of someone else doing something that he thought he could teach other people to do.

You could generously interpret it as him really reacting to his friends being in more danger than they were before (if he needs to beat Florida Boy to save them. Does he? Still don't know), or that he was holding onto the hope that Florida Boy would discard the stolen cards after failing to Pendulum Summon with them. But that's not what he actually says. The way it's worded, at least in the sub I'm watching, puts the emphasis of the shock on "someone besides me" being able to do the trick at all.

Which...well, I pointed out the issues with this last time, so no point in repeating myself. It's just that the "last time on" puts a lot of focus on that moment, and my irritation at this must needs be spoken aloud.

So, moving forward now. Florida Boy power trips about having successfully pendulum summoned, and then uses his new trio of minions to move the ball two poles ahead and pass it over the sixth time-fracture wicket. Yuya counters by running to the negative score zone to prevent his opponent from winning too many points with that maneuver, and narrowly manages to avoid treading on the Invisible Sector with some lucky guesswork. Pendulum Summon is just too OP though, and Florida Boy brute forces his way passed the penalty and still magnifies his lead.

Meanwhile, that bridge tower is still weakening from the structural damage it took, and from the ongoing kinetics around its base. The one kid is still hanging onto Zuzu's hand to keep himself from falling off the top of it.

Well, they're all acting like the fall would kill him, so for the sake of my own sanity I'm going to assume that the safeties just aren't designed to account for more than two people and that he actually is in danger by falling until I can no longer reasonably do so.

Zuzu tells him not to give up. Yuya's not giving up, so they shouldn't either. Um. Okay.

Back at ground level, Florida Boy comments that he hasn't nullified Yuya's entire score yet, but that he isn't sure if Yuya still has the will to fight. I guess it depends on what happens to him and his friends if he doesn't win. Or if he DOES win, for that matter. Yuya doesn't answer, because he's still unable to overcome the shock of someone else being able to use the same cards that he used to do the same thing that he did.

He also expands on this a little bit to wonder at how such a terrible person could possibly share his ability. Which...okay, Yuya's a kid, that might seem like a reasonable thing to wonder if you're his age.

He then asks his father's memory what he should do here, and clutches the little hypnotist pendulum that he's still wearing around his neck. He has a brief flashback to the conversation with his dad on that bridge, where he told him about the importance of putting on a cheerful countenance even if he doesn't feel it, and that acting like you're not overwhelmed will make you not overwhelmed. Okay. Pretty general, but maybe Yuya will be inspired to use some particular strategy by it.

Yuya stands up, and starts laughing uproariously. Florida Boy is unnerved by this, which is probably an intentional secondary effect for Yuya. Then Yuya pulls out one of the shitty low level cards that Florida Boy tossed him and uses it to summon the "Block Spider." A creature with pretty much no offensive capabilities, but which can extend itself out into a web that blocks Yuya and his other summons from attack. A meatshield, basically.

If it's a common and mediocre card though, then I imagine its durability must be fairly limited. With three big monsters active on Florida Boy's side, I don't know if it's even going to buy Yuya a full round.

But that's only the first part of what Yuya is doing this turn. You see, when Florida Boy was busy cackling and ranting, Yuya had been secretly tiptoeing toward the Consecutive Caper Corner, and by banging the calvinball against the central post he's able to follow the Block Spider up with a monster-duplicating card that gives him a second Block Spider. The two are now shielding each other, and therefore are completely indestructible along with everything behind them. He then preps two cards for use next turn and ends his turn.

Florida Boy n-n-nani's at this turn of event, apparently never having considered this possibility before. Um...really, dude? This seems like it should be a pretty well known tactic.

And also, coincidentally, like extremely shit game design. If this exploit isn't actually possible in the Yu-Gi-Oh card game, than the show is kinda doing a terrible job at marketing it by making it look much worse than it is lol.

Florida Boy eventually figures out a counter. Yuya might have reached the Consecutive Capter Corner, but he's still standing on the part of it that intersects with the Boomerang Zone, and Florida Boy remembers to declare the reversal by not declaring it, thereby neutralizing one of the spiders at the cost of two of his own summons. But then Yuya sees Susie Derkins coming up the street and bashes her over the head with the calvinball, turning the score completely against Florida Boy. What a shift in fortunes! This enables him to hiijack two of the discarded Pendulum Monsters. He tells them that "it's time to go," and somehow they know that that means he wants them to grab his friends who are falling off of the finally collapsing tower.

Florida Boy manages to grab the calvinball back and bring the score back up to Z to Q, but Yuya, rising back into his showman persona, is able to devise counterstrategies to everything even with his mediocre deck.

I have no idea what Pendulum Dragon's effect is, but it helps. Through a complicated sequence of bullshit, Yuya steals back the pendulum cards and turns his Block Spider into an offensive juggernaut. Florida Boy tries to flee, but its useless.

Hey. Okay. I have a question.

...

Fleeing *always* seems to be useless in these duels. The attacks and trap cards and so forth all seem to be 100% reliable unless countered by another card, just as they would be in an actual trading card game. In the show, this is illustrated by how the attacks just keep on coming until they hit their targets and deduct the hit points. We saw that with Yuya being hit by the giant billiard balls earlier, and we've seen it with a bunch of attacks on either side since then. And also BEFORE then, in previous duels in the first couple episodes.

So, given that that's how it works...why are they running from the attacks?

You could say that it's just instinct taking over. It would take a fair bit of self control to NOT run from a giant monster or rolling mass of debris, even if intellectually you knew that they were just holograms. Buuuut there's a problem with that. Specifically, the Action Cards.

Getting Action Cards is seemingly an important part of the game. Collecting them requires you to dash, ride, or climb around the arena to get to them before your opponent can. Just in the last episode, we see that Action Dueling schools include physical training, which I assume is to make you better at running after Action Cards.

And THAT means that if you're taking this sport at all seriously, you're going to pretty quickly train yourself to save your breath for when you need it. Running from holographic attacks that will eventually hit you no matter what is just going to exhaust you and make it harder for you to cover ground when it actually WILL help you.

You could make the argument that these are just kids, but...honestly, I still don't buy it. If these children were raised in a world where Action Dueling is a ubiquitous public spectacle, have pro-duelist parents, and have been practicing the sport themselves for years, they're going to have mastered this. I could buy someone like Yuya dramatically and/or comically running from attacks as part of his stage persona, but Florida Boy? When he's *really* playing to win?

...

Anyway, the rescued friends all watch in smiling awe as Yuya turns the tide, and go on about how cool he is and how he inspires them and other contractually mandated shounen sentiments. Yuya, getting more and more into his stage persona, calls on the audience to help narrate his final attack that drops Florida Boy to zero hp.

The game is over. The Dark Village holoscape vanishes, along with the monsters, leaving them back in an empty arena. Can you guess what happens next?

Florida Boy gets up off the ground and tells his friends to grab Yuya and his friends again, and to take back the Pendulum Cards that Yuya took back using the game mechanics by force once more.

Because, you know. They're still in the same situation that they were in previously.

...

I was going to ask why Florida Boy would be willing to risk dueling Yuya if the game contains methods of snatching your opponent's cards out of their deck. That would be risking letting Yuya take back what he'd stolen, with pretty much nothing to gain.

The answer to my question is apparently "the duel never had any stakes or consequences and was a complete waste of time." Which is something I also wondered about, throughout this episode and the previous one, but I had HOPED would end up not being the case.

...

Before Yuya and Co can get beaten up by the physically bigger and stronger older boys, that mysterious blue haired girl from earlier charges into the arena and punches the bad guys really hard in the face, knocking them out.

Because the problem that needed solving was "some older boys are physically overpowering us." So, the solution, clearly, was "we need another physically strong person to come help us out."

...

An episode and a half.

An episode and a half were spent on this action duel.

...

Blue girl says she was in the process of enrolling at this LeoCorp club, but now she'd really rather not. She thinks Yuya is cool, and wants to be trained by him.

Gain new student for You Show, I guess. They take the recovered cards and quickly flee the premises before Team Gaetz can regain consciousness. Over in the sinister corporate office, one of Florida Man Senior's lackeys urges him to send security to apprehend Yuya and take the cards back again, but he declines to do so. The framing implies he has some new villainous scheme in mind now, and that he'll need Yuya to keep the cards at least for now. End episode.

I can probably count the times that fucking RWBY made me this mad on one hand.

We have a tense situation with seemingly serious stakes. And then we abandon that situation for an episode and a half to watch the hero and the villain play a completely unrelated game of Calvinball before continuing the story.

My complaints about the lack of stakes in the charity event match don't even come close to this. This would be like watching a Law and Order episode where the cops and criminals abruptly take a break in their tense standoff to play twenty onscreen minutes of frisbee before resuming right where they left off with nothing changed.

I could write paragraph after paragraph about how fucking bad this sequence was, but I don't think they'd come any closer to expressing my feelings on the subject than I already have.

Three more episodes. Why are there still three more episodes of this shit in queue?

Good night. Fuck you.