Yu-Gi-Oh Just Let its New Protagonist Lose a Duel

Yu-Gi-Oh has kicked off the seventh entry in its anime franchise, Yu-Gi-Oh Sevens, recently and fans are already seeing the drastic changes in tone and style from the other entries. Like every season before, Sevens features a brand new world with a new central protagonist named Yuga Oudou. De-aging the central cast to Elementary School ages, Yuga attends a special school alongside the rest of his friends that was being monitored by a central shadow organization. But after introducing a brand new way to play the game, these kids are now taking steps toward carving their own futures.

Yu-Gi-Oh Sevens seemed to give its central hero an edge when it was revealed that he was the one that invented the new Rush Duel mechanic that’s integral to the new series, but as the second episode of the series proves, Yuga is going to have to start dueling a lot more seriously if he doesn’t want to keep losing.

Although Rush Duels streamline the game and makes it much faster by allowing players to summon as many monsters as they want with each turn and have a full hand of cards, the second episode showed just how many holes Yuga has in his current strategy. The first episode saw him rely on the Seventh Road Magician, a card that gets a boost in attack points for every kind of attribute in his graveyard.

When Seventh Road Magician attacks, Yuga sends the top card of his deck to the graveyard. This came in handy the first episode as it provided a final attribute monster to give the magician one final boost needed to end the duel, but the second episode showed how big of a gamble this was as he draws a Spell Card by mistake.

In the duel against his (friendly) rival for the new series, Tatushisa Kamijo, Yuga isn’t able to power up his Seventh Road Magician to end the duel in his turn and Kamijo is able to follow it up with his own central monster, Dragears, and Yuga loses all of his life points. He doesn’t take this loss too hard at all, and it’s a loss that makes sense considering how early into the series we are, but fans are noticing that this is a good trend.

Rather than get covered in plot armor and completely win with lucky draws in each duel like some of the past Yu-Gi-Oh protagonists, Yuga is already fallible. But what do you think? Were you surprised to see Yuga take a loss in Yu-Gi-Oh Sevens? What are your thoughts on the newest series so far? Let us know your thoughts in the comments or talk to me directly about all things anime and other cool things @Valdezology on Twitter!