Yu-Gi-Oh Cosplay is Ready to Duel With Mai Valentine

One awesome Yu-Gi-Oh! cosplay is ready to duel with Mai Valentine! Kazuki Takahashi’s original manga series might be a completely different kind of juggernaut these days thanks to the success of its various anime and manga sequels, video games, and real world trading card game, but it started out much more humbly and much darker. Before the idea of the card game was introduced to the series, it was a completely different kind of beast. But the card game was so successful that the series not only completely changed to focus on it, but introduced a whole new kind of world as a result.

This included a whole new wave of characters that were brought into the series as part of the Duelist Kingdom saga of the franchise, and that included new members of the cast like Mai Valentine. First starting off as one of the many duelist rivals to Yuji and Joey, she eventually became one of their closest friends and allies over the course of the series as a whole. Now she’s been brought to life in a cool new way thanks to some awesome cosplay from artist @kisaragiash on Instagram! You can check it out below:

Although her role in the franchise’s story overall seemed to fade over the course of the series (even including her brief comeback during the anime’s original Seal of Orichalchos arc), Mai was involved in some key moments of the franchise and helped cement her as a memorable character for the series overall. She played a pretty big role in the Battle City events, but it was really the last real time that she had meant something larger to the overall canon of the series as whole. Thankfully, she’s managed to outlive that in future releases from the series.

The Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise has made Mai Valentine one of the key additions in pretty much every video game release from the series continuing to this day, and this even includes all of the new characters introduced in the anime’s future sequels too so that’s doubly impressive in terms of impact. But what do you think?

Where does Mai Valentine rank among your favorite characters in the original Yu-Gi-Oh series? Where does she stack up when compared to future anime entries and those new characters? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments!