A little boy named Shougo Aoyama finds a powerful card called Red-Eyes Black Dragon, but he is too scared to actually "fight" (aka play a card game), so he just doesn't use the card at all. Kaiba wants to have the card, so he invites Yugi, Shogo, and some other duelists to a tournament. Wow, what a creative plot! Since Shougo doesn't want to fight, Yugi borrows his card and battles Kaiba instead. The first half of the movie is pretty much Shougo whining over the card and the second half Yugi and Kaiba playing Duel Monsters.
Sounds pretty terrible, right? So why am I rating this a 6/10? Before I start with the positives, I want to mention some flaws in the plot. It's just so ridiculous how everyone is overreacting over this dumb card. Yeah, it's Yugioh, but even in the show, they don't react like this. On top of that, they mention in the movie that Red-Eyes is the second most powerful card, right after Blue-Eyes White Dragon. So I thought to myself "well the Dark Magician probably wasn't introduced at this point". But guess what: the Dark Magician actually appears in this movie! So shouldn't Shogo's Red-Eyes be the third strongest? Also, Shougo himself is pretty annoying and not memorable at all.
The duel between Yugi and Kaiba was pretty sweet. I mean it's nothing you haven't seen before, but "Yugi vs Kaiba" is just a pretty safe bet, so it should appeal to most of the audience. The monster design looks especially nice. In fact, the whole movie looks pretty pleasant. Just from the coloring, you can tell it's based on the 1998 version (season 0), but the character design looks more like the Pegasus arc and onward. Also, Kaiba finally has his brown hair instead of green one. So the style looks like a mix between Season 0 and Duel Monsters. The music was good too. It had a very video game-ish feel to it, which I found very fitting. I especially liked the remix of Yugi's transformation theme.
I really like how they actually use Kaiba's proto-type Duel Disk, which was introduced in the Pegasus arc and only used there. It makes no sense that it appears in this movie, but hey it's a nice touch. Also, Rex Raptor, who hasn't been introduced at this point makes a small cameo ;)
If I actually went to the cinema to see this, I'd probably be very disappointed, but as a fan of the franchise who just discovered this obscure movie on the internet, I found this to be an alright experience.
