After watching the last episode (19) against a built-up boss (like, 4-5 episodes built-up) I can safely say that I'm absolutely disappointed.
And oh boy, reviewing this without referencing the direct antagonist, Arc V will be impossible, so I might as well give up avoiding it right now. Vanguard is a world where a card game has become the number one form on entertainment, with the protagonist (Chrono) and his two friends competing as a three-man team to win tournaments and stop villains from succeeding with their incredibly evil plans...
Aaaand that's where the similarities with yugi stop, to Vanguard's loss I might add. You see the thing that made Yugi so popular was the whole hologram and evil magic ideas. Sure they took the anime a few more steps away from the "realism" department, but the fact that your cards actually became huge-a$$ monsters that WERE in fact dangerous brought the excitement levels up. Vanguard, keeping to a relatively more realistic setting, is simply a card game AND NOTHING MORE. There are no holograms, no apparent threats to humanity and all in all NO PRESSURE. If the main character loses he will just... Well... Lose, that's it. In Yugi if the main character loses it is quite literally the end of the world. So the stakes are pretty low.
But having an anime with just people playing a card game and the cards not being visualized in some way would be boring, right? So the anime does provide animated versions of the creatures and monsters... (And take a deep breath here) in the characters' IMAGINATION. Yes, folks, you heard right. The anime's official plot is that people sitting above a table are daydreaming and taking things WAY TOO SERIOUSLY, since, again, there are no actual stakes, which just ends up being ridiculous, especially when tons of people are gasping from the sidelines.
Of course we ain't done. 1)Cliched cliches are too cliche for your anti-cliche tastes. Painful episodes of forced character development that are basically filler abound, and they are both predictable and badly written. And again, I can't help but compare it with Arc V, that simply didn't have such stupidly-written pointless episodes. 2)The anime skips large parts of the game. You see, while Vanguard can really be fun once the board has been set, the setup to that is relatively boring, so the anime quite often cuts down on the start and middle part of the game and jumps right to the final attacks, which gets both confusing and annoying really fast. (and again, comparing with Arc V where the duels are shown from start to end without losing any of the excitement). 3)Token characters are token characters, we wouldn't lose anything if 4/5ths of the cast were removed. 4)The change from needlessly serious over a card game with no stakes to whimsical and light-hearted without a shred of seriousness makes me want to slap the animators. Pick one and stay with it, as ridiculous as it is.
Baaaah, whatever, at least it has good art and relatively good voice acting...