Should Konami start "supporting" an older Yu-Gi-Oh! anime series? (Just hear me out.)

[ABC Gun]

I was thinking about stuff, mostly a bunch of existential crises', and then I thought "what if Konami didn't just support older Archetypes, but what if they also supported an older series". Did any of you see the last episodes of GX where Jaden duels Yugi, you probably thought it was kind of cool seeing 2 main protagonists pit their best Decks against each other right? Well let's take that further, let's not just have older main protagonists duel each other, let's give an entire older series some new characters, new settings, and maybe a few other "new" things. If Konami were to revisit an older series, there is a potential for a couple of things to happen. The first (and most likely) is either a movie made for the fans like Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, or possibly a short OVA series of about 3 movies like the Digimon Tri. series. The second and the one I would hope for is basically using an older anime series to introduce not only new characters and settings, but maybe a new Summoning mechanic, a new Duel type along with the older main characters from that series getting updated. Again I think we will get a movie/OVA series of an older Yu-Gi-Oh! anime as opposed to a new series that takes place in an older anime setting, but its not entirely out of the question and Konami have done crazier things in the past.

So what you do think?

[Flash Flyer - Sakura]

At this point, I think people are getting tired of the DM nostalgia being tossed around so would not be in the producer's best interest to insert Yugi/Kaiba again. Not to say that everyone's getting tired of Yugi/Kaiba, but yeah. Then again, the producers making a movie for the spinoffs generally depends on how the fans felt about the series itself.

 

If the series was ill-received, then it'd be a waste of money to make it. OVAs wouldn't be bad either, but then would require a lot of overhauling depending on which generation of play they're trying to redo (especially given the new rule changes that VRAINS brought along) and again, did fans like the series enough.

 

Granted, the second option (introducing new generation characters in current generation) is already used in other series like Pokemon, however that works mainly because the battle styles are similar throughout. It's not like Yugioh which gets a new summoning mechanic every generation (and VRAINS certainly changed things around). 

 

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Also a note that Konami technically does the card game only; the anime is done by TV Tokyo (NAS) and ShoPro. But answering your question, probably not, considering how the series has been set up post-GX. Introducing a new summon mechanic or Duel type doesn't work out, both due to how the series are usually setup in plot and playstyle differences. 

 

Remaking something like 5Ds would be nice though, but again, it depends if enough of the fanbase actually wants it and if it's feasible to adapt the characters to MR4 play without drastically editing how their Decks worked back then (losing their essence). 

 

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In general though, just leave the old series alone, given budgeting and interest. Unless people really want to see a reboot, it's not worth it from a production standpoint.

[ABC Gun]

At this point, I think people are getting tired of the DM nostalgia being tossed around so would not be in the producer's best interest to insert Yugi/Kaiba again. Not to say that everyone's getting tired of Yugi/Kaiba, but yeah. Then again, the producers making a movie for the spinoffs generally depends on how the fans felt about the series itself.

 

If the series was ill-received, then it'd be a waste of money to make it. OVAs wouldn't be bad either, but then would require a lot of overhauling depending on which generation of play they're trying to redo (especially given the new rule changes that VRAINS brought along) and again, did fans like the series enough.

 

Granted, the second option (introducing new generation characters in current generation) is already used in other series like Pokemon, however that works mainly because the battle styles are similar throughout. It's not like Yugioh which gets a new summoning mechanic every generation (and VRAINS certainly changed things around). 

 

====

 

Also a note that Konami technically does the card game only; the anime is done by TV Tokyo (NAS) and ShoPro. But answering your question, probably not, considering how the series has been set up post-GX. Introducing a new summon mechanic or Duel type doesn't work out, both due to how the series are usually setup in plot and playstyle differences. 

 

Remaking something like 5Ds would be nice though, but again, it depends if enough of the fanbase actually wants it and if it's feasible to adapt the characters to MR4 play without drastically editing how their Decks worked back then (losing their essence). 

 

====

 

In general though, just leave the old series alone, given budgeting and interest. Unless people really want to see a reboot, it's not worth it from a production standpoint.

 

Another option I didn't talk about might be to adapt some of the mangas into a short anime series, like if the GX manga got a 12 or 13 episode limited anime series.

[Sleepy]

There are a lot of issues that would cause problems for such a project. Mostly external ones.

 

Gen 1s almost always get special treatment.

 

Multi-generational franchises usually have a sort of "big bang" blast on their gen 1. Yugioh oversupports Yugi's legacy support while GX, 5DS, and ZeXal don't seem to be deemed trustworthy enough to sustain a product by themselves. Just look at how quickly they went over a single GX and single 5DS legendary collection boxes, while DM had like 3 for itself. Blue-Eyes support is upcoming again very soon with a solitary Photon support card announced with them (ZeXal support). This year's tins are 1 GX and 1 5DS. Mostly never giving non-DM exclusive support.

 

Pokemon also has Red appear in other gens or be hinted at, but we've never seen Gold, Ruby, Diamond, etc. outside their game or remakes of their games. Digimon went into nostalgia for Adventure in the form of Tri, neglecting the 02 team that at that age might as well be both a single bigger team, even though I've noticed long time Digimon fans tend to like Tamers and Frontier the most... I'm pretty sure I can keep naming this pattern.

 

The only exception coming to mind is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, with Jotaro (Gen 3 AKA Stardust Crusaders) being the most prominent main character in its franchise.

 

A cause for this is that the general public gradually loses interest overall over time. If you were to graph these sorts of shows in terms of audience, products sold, etc. it'd be a very slow and slight but steady slide downward. This means companies that tend to own these things usually prefer a safe bet and this means a lot of the past would still not get much attention ideally.

 

 

They'd be competing with themselves.

 

I recall a time when Shonen Jump had a chapter of the regular manga (or probably Yugioh R), plus a GX manga chapter, plus a 5DS manga chapter, and ZeXal's was probably in its planning stages I bet, and Shonen Jump can't get to the point where it'd be 50 or 60% Yugioh. At the same time they can't just make a separate magazine just for Yugioh for the sake of all manga series because they need the general audience to have access to them. This has in the past played a roll in certain series being shorter than they could have been. Mainly GX's manga.

 

Now if you apply this with other parts of the franchise, since anime and manga costs money to make, their biggest interest is that if you are a Yugioh fan and they possess a latest product, they want you to look at that. It's hard enough to be competing with other series, they wouldn't even be thinking about the idea of also competing with themselves in the process. Splitting audiences 50/50, or if we go the way things are now, less than 20% when divided among DM, GX, 5DS, ZeXal, Arc V, and VRAINS. This is without supporting alternate timelines like how Manga vs Anime has been for everything non-DM, which also has Yugioh R to be split on.

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I do believe they'd have an audience, and it'd certainly be more content, but doubt they'd really go for it if presented with the idea.

It's a bit too late for this but I would have liked for no gens to have ever gone to a "saving the world" scale or any mentions from IRL places (Nasca lines, California, Japan, etc), and localized each gen so that we would never need any dimensional shenanigans or time-traveling stunts for old characters to be brought back. Or any of the multiverse versions of the same characters.... Then again, if they didn't do that, they probably wouldn't stop themselves from making cameos a bit too often. GX had that issue with DM after all, that at times seemed to be kissing DM's feet's characters. This would allow any single-episode specials to exist from whatever past archetype they wanted to show off....

[ABC Gun]

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