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Do you want to play a game?
You might have heard of Yu Gi Oh through pop culture. It's not only a children's card game, it's also an anime and manga about people playing a children's card game, not to mention the abridged series on the internet.
This is not that. Well... it's a precursor.
In its first incarnation, the Yu Gi Oh manga concerned itself with games of all kinds, made deadly by the magic of an ancient Egyptian puzzle and the spirit housed within it. (Fictional Ancient Egypt - always out to get you. Always). While the card game that would become its most famous aspect makes an appearance in this first seven-book series, it doesn't show up here, in volume one. Instead, we get games involving stabbing money, playing explosive table hockey and that old gem that parents everywhere love, "let's see who can stay quiet the longest."
The original seven-volume Yu Gi Oh series is an odd bird. It's got this weird whiplashy tone thing going on. The characters are ostensibly normal high school kids doing basically high school kid things -going to school, gossipping about celebrities, getting part-time jobs, trying to watch pixelated porn on the pay channels. But the games and some of the situations that set them up are *ridiculously* dark. And when I say ridiculously, I don't mean "very." I mean the situations are so ridiculous it can be hard to take them seriously. Like the school bully who decides if his patsy can't scrape together a lot of money (200k yen) in 24 hours he's going to go after him with a knife. Or adults beating up on kids, just as a matter of course. Or a hardened criminal casually discussing killing people.
But even darker than THAT are the penalties for the losers in these games. Some people are driven insane. One's literally set aflame. And then the story's like "Well, THAT was fun!" and we're back to normal school stuff again.
So, anyone familiar with my tastes can probably already guess. I LOVE this first volume, even if the art hasn't quite settled in yet. It's so ridiculous and wild, lacking the arching storylines and card games of the later series. But I love the variety and the oddness