REJECTED! - Cardfight! Vanguard

You know, I totally understand the idea of the collector, and I refuse to condemn people for the things they collect. Stamps, coins, comics, dolls figurines...heck, if you're going to go as far as a Mitsudomoe dakimakura, it's your prerogative. A weird prerogative, but we're all collectors of something, whether it be as a hobby or as a career.

That's why I didn't have many qualms with Yu-Gi-Oh! when it came out. It didn't start out with the idea that it would transition over to a card-collecting game—at least, it didn't appear that way on paper. Yûgi had his own demons to figure out in the process, playing games through his split personality until it finally led to the worldwide phenomenon known as "Duel Monsters". The card game was spawned by the success of the franchise, and I can live with that.

However, the opposite does not necessarily work; a fictional card game won't lead to a real franchise. You can't plant an anime into the community, use it to tell people how to play the card game in some cryptic way, and guarantee that it will send consumers to toy stores when the cards hit shelves. In the case of Cardfight!! Vanguard, a show spawned by the collected minds of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Duel Masters, and card-corporation Bushiroad, this inverse of the sales formula is not only displayed, but it reveals that you simply can't rehash a show to regrow card sales and hope no one notices.

Apparently, in the world of Cardfight!! Vanguard, "Vanguard" is the card game that everyone has been talking about for years, even though it hasn't even been released in actual stores yet (the Vanguard game comes out February 26th). All the cool kids play this fantasy game where the combatants are merely spirits fighting on a mystical planet, and their means of survival involves summoning monsters and warriors through cards. One of the uncool kids, a quiet blue-haired kid named Aichi, has a particular card taken from him, and instead of letting it go, he chases the culprit.

However, his "Blaster Blade" card has, in turn, been lost by the bully and claimed by Kai, one of the strongest Vanguard fighters in town. Aichi timidly takes on Kai to get his precious card back, and this sends us on a two-episode primer covering everything about the game—something about twisting the card and using it to protect others, then drawing from the card pile to figure out some other sort of exotic math. (I wasn't really paying attention, as all of the Super-Saiyan hair was distracting me.) In the process, we come to find that Kai was the one who first gave Aichi his "Blaster Blade" card, and when it looks like all hope is lost, Yûgi Aichi removes a miracle card from his pack to defeat Kaiba Kai with the combined efforts from his "Blaster Blade".

You can't blame me for mistaking the characters from this show for the two main combatants from Yu-Gi-Oh! Intimidated pipsqueak taking down a confident fighter who later teams up with said pipsqueak? Yeah, we've heard it all before, Bushiroad, but the last time we were able to understand the rules of the game after we got to know the characters completely. This time, you're just trying to drive propaganda into fooling the viewer that this is the coolest thing since the last card game you tried to shove down our throats (which was Milky Holmes, for the record, so don't think we haven't forgotten that bitter pill).

Really, there is so little creativity to distinguish it from previous games and so much difficulty to understand how the game works that Cardfight!! Vanguard ends up putting us through a show that could have easily just been lumped into another Yu-Gi-Oh! spinoff. There's nothing about this show that interests me in the least, and that includes the non-traditional, all-serious female lead and a JAM Project opening theme that is severely out of place.

Here's a novel idea—take those Yu-Gi-Oh! cards that you've forgotten you've had for so many years and shuffle them for a while. It'll be just as exciting as watching Cardfight!! Vanguard, except you won't have the eye-strain in the end.

(Cardfight!! Vanguard is simulcast on Crunchyroll every Friday at 7PM EST.)