GX Duel Memorial Album #3: Regarding Duel Composition

How do you write a Duel for the TV show.

Q. Around the time the Show was airing, were there any requests from the “Official Card Game” side of things for things like “We want you to include this card”?

A. I wasn’t in direct communication with KONAMI during the days of “GX”, but I think there was some nuanced discussion with the producers, asking to use certain cards, if at all possible.

As a side note, in the case of most Hobby Anime and Tokusatsu “The timing of on-air appearance and the new product launches are perfectly aligned! A new item appears in a commercial before it shows up in the show!!” However, at that time, there was a delay between the production of cards for the “Official Card Game” and the production of the TV show, and things like that never worked out.

Sometimes, however, the release date of certain cards would match their on-air appearance in the TV show. In those cases, we got information about the cards before they were releases, and we used that information in the TV show. I do apologize, as it’s been some time, so I’ve forgotten the specifics, so please enjoy watching it and imagining “Maybe this was the case?”.

But there were cases where I did take a card and build a theme around them. Two such examples were “Red-Eyes Darkness Dragon” from Turn 30 and “Vampire Genesis” from Turn 31.

Both were cards included in Structure Decks, and I and the staff picked them because they were very easy for viewers to get, they had very appealing effects, and they were just strong enough to work as the ace cards for villains in the show.

We chose cards that we thought would please the audience, as we felt it was nice to see the cards you actually own play a part in the TV show.

Q. Can you tel us exactly how the job of Duel Composition works?

Many of you seem interested in my job, so I’m trying to think of how to articulate what kind of job it is.

First off, it focuses on the matchmaking of who will fight based on the series composition and structure. There is a wide range of things to think about, such as the Deck Image of each Character, and key cards for the entire show, such as the “Sacred Beasts”. It is also important to propose the images for card illustrations, give lectures on Dueling to the Screenwriters, check the completed script, and explain how to understand a Duel.

But what I suspect you’re all interested in and really asking is “How was the Duel for each episode structured?”.

For each episode’s Duel, I made a Duel Chart (not really a chart, but let’s call it that for convenience) which basically worked like a Shogi Kifu. It’s a document that would follow the flow of a Duel, keeping track of Life Point math and the size of each Duel’s hand, as well as which cards were played and activated, and serve as the basis for how Duels were depicted in the TV show.

But more than anything, I felt the main purpose of the Duel Flow Chart was to help tell the Script Writer what the Duel was about.

I would like to reflect on specifics.

TURN-29 & TURN-30

This was a Duel focused on the card “Red-Eyes Darkness Dragon”. In order to take advantage of its effect, I had to design the Duel backwards to take advantage of its effect, but in order to prevent people from thinking “He’s going to play “Red-Eyes Darkness Dragon”, isn’t he?”, I cornered Judai with combos using “Red-Eyes Black Dragon” from the start of the Duel. In the second half of the Duel, the role of “Black Dragon” from the first half helped amped up the excitement and entertainment of the second half.

TURN-31

I’m deeply attached to Professor Chronos’ “Ancient Gear Golem”, as it’s a “GX” original ace monster I thought up early on. I figured it would be a monster that would actively be used from start to end, but I changed the means and method Chronos used to summon it each time, specifically so it wouldn’t feel like it was a routine yard sale piece of junk. Since Professor Chronos is a teacher, I hope this Duel was able to convey the idea that there is more than one route to the right answer… Was what I was thinking when I wrote this Duel.

TURN-32

A Duel in which Kaiser lost. I was worried how to sell the loss of the story’s strongest and best Duelist. If you play a card so powerful it seems like a complete fraud, it raises viewer expectations that “Kaiser will be able to do something about!”. If we let a Duelist lose, it loses the standing of the Duelist, so we needed a variety of ideas to prevent that feeling from happening, and we came up with various ideas and scenarios that would happen outside the Duel.

Duel Composition is a job where it takes time to complete the work, so I would basically have meetings every other week, so I’d need to complete the work in time.

However, there are times when multiple scriptwriters would place requests at the same time, so I’d need to do some preliminary legwork before placing the order. Especially when a new character is introduced, I’d have to think about their Deck first. In reality, the character would often change depending on ideas from the scriptwriter, so I feel like I was more often tested in my ability to improvise.

Also, Duel Composition would often take a month to complete per episodes, since any mistakes would also have to be corrected. Sometimes episodes would have 10+ versions due to necessary changes and the corrections of various mistakes…

However, I was often doing this in parallel, I might also want to know exactly how long it took, for record keeping purposes (ahaha).

Q. Fubuki uses a lot of cards owned by Jonouchi, such as “Red-Eyes”, was it because he was an older brother with a sister?

A. I hadn’t thought of that!

Q. Why were the “Ojamas” chosen as Manjome’s Spirits?

A. I think it was because Yoshida Shin-san, one of the script writers, liked the idea and went with that direction.

Source: V Jump