GX Duel Memorial Album #06: About Asuka

Shall We Duel?

GX Duel Memorial Album #06

(We asked him about Asuka’s Duels & Other aspects of the show as it aired)

TURN-41

I’ve had a couple questions about Asuka pile up, so I’d like to answer them all at once.

Q. Can you tell us how you came up with Asuka’s Deck? Also, was there anything you were conscious of when composing Asuka’s Duels?

Q. I would like to hear any stories you have to share about the Duel Composition for Turn-41 (Asuka VS Titan). Also, the effect of “Cyber Blader” which changes on the number of monsters your opponent controls, remains rare and impressive even today.

Asuka is the lone girl in the regular cast who is an Obelisk Blue Honor student, so I tried to give her a Deck that gave the impression of her being a strong female character. That led me to giving her a motif based around female athletes. It was also a motif not used before. (“U.A.” didn’t exist during “GX”) (1)

I tried to think of how to reflect the strength of hard-working female athletes in sports with her Deck. “Cyber Blader” and “Blade Skater” have the aesthetics of Ice Skates, so I thought it would be good making the edges of skate shoes look like blades for the motif of her monsters. And I tried to combine that with elements of ballet.

Technically ballet dancers aren’t athletes, but due to a certain movie I saw when I was in school, I always saw them as more fighters than athletes (ahaha).

When thinking of new motifs, I research various materials. When doing this, I come across a lot of words I don’t know. That’s one of the joys of this job. The research I do reflects not only in the cards and Decks, but in the names of attacks and effects. “Cyber Blader”‘s effect names are derived from ballet terms: “Pas de Deux”, “Pas de Trois” and “Pas de Quatre”, which mean “Two people dancing”, “Three people dancing” and “Four people dancing” respectively.

This terminology lead me to the idea of “Could ballet dancing could be recreated through monsters battling?”, and resulted in a tricky monster whose effects change depending on the number of monsters.

As a result of coming up with this effect, I feel like the direction of Asuka’s personality and character and the structure of her Duels ended up being decided. I think I was able to differentiate her from other students by having her use tricky effects, and use her Duels to show not only her fierceness and strength but her intellectual nature. Also, this isn’t limited to Asuka, but the same ace monster will appear several times in the Duels of the regular cast. At that time, I took great pains to avoid making people think “This again”, but I think it’s easier to create new surprises each time if the effect shifts. I think “Cyber Blader” is a very good monster because of its productive economic efficiency. (Ahaha).

TURN-42

The spirit of “Dark Magician Girl” appears to Duel, but when considering this kind of Duel, a situation arises in which the Duelist will summon themselves. I try not to think about it too much when composing the Duel, but if you could actually Summon yourself… would you do it? (ahaha) In case you were wondering, originally this episode was purely a cosplay Duel.

TURN-43

The screenwriter for the episode asked “Aren’t there gambling themed monsters in the Official Card Game?”, I suggested “Sand Gambler” and “Second Coin Toss”, which formed the basis of the cards used to compose the Duel.

While “Gamble Angel Bunny” is a brand new anime original card, the truth is its effect is the same as “Abare Ushioni”… Which is because, at first, it was “Abare Ushioni”. However, its visual image was too far away or inconsistent with the character and aesthetics of “The Boy” to use, so we decided to keep the finished Duel and just swap out the monster. “Gamble Angel Bunny” is certainly on point with his aesthetics.

I was also hooked by the idea that relying so heavily on “Second Coin Toss” makes him fail as a gambler, which wouldn’t have hit as hard if we had used “Abare Ushioni”.

TURN-44

The Duels for this episode were made doing TURN-45 and TURN-46 first and then provided feedback for this episode. It was made to show the threat to the audience ahead of time, while preventing character spoilers due to card effects and the voice actor’s voice.

Everyone Let’s Ask Hikokubo-san!

Q. I get the impression that in the anime there are many Duels that end when a character’s Life Points hit exactly 0. Do you intentionally do this?

A. Yes. I do it intentionally. Conversely, there’s a high chance of perfect kill plays happened unintentionally. At times like that, I smile to myself and think “Maybe the God of Duels lined things up like this?” (ahaha).

Also, however, there are scenes where perfect kills are effective and times where they aren’t, so I don’t think I’m emphasizing that much, so I guess it depends on how the scriptwriter sees it. However, I think perfect kills can express something about a Duelist without speaking, like a man’s back (2)

Q. Did you always come up with the names of monsters’ attacks?

A. I like coming up with names for techniques, so in the beginning I came up with them myself. However, as time went on, my workload increased, I tended to put things off until later, so gradually the screenwriter began to think about them, and we adopted the screenwriter’s ideas.

Q. What’s your favorite “GX” Duel in terms of visual direction?

A. The end of TURN-8. Judai disappearing in the flash of light of Eternal Evolution Burst (3) is so cool!

Translation Notes:

(1) Yes he said “U.A.”. This is not a transcription error.

(2) A man’s back is a Japanese idiom for “Actions speak louder than words”.

(3) Japanese Name is Eternal Evolution Burst. The dub localized this as “Super Strident Blaze”.

Source: V JUMP