75% sodium, 20% rage, 5% card games

Y’know, Rio looks pretty go for someone who was seared by otherworldly flames. I know advanced medicine and alien healing factors or something were in effect, but just seems odd that the victim of an accident sustained fewer injuries than the person who rescued her.

Also odd is the fact that despite being in intensive care and bedridden, possibly for several months, she’s able to outperform every one of Heartland Academy’s sports clubs on her first day back from the hospital.

What the hell is muscle atrophy? Something that Rio Kamishiro does not have time to deal with.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Bohman won! Admittedly that’s all I really wanted out of this episode, since I like Bohman, but I’d feel bad not mentioning the match itself.

This was a damn fine duel. Damn fine.

This the first time in a while were one of Vrains’ duel kept me engaged. There were a lot of good plays from both sides and a liberal amount BS, particularly Tesseract’s annihilator multi-attacker pseudo-Skill Drain BS and that damn field spell! I now understand why Hydradrives probably won’t see the light of day, being a one-sided Skill Drain and all and I am even more terrified at the prospect of Marincess’ eventual release, though I’m not really gonna complain at the prospect of a new water archetype.

As far as characters are concerned... I’ll be honest, I stopped caring about that a long time ago. Bohman is a pretty cool dude, I guess. He was oddly respectful towards his brother’s killer, but I guess being an advanced super-AI means that he wouldn’t easily be swayed by emotions like anger. And Aoi... was there too! I mean, there were moments here, mainly flashbacks to really old episodes. I liked how the Zaizens were actually able to say goodbye to each other before Aoi goes into another coma (that makes three! She’s tied ‘deaths’ with Shark at this point! One more and she’ll be tied with Rio. Although those were actual deaths, as opposed to comas.) Honestly, I still don’t care much for her.

And speaking of characters I don’t care about-

Next week, we’re back with Yusaku, the human piece of wood!

I know this will probably never happen, but I really wish Hydradrives would get printed at some point.

They remind me of C/Cs, but better.

Anyone else notice that Aoi is pretty much going through the same motions that Go went through back in the Another & Tower of Hanoi arcs?

Think about it.

Both are motivated by newly introduced characters that are extremely important to their pasts and have not been so much as alluded to at any prior point in the story. (Makoto/Miyu)

Both underwent a costume/name change. (Dark Onizuka/Blue Maiden)

They both scored a victory against a relatively low-tier villain. (Dr.Genome/Haru)

And then they ate shit against the season’s antagonist. (Revolver/Bohman (Admittedly, the last part hasn’t happened yet. Keyword being “yet.“ I’ll get back to you on Wednesday.))

The main difference is that instead of wrestling theatrics we get the slowly encroaching dread from the fact that a deck focused on swarming, hand traps and burn will one day be printed and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

You’ve got to love the setup here.

Back when Aoi fought Haru, she needed a win to show-off her new deck and who was the most expendable member of the villain team? Haru. Technically, it’d be Bit-Boot, but they wanted that win to mean something.

Now it’s Bohman’s turn to show off his new cards and who is the most expendable member of the hero team? Spectre. But since he already died, Aoi’s next in line.

Though I’d feel bad saying that this is simply a worfing, since there are personal stakes here. Bohman wants to get even for Haru, a relationship that was mostly undefined until five episodes ago, and Aoi wants to avenge her dear friend. A friend so near and dear to her that she forgot about her for several years.

Again, there are stakes here. Sort of.

If nothing else, it’d be nice to have Bohman finally get a win. Hell, I’m just happy to see him duel someone who isn’t Yusaku!

Look at this... absolute masterpiece.

It’s like the box art for those old Action Replays. You know the ones.

Can we take a moment to appreciate the fact that the KoH have an official desktop background?

I finally saw the translated effect of that Hydradrive card that nearly gave me an aneurysm last week:

So it does work out and Haru isn’t quite as stupid as I pegged him. My issue came from the fact that the anime (or at least the translators) described it as:

I may be wrong, but at least I can rest easy, knowing that Vrains hasn’t gotten that bad yet.

aside from neo storm access

I get that shipping is shipping and shippers are gonna do whatever, but...

Can we just take a moment to acknowledge the fact that this ‘relationship’ is built of the foundation of a mistaken identity and attempted murder?

Can I say something?

This boy is dumb and I mean REALLY DUMB.

I knew he was gonna lose this match, I’m pretty sure everyone knew that going in, but I kinda thought it would be because Aoi just outplayed him, not because he forgot how to think! He has truly ascended with the likes of Harald, Jean and Shark, in terms of royally bungaling up a victory that was handed to you on a silver platter.

I get what they were going for (I think.) He’s a prototype and imperfect, so he makes mistakes, because he’s all emotional and stuff, but this was just painful.

Here’s the rundown:

Haru has Judgement Arrows up pointing at Twin Hydradrive Knight and Coolant Hydradrive. Coolant is also equipped with a card that doubles the damage it deals in direct attacks (on top of the boost from Arrows) but it is forced to attack.

Aoi has Marincess Coral Anemone (yay new water archetype, boo Cyberse) at 2800 ATK. She activates a trap that negates Coolant’s effect, but it still has to attack.

Haru, like the dopey prototype he is, crashes Coolant into Anemone, taking 800 and then destroys her with Twin Knight, allowing Aoi to set up a counterattack with her skill, which ends up winning her the match.

You see the problem?

He didn’t have to attack with Coolant first. It didn’t say that it had to go first, it just had to attack. I’m thinking that it might have been a better idea to attack with the 3600 monster first and then attack with Coolant, for a clean 4K. For an AI, he’s not very logical. It seems to run in the family, what with Bohman passing up the chance to KO Playmaker and all.

The next generation of Artificial Intelligence, ladies and gentlemen!

EDIT: I made an error in analysis. Coolant’s effect had been negated after the attack was declared, so he couldn’t have attacked with Twin Knight first. However, Hydradrive impact does allow the equipped monster to attack directly if the opponent has a monster on the field, which she did.

So he still bungled it.

Well... This is a thing.

I wanted to say that a match like this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but on a grander scale, it sort of does.

Put simply, due to Vrains’ smaller cast of both heroes and villains, the hierarchy of who is and is not allowed to beat whom is much more strictly enforced. Unfortunately, even factoring in the Ignis, Aoi is really low on that scale. You have her and then you have Takeru above her and Ryoken above him and Yusaku even further up. Making things even harder is the fact that our main villains are already involved with other plot threads. Bohman and Lightning have to deal with Yusaku and Windy has to deal with Ryoken. Odds are that anyone else who fights them will likely lose (like Spectre!)

So this leaves us with a hard question: whose gonna lose to Aoi? I mean, she has to beat someone! They gave her an Ignis and yet another costume change, they can’t just let that go to waste- even GO managed to get a win before he got bopped. So that’s where Haru comes in. He’s pretty much the only villain who fits the qualification, which will probably bring some complications. The only problem with that is that Haru is kind of a nobody, he hasn’t really done anything all season, except stand around and be kinda sassy.

But hey, it’s an actual Duel! That’s more that I can say we got last week.

Are you really doing this, Vrains?

You had plenty of time to build on the dynamic between Bohman and Haru, because let’s be honest, people were staring to wonder what exactly Haru brings to the table, but you chose to do this now? Right before he gets bopped? He’s pretty much been an afterthought for most of this season and now you want to try and develop this whole thing.

Vrains, why are you like this?

Get it?

And so begins a match that doesn’t actually need to happen. I get that they need to show off Lightning and I guess that’s why they’ve been focusing on Blood Shepherd so much: so we can have some of that sweet sweet drama when he gets bopped, but there’s a bit of a snag here.

He has a gun for a hand! And that gun is pretty good at messing Ignis (and most other things) up! Just blast Lightning! He had the right idea when tracking down Aqua. Hell, he didn’t even need to fight against Emma. Just blast her and then the trap goes poof and then you can blast Aqua. Might as well blast Aoi, too, don’t want to leave a witness. It probably wouldn’t work on Revolver though, because Revolver.

That’s the problem with a character like BS: when they draw attention to the fact that problems can be solved without the use of card games, it becomes a little odd when they still end up using card games to solve their problems.

I want to point something out with these two.

Typically in Yugiohs, sibling pairs are made to suffer, particularly the younger sibling (just look at Mokuba! The boy exists to be endangered,) but Emma actually got of pretty easy. At least she still has both of her arms and relatively happy childhood, unlike Kengo.

It took an unnecessarily long amount of time, but finally, the gang’s all here!

It just occurred to me that tomorrow’s episode is gonna shed some light on Emma’s backstory. I mean, it pretty much has to! This is her finale of sorts, since the summaries for future episodes lowkey confirm that she loses this match and thus, her account (because we need yet more DRAMA... and an excuse to get the Ignis holders together,) but also because she dueling her brother! Sibling matches are always good for this sort of thing.

That being said, I am extreme nervous about this. One of the reasons why Emma’s one of my favorite characters is that she doesn’t have an overly dramatic backstory, like most of Vrains’ cast, but that’s because we never really saw it. That’ll probably change tomorrow.

Or maybe it won’t, I honestly can’t tell with this show sometimes.