Wednesday, May 29, 2013

The Drdek - Yu-Gi-Oh!

This card comes all the way back from the old days of Yu-Gi-Oh!, all the way back from Volume 1, the first expansion in Japan. Since then, to date, it has never been reprinted in the OCG, and is one of the few cards never been printed in the TCG because, well, it's bad. Yu-Gi-Oh! is not a very well-balanced game.
Tremble in fear of the, um, eyeball plant.
The original Japanese name, when translated, is Death Foot. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either, if anything it looks like the eyeball is attached to a demon hand, but whatever.

While never printed in the TCG and never appearing in any of the four animes (if I'm wrong and you find it, please update Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia) the card still has an English name, having appeared in several video games released in the US. They couldn't call it Death Foot, because you are not allowed to say death in the TCG. What will overly sensitive and easily insulted parents say if we include the word death in a children's card game, a game that involves monsters destroying each other! If they had it their way the Graveyard would be renamed the Better Place. Like these parents, I am overly sensitive to stupid name changes. For crying out loud, you weren't allowed to say the word black for several expansions, hence the Red-Eyes B. Dragon.

The English name though makes even less sense, The Drdek. How do you even pronounce that? Turns out the name is a likely homage to Matthew Drdek, one of the translators at 4 Kids who worked on the English localizations of the Yu-Gi-Oh! series. Why they felt compelled to name a disembodied eyeball after him though is beyond me.

No comments:

Post a Comment