Yu-Gi-Oh!

On the data. The 1998 series is the first trap. Toei Animation adapted the manga in April 1998 and made 27 episodes, ending in October the same year. Fans call it Season 0, which is misleading, because it is not season zero of anything: it is a separate adaptation with a different studio, a different cast, a different tone and a different focus, mostly on deadly games rather than the card game. When Studio Gallop began Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters in April 2000, it started again from the Duelist Kingdom arc and simply proceeded as if the Toei version did not exist, contradicting it outright in places. It was never dubbed into English and has never had an official English language release, so anyone who has watched it did so subtitled by fans. Nothing on this page depends on it. Duel Monsters itself ran 224 episodes in one continuous Japanese broadcast to September 2004. The 4Kids English dub of the same 224 episodes was reorganised into five seasons, which is why the season numbers people quote never quite line up, and it was heavily rewritten, with names changed, deaths removed and imagery altered. Where a count or a season number differs between versions, this page uses the Japanese broadcast: one run of 224. GX followed in October 2004 and is a real sequel, set about ten years on at a duel academy founded by Kaiba, with Yugi himself handing over a card in the first episode. Its 180 Japanese episodes are not all available in English: 4Kids dubbed the first three years and stopped, under pressure to move on to the newer series, so the fourth year was never dubbed and only reached the West subtitled years later. Sources give the dubbed total as 155 or 156 depending on how a two-part episode is counted, which is why no dub figure is used in the listing above. 5D's continues the same world later still, in a city built on the site of the old one, and Bonds Beyond Time in 2010 puts the leads of Duel Monsters, GX and 5D's in one film, which is the clearest statement anyone has made that those three belong to one timeline. That film is a crossover happening at three points at once, so it is deliberately left outside the story order rather than forced into a position. The English version of 5D's was cut and rearranged in its later arcs and sources disagree about how many episodes the dub actually contains, so only the Japanese figure of 154 is listed. Then the chain breaks. Zexal, from 2011, shares no stated link with 5D's. Arc-V, from 2014, builds a story out of four dimensions whose duelling styles match the earlier shows, Fusion for GX, Synchro for 5D's and Xyz for Zexal, and brings back versions of their characters. That is the opposite of a sequel: it presents those series as parallel worlds rather than earlier chapters, which is why they are grouped here as alternate worlds with no position in the story order. Arc-V is also the worst served in English, since its dub skipped an entire middle season on broadcast and was never properly completed. VRAINS, from 2017, is connected to nothing. Sevens in 2020 and Go Rush!! in 2022 form their own pair: Go Rush!! is set in the same world as Sevens and earlier in its history, and both use Rush Duels, a rebuilt version of the card game with different rules, so they are the one place where starting with the newer series does no harm. Go Rush!! ran to 30 March 2025 and its total is contested: episode guides that list every broadcast give 151 across three years of 51, 51 and 49, while at least one franchise wiki still shows 105, a figure that appears to have stopped being updated. This page uses 151 and flags it. The films need care. Pyramid of Light, from 2004, was made for the English language market and is the case named in this page's headline: it uses the Duel Monsters cast, it was marketed as part of that series, and it is not part of its story. The Dark Side of Dimensions, from 2016, is the genuine sequel, written by the manga's author Kazuki Takahashi and set six months after the original ending, and it is the only film given a place in the story order here. Capsule Monsters, a twelve episode series from 2006, was produced in English by 4Kids and never broadcast in Japan at all, so it is listed but left outside the timeline.

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