I've put off reading this and watching the anime for months on end, expecting it to be terrible; the last three series all had awesome main characters (and in DM's case, villains), and then... there's Yuma.
I haven't actually yet been able to bring myself to watch the anime, but the manga was definitely nowhere near as awful as I expected.
While Yuma and Astral come off as "Yugi and Yami reincarnated" just a little too much, they're not too bad characters at all (Even though, to this day, I have no idea if that red spiky thing on Yuma's head is actually supposed to be hair or...).
The only thing I found amusingly bad is the fact they're using those D-Gazer things (Augmented Reality) in ZeXal, while they had flawless, full 3D holograms in Duel Monsters. Way to take a large step backwards in technology. |D