R to L (Japanese Style). XXXThe Duel Academy Tournament moves into high gear as Jaden and his friends battle it out with each other for a chance to duel the legendary Zane "Kaiser" Truesdale. American duelists David Rabb and Reggie Mackenzie are also in the running, but their goal is not to take the title of Duel Champion--they're after nothing less than Winged Kuriboh, Jaden's most trusted, and enchanted, card!
This is what I've been waiting for! The two students from America have revealed themselves to be super shifty and actually working for this evil shadow thing that's looking for soul cards to resurrect it. The duel tournament has begun and what I really enjoyed is none of these duelists are bad...we don't have a "Joey Wheeler"; everyone has their strengths and the duels are real fast paced. I also appreciated their attempts to stay true to the actual dueling of the real life card game. For those not familiar with the game or maybe not with the anime I could see this being hard to follow, it was all basically the duels of the tournament and none of them last more than a few pages. I like the canon consistency, referring to the Millennium Items and the Egyptian legends of containing whatever this shadow is...I'm eager to see how this is gonna play out!
GX continues its Duel Academy Tournament storyline as Alexis finishes her duel with Reggie "Mac" McKenzie in the preliminaries; going head-to-head with a planet series cards. Then the semi-finals begin with Jaden taking on a Obelisk Blue, then we move into a duel with Bastion vs Mac, then a shocking one-turn kill occurs when Alexis takes on David from the American Academy, and the volume finishes off with a duel between Syrus and Chazz. Kageyama delivers on some interesting duels that don't rely on drawing a god-tier counter on pure luck. And I appreciated that greatly. We also learn more about the motivations of the American students... and are teased about a potential shadow game to happen soon.
The GX manga continues to deliver its own unique and engaging storyline. Expanding greatly on deck strategy and character dynamics in this engrossing collection.
As the plot thickens, so do the quality of duels the reader will see in this volume. The intensity in this volume only picks up where the last volume left off, making reading this volume swift due to the many duels. If you aren't a fan of too much dueling, then this volume might not be the best for you.
So we finally get to learn more about the main villain of this series even if he is not named and I do like that this feels more of a sequel then the anime was. As the GX anime just had a bunch of references and Easter eggs to the manga/anime while this actually uses ideas like the fact that the villain seems to be linked to what happened in Ancient Egypt.
This one's fine. Alexis kind of just gets stomped all over twice, which isn't great. Syrus's match is a lot more engaging and does more for his character, and Jaden's is solid as usual. The art is really lacking in this volume comparatively.