'Yu-Gi-Oh!' Twitch Channel Feels The Power Adding 'Arc-V' & 'VRAINS'
The pendulum has swung rather positively it seems
Can you feel the power? After about a week with fourth series Zexal in rotation, the official Yu-Gi-Oh! Twitch channel added both the fifth and sixth series, Arc-V and Vrains. These might complete the channel’s collection of series for the time being, with the latest series, Sevens, having its status unclear. The additions came Friday, December 6, though admittedly I didn’t notice until ten episodes before the end of the first round of Arc-V Sunday night, and thus rolled into its first round of Vrains very early Monday. It was users Internetexplorer11, FrostyFox49, and MaskedDudeJ who were kind enough to inform me of when it happened. I was very mindful of at least properly acknowledging those who answered me this time. Also, apparently the 2016 Dark Side of Dimensions movie I’ve discussed in previous coverage still hasn’t been added yet.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V continued the franchise’s stay on Nicktoons, having begun its stay with Zexal. Yuya Sakaki seeks to become the greatest entertainer in Action Duels who introduces the new Pendulum Summoning method to Duel Monsters, and it gets attention from shady places. The series pretty multiversal too, with alternate versions of familiar previous series characters appearing later on. While I previously alluded to Zexal breaking the pattern of dubs not being complete, Arc-V’s second season was skipped by Nicktoons, but they did air the third. All 149 episodes were still dubbed and packaged together.
VRAINS stars high school student and Yusaku Fujiki of Den City, where thousands of duelists play in SOL Technologies‘ virtual reality space known as Link VRAINS with their own avatars, VRAINS being an acronym for Virtual Reality Artificial Intelligence Network System. The big villains are a hacker organization known as the Knights of Hanoi, and Yusaki fends them off as “Playmaker” while uncovering a traumatic incident from his past alongside his AI partner, Ai, and protecting the Cyberse world. While the series does feature previous series’ summoning styles, it brings its own as well, called Link Summoning, VRAINS is probably the least-watched English dub in the entire franchise, at least in the United States. It is currently the only series to bypass linear television here entirely, premiering on Pluto TV in November 2020, after the series had completed airing in Japan. It was also the last series to be animated by and runs 120 episodes, bringing essentially 270 episodes to the run on the Twitch channel.
It took just over a month for the six series to be added. As for Yu-Gi-Oh! Sevens, it seems to be Hulu-exclusive, and Disney XD-branded at that, since it is the U.S. home for the series. However, it finished airing the 89 dubbed episodes (out of 92) on December 2, 2023. Maybe now that it’s been a year since concluding there could be some broader unification movement on the other platforms its predecessors are on. It’s definitely a longer-term wait-and-see approach going forward, but it was a lot of fun tracking the process.
