YMMV / Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters

• Evil Is Cool:
  • Alexander the Great is an Evil Brit, has a cool design, and gives the heroes quite a fight without needing to play card games. It helps that, like fan favorite Yami Bakura, he's someone's Superpowered Evil Side. He also gets to perform Grand Theft Me on his descendant, Alex Brisbane.
  • Joey's Red-Eyes Black Dragon armor and him being possessed by it in Episode 7 is also a highlight, with many fans moaning that it was only for one episode.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the past, the Millennium Ring possessed someone besides Ryou Bakura. In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, the Ring possesses two of the villains instead of Ryou.
  • The concept of monsters being worn as armor becomes funnier/awesome with the release of Nekroz.
  • Joey's Red-Eyes Black Dragon armor becomes this with the advent of Red-Eyes Dark Dragoon.
• Ho Yay: Alex Brisbane describes Yugi's grandpa as one of his dearest companions, and Solomon thinks likewise if his comments after Alex is un-possessed are any indication.
• Narm: Not even DAN GREEN can make this particular line sound serious.
  Yami: That's no teapot. Stand back!
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Anzu/Téa's characterization in this series helped a lot of fans to improve their opinion on her from the main series, as she knows a lot of historical facts, gets to be snarky without being overbearing, and has a lot of moments of supporting her friends, including Joey. It helps that she is directly involved in the action, with her Dark Witch being one of the strongest team members initially.
• So Bad, It's Good: It's 4Kids writing their own Yu-Gi-Oh! material, without needing to stick to an established script. From Tristan's melon obsession to Yami's duel armor, it's pretty silly, but fun too.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: With each characters have at least 2 Capsule Monster, this inevitably happens with some of them:
  • Summoned Skull was one of Yugi's ace in the original series and served him extensively throughout the series. It was introduced as Solomon's Ace monster and came to the rescue of Tristan and Tea by one shotting High Tide Gyojin... and then spent the next two big fights offscreen because it is a Silver Capsule Monster. The one fight it had is episode 4, where it is destroyed by the Guardian Statue dragging it into Yugi's Dark Magician attack and left Solomon with no Capsule Monster and thus spent most of his screentime as either Mission Control, Mr. Exposition or Distressed Dude until episode 9.
  • Same story with Yugi's Kuriboh, his frequent Support Party Member in the main series, who only has three scenes, two of which are cameos. Its effect to reduce damage in the main series is not mentioned at all despite plenty of time that it can be useful.
  • Honda/Tristan's Shovel Crusher is introduced in Episode 9 to bulldoze through the maze the cast is facing... only for it to absent from the Ultimate Great Moth fight. It got a scene to weaken Big Tusked Mammoth in episode 11 only to be one shot by Firewing Pegasus, an element that it isn't even weak to.
  • The worst offender must be Anzu/Téa's Dark Witch. Introduced in Episode 4 as the cast most powerful Capsule Monster and still managed to hold her own and be useful even when the cast progressed further into the game and obtained more powerful monsters, she was unceremoniously killed off by Garma Sword in episode 12, an attack she could have easily dodged by flying.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Joey being possessed by and merged with Red-Eyes Black Dragon has a lot of emotional stake and fight potential for the cast... that only lasted for about half an episode.
  • Solomon unceremoniously obtained Curse of Dragon in episode 9 with the spirit of Alexander the Great giving it to him, especially considering it was in his deck in the original series.
  • The concept of Silver Capsule Monster, powerful Monsters but need longer to be recharged is not really expanded upon and came off as an excuse to prevent Summonned Skull from one shooting all of the early game Monsters.
  • Alexander and the cast fight over "the Power to Rule the World". What is it? Where is it come from? How did Alexander learn about it? It is never expanded upon and shown what the power exactly is. It is implied to be some kind of mass mind control or charisma ability but even that is unclear which extent the power has.

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