Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS

After months of speculation, more details about the sixth series in the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise have finally been revealed. The new series is going to be called Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS. I'm guessing that VRAINS is an acronym for something, and that the first two letters stand for Virtual Reality. The reason I'm making that leap is because the duels are going to take place in some kind of virtual world created in cyberspace. To me, this info makes it seem like they're going to be doing some sort of Sword Art Online based Yu-Gi-Oh! series.

According to the new info, the duelists in this virtual world seem to transform (these transformations could just be digital avatars) and fight using some kind of hover boards. Apparently when the new hero of this series, Yusaku Fujiki duels in this virtual environment, his hair color changes and he wears this outfit that looks like something out of the movie, Tron: Legacy. Basically it's a black jumpsuit with glowing gold lines on it like circuit paths. Yusaka's ace monster in the series has also been revealed to be a large mechanical-looking warrior called Decode Talker (click here to view). There's no new info yet on whether or not Decode Talker is going to use a brand new summoning mechanic for the game, but I'm sure we'll find out soon.

I have to admit that I'm a little bit skeptical about this new Yu-Gi-Oh! series. It is kind of nice though that after all this craziness with alternate dimensions in ARC-V, it's kind of nice to see the producers do a series that's a little more grounded in reality... well, virtual reality anyway.

EDIT: It's been revealed today that there is going to be a brand new summoning mechanic to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game that's going to be introduced in VRAINS. It's called Link Summoning, and from what I've been able to figure out so far, it involves using monsters in adjacent card zones to summon what's known as a Link Monster from the Extra Deck. Yusuka's ace monster, Decode Talker has been confirmed to be one of these link monsters. VRAINS is also going to be introducing a brand new monster type to the game called Cybers. Just to be clear, this isn't a new archetype but a basic monster type like Dragons, Warriors and Machines. All of Yusuka's monsters are going to be of the new Cybers-Type. My guess is that these Cybers monsters are a reference to how the duels in VRAINS take place in virtual reality, so this series may be less like Sword Art Online and more like the Tron movies.

I have to admit that I really like the concept of this new Cybers-Type, but at the moment I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around the whole Link Monster thing. My guess is there will be some very drastic changes to the card game once the VRAINS era finally begins.

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