Logo for Legendhiro's Yu-Gi-Oh! DA
Yu-Gi-Oh! DA (Duel Academy) is a Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction by Legendhiro. It is a spinoff of his previous work Yu-Gi-Oh! DF. It follows John and Karen of DF as they go on to become students at the newly opened Duel Academy. The primary purpose of this one-book story is to reconcile some of the plot holes in the series Yu-Gi-Oh! GX while simultaneously developing Legendhiro's core two characters.
Yu-Gi-Oh! DA shows the event that caused the Abandoned Dorm to become abandoned, the naming of the three dorms after the three Egyptian Gods, and the instance that led the Sacred Beasts to be imprisoned under the school. In fact, DA goes so far as to even rationalize why the summoning requirements of Armityle the Chaos Phantom are different between the OCG/TCG and the anime.
Though DA focusses on John and Karen, it also introduces many new characters to the DF continuity.
Characters[]
Main Characters[]
Thomas
Gloria "Ria" Hernandez
Duel Academy[]
David Sheppard
Headmaster Kagemaru
Nurse Fonda Fontaine
Miss Warren
Antagonists[]
The Card Takers (DA)
- Shin
- Sky
The Shadow
Armityle the Chaos Phantom
Minor Characters[]
"Gray-Eyes"
Lisa
Todd
Pete
Story[]
Part I: The Card Takers[]
John and Karen witness a teenage duelist crush his test opponent during the Duel Academy entrance exam dueling portion and are very impressed. John later meets this Duelist, named Thomas, in one of his classes while Karen is in a design class. Thomas tells John about a group of Duelists calling themselves the Card Takers who are seeking challenges by challenging fellow students to duels with their favorite cards as ante. John goes to face the Card Takers. John moves to face them. He claims to want to recover the cards lost to the Card Takers, and on some level he does, but he mostly is looking for a thrill. Karen and Thomas acompany him. Karen seems to think that facing the Card Takers is a bad idea, though she never comes right out and says it.
John meets the Card Takers at night at the bridge to the dorm that would one day become Osiris (Slifer) Red. He discovers that the Takers are ex-Order members who heard that John was the one who defeated Yami Marik and freed them from Marik's influence. They engineered the entire situation with the anted cards in order to draw John into what they call a "real duel". John faces the first (weaker) of the two Card Taker members. He is overconfident and fails to take notice of his opponent's strategy. John loses, losing his The Fiend Megacyber to his opponent. Thomas appologizes for getting John into a situation in which he lost his favorite card, and Karen tries her best to comfort him, to no avail.
John is thrown into a retrospective depression. He skips classes the day after the duel and is promptly forced into a Shadow Duel by a mysterious figure who overwhelms him almost instantly. During the duel, John realizes his mistakes and manages to turn the duel around. He is then able to see that his opponent is really his old friend Max and that the Shadow Game is false. Max, having succeeded in snapping John out of his "funk" states that the debt created when John saved Max from Yami has been repayed, since John's deficiency could very easily have led to his death. Soon after, after Thomas loses his Flame Spirit Ignis to the Card Takers while attempting to recover John's lost card, John challenges the Card Takers to a rematch.
John defeats the Card Takers. They reveal that they had planned to return all of the cards they had won anyway, but John still doesn't like them. Both Karen and Thomas are present when the Card Takers are defeated.
Part II: The Shadow[]
John (now more serious about his life) and Karen meet a fangirl of John's, Gloria "Ria" Hernandez, at the quarterly Dueling Exams. Ria has a very obvious and flambouant crush on John. She initially challenges Karen for John's affections, even when John reveals that he has no real interest in her. It isn't long before it is revealed that Karen and Ria have been paired off to duel. They agree to place stakes on the duel. If Karen wins, Ria must back off, but if Ria wins, she can sontinue to pursue John. Ria is defeated, and John invites her to join his circle of friends ("Try being my friend, not my fan"). Ria declines, but is later shown as part of John's group alongside Karen and Thomas. She also continues to pursue John, which often causes friction between her and Karen. Karen originally thought that Ria only hit on John while she was around, as a way of getting under Karen's skin, but Karen learns from Thomas that Ria hits on John much more often than that.
Meanwhile a mysterious force latches itself to a book and tricks two Duel Academy students into summoning it into our dimension. It begins absorbing/consuming Blue Dorm students in secret for their Duel Energy in order to increase its physical pressence in this dimension. Karen is about to give John a card she made for him when the creature becomes strong enough that she and John take notice. Karen and John move to confront the creature and discover that it has attacked Thomas and Ria and that only Thomas escaped. Because the creature has put up a barrier of shadows, only John is able to continue forward, taking with him his gift from Karen; a card made by her specifically for his deck. John finds the creature which he refers to as the Shadow about to absorb Ria. John uses his shadow powers to save her and engages in a duel against the Shadow with his and Ria's lives on the line. During the duel, Karen waits with Thomas outside of the Shadow's barrier.
Sheppard appears during the duel and explains to Karen and Thomas that the Professors had expected that the large collection of Duel Energy among students at Duel Academy might attract an evil force, though he assures her that they never expected anything as powerful as the Shadow. Sheppard also explains the nature of Duel Energy to a limited extent, likening it to the energies known in ancient times by the names Ki, Chakra, and Ba.
Karen follows the duel between John and the Shadow from outside the perimeter of their game, using the feelings she has for John to sense his emotions with her Soul of Imagination. She is the first to realize when the duel ends, and is the first inside once it has. Karen enters the dorm in time to see an injured Ria kiss John. Even though the kiss was unwelcome, it causes Karen's emotions to spin out of control. Karen is enraged, breaking things off with John and stating her plans to be given a seprate schedule from John the following year, as well as an intension to move to the Red Dorm, stating that she doesn't want to see John again until he learns to truly take his life and lovelife seriously. However, because the blue dorm is no longer habitable, all students staying in the blue dorm must be assigned places in the other dorms for the remainder of the year. During this period of confusion, John confronts Sheppard and Kagemaru, claiming that leaving Duel Academy open is a risk, as it attracts trouble. The two teachers counter, explaining to John that the school serves the purpose of making Duelists strong enough to fight against such dark forces as well, and that as long as Duel Monsters exists, the school will be necessary. John unenthusiastically agrees, and proceeds to transfer out of blue dorm and arrange a separate schedule from Karen for the following year long before Karen can do so herself. He also returns Karen's gift as part of a note explaining his intention to remove himself from Karen's life until he has gotten his life together. He doesn't reveal himself until the following year. It is unclear what he had been doing until then.
During Duel Academy's second year, the Shadow returns, having slowly siphoned small amounts of Duel Energy from the students on the island until strong enough to instigate its full and complete emergence into our dimension. It is met in battle by Karen, Ria (who has reconciled with Karen), and eventual by a fearful and reluctant Thomas. They are unable to defeat the Shadow, and are saved by John, who has recovered the serious side of his personality lost since the end of Yu-Gi-Oh! DF. He again engages the Shadow in a Shadow Game, this time without his gift from Karen. Even from outside of the Shadow Game boundary, Karen can tell that John is losing. In fact, it seems that he will lose until Karen's feelings for John and he connection with him allows The Fiend Omegacyber to join back with his deck. He uses Omegacyber to defeat the Shadow's Neos Wiseman. John penalizes the Shadow by trapping it in an eternally formless state, forcing it to observe the world it wishes to rule forever without ever being able to be a part of it.
Part III: Emergence of the Sacred Beasts[]
John and Karen have renewed their relationship. John moves back up to the Blue Dorm, now Obelisk Blue Dorm. They think things are going well until the beginning of year three when they learn from Sheppard that a new threat is about to appear. Sheppard explains that after Maxamillion J. Pegasus created the God Cards he also created their foils, the Sacred Beasts. But the Beasts threatened to absorb all life from every monster and Duelist around them. A co-worker and friend of Pegasus, Kagemaru, had a unique power to seal the Beasts and offered to keep the Beasts bound in his deck until his death, taking the spirits of the Beasts with him. But Sheppard explains that the governing intelligence of the Beasts, their combined form Armityle, has eroded Kagemaru's control and seized his body and deck. Sheppard enlists John, Karen, Thomas and Ria to help him fight Armityle and his three Sacred Beast forms/cards.
Armityle has not yet reached the point where he can summon himself into a duel, so he forms a plan to protect himself from John and Karen, the biggest threats to his emergence, until after his power has been fully realized. He awakens the dark side of former Card Taker, Shin. Dark Shin cuts John and Karen off from the others. He uses a combination Wind/Dark Deck to defeat Karen and banish her to the Shadows with Armityle's power before he himself is banished by John. John moves on to face the Beasts and Armityle and break its spell, returning Karen, and finds that Sheppard, Thomas and Ria have all been defeated by Armityle at once.
John and Armityle face off in a Shadow Game that has the potential to deal real physical damage to the players, especial from the attacks of monsters as strong as the Sacred Beasts. John almost dies, especially after Armityle combines the Sacred Beasts to summon himself. But John manages to use Armityle's power against him. He penalizes Armityle by shattering the intelligence that Armityle holds dear and transforming him into a mindless beast. This is why Armityle must be summoned with a Spell card in the Yu-Gi-Oh! GX anime, since he is no longer smart enough to summon himself.
The shock of the duel leaves Kagemaru injured and unable to continue as headmaster. John uses his powers to make Kagemaru forget the Beasts, and therefore any guilt he may feel, unaware that Kagemaru would discover the Beasts again several years later and seek their power in a bid to recover his youth. Kagemaru retires and names Sheppard headmaster. Sheppard commissions for the school, destroyed in the battle with the Beasts, to be rebuilt with a secret vault beneath it in which the Beasts can be safely sealed away.
Part IV: A Duel of Fate[]
John's fourth year begins. He and his friends are well known across the island as the heroes who saved Kagemaru and Sheppard from the "collapse of the Duel Academy building" the previous year. Pegasus appears at the school and offers Karen a job heading up his newest design department. He also gives Ria a place on a Duel Monsters team he is forming. He states that he needs one more duelist for his team and John and Thomas duel for that possition. John narrowly defeats Thomas, who has vastly improved, easily reaching John's level. Pegasus begins to give John the possition on his team, but John declines, stating that Thomas is more deserving. Moved by John's self-sacrifice, Pegasus allows both to become members of his team. John and his friends move on to their desired futures, which all look very bright.
Karen has very little to do with this final arch of the book. Karen's is actually involved in very little of the Yu-Gi-Oh! DA storyline overall (though she does contribute in her own way). This, however, is understandable seeing how Karen doesn't even consider herself a Duelist any longer.
Trivia[]
- Unlike some fans of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime, Legendhiro doesn't hate Yu-Gi-Oh! GX for its slower, happier pace. In fact, his only real gripes with the series are that its serious and its humorous moments seem completely separated from each other (which is more anoying than anything else), and that the story was riddled with plot holes that came from a lack of sufficient backstory. This book is obviously (at least in part) an attempt to reconcile the latter of these two issues.
- This is not a typical "Duel Academy Fan Fiction" as the opening chapters might suggest. It is written and paced almost exactly like Yu-Gi-Oh! DF, only the setting is different.
- According to the author, John and Karen get engaged soon after the events of this book.