OH MY GOD YOU FOUND IT. YOU FOUND THE SCENE.
This is THE SCENE that made me start liking Ryou Bakura. LET ME EXPLAIN
Prior to playing The Falsebound Kingdom, I was only familiar with Ryou from the first couple of seasons of the English anime (yes, the 4Kids dub), and a tiny, TINY bit of the manga (when he runs crying after failing Bobasa's test). My favorite character was Yami Bakura, and all I knew of Ryou was, basically, he was a pathetic, timid coward whose only purpose was to stand in YB's way. I found him annoying, basically.
This was the mid-aughts, when the manga wasn't even finished yet! I was like, 11 or 12, just discovering fandom on the internet, and had found out that the final arc of YGO was taking place in ANCIENT EGYPT! I was SO excited! So I had found this incredibly sketchy scanlation site and every week, when a new chapter came out, I would sit there for like a half hour as the images loaded on our incredibly awful dial-up connection.
Yami Bakura WAS my favorite character. But I was discovering Thief King Bakura and falling head over heels for him. I'm not sure that I had admitted I liked TKB more yet, but I was there. (I also, at the time, was discovering the Queen's Thief series and Jing: King of Bandits, and therefore decided that I very much liked fictional thieves in general.)
So I somehow procured a copy of The Falsebound Kingdom and was playing it, Yugi version first because I have always hated Kaiba, and we finally find Ryou, and I'm like *rolls eyes* okay, whatever, and then he says all this. And I'm like "...???" And he SUCCEEDS. And I'm like "?!?!?!"
Wait, so Ryou can be a badass thief, too?!
And as I continue playing the game, Ryou proves himself to me. He ends up being my strongest duelist besides Yami, and the fastest by far. My entire strategy started to revolve around sending the majority of my army through the middle of the battlefield to take the enemy head-on, while Ryou, with his incredible speed, ran around the edges and started attacking the enemy fortress from the back. Then, by the time Yami and the rest got there, the leader was so weak that they couldn't stand up to Yami at all.
All along, I am becoming more and more fond of Ryou.
Then the Big Bad of the game decides to mind control Joey, Tea, and Ryou. And I'm like, "Ohoho, Yami Bakura isn't going to like that."
It's all very dramatic with Yami (or maybe little Yugi?) rescuing Tea, and Mai saving Joey, and we finally find Ryou again but it's not him. I was right, Yami Bakura was displeased. However, he saw the game we were all playing and decided he wanted to sow some chaos.
Cue the hardest goddamned level in the game.
Mind, up until this point, I had beaten every level in one or two attempts, three at the most when I was being dumb about something. But trying to catch up with Yami Bakura and defeat him before he burned our castle to the ground (with everyone inside) was insane. I probably went through 20+ attempts, pulling my hair out, just trying to find a single monster that was fast enough to get to our castle first.
I finally realized that the key... was Ryou. It was his monsters that were so fast. They were the only ones who stood a chance.
Even with Ryou's best monster, Ansatsu, leading Yami's party, it took like three attempts to catch Yami Bakura. But boy, when I caught him, I absolutely crushed him with Dark Magician and Dark Magician Girl and I loved it.
Ryou wakes up, and says meekly that he hopes he didn't cause too much trouble. Yami replies, "We're just glad to have you back." I'm like, damn straight. At that moment, if I never saw Yami Bakura again, I would be happy.
That game literally flipped how I felt about Ryou Bakura and Yami Bakura. That game is THE reason I like Ryou as much as I do. From that moment on, I paid more attention to him and found all his little charms, how incredibly brave and loyal he is, and how goddamned weird he is, too.
... all because he's a little bit like Thief King Bakura. 🥰
