Yu-Gi-Oh! Manga vs Anime

A detailed comparison of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime to its original manga.  Personal blog is InvaderWeezle.tumblr.com

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Yu-Gi-Oh’s animation directors

In total, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters had 34 different animation directors from 9 animation companies across its 224 episodes.  In my last post, I covered the rotation that the animation companies had over the series’ run, so in this post I want to break down how many episodes were done by each company and how many by each director.

Yumeta Company (ゆめ太カンパニー): 31 Episodes

Takahiro Kagami (加々美高浩): 17 episodes: Episodes 1, 7 (with Aki Tsunaki), 19, 30, 42, 54, 66, 79, 91, 97, 103 (with Kazunori Takahashi), 115, 128, 140, 153, 165, 177 (with Kazunori Takahashi), also the AD of OP5 and ED5

Aki Tsunaki (つなきあき): 8 episodes: Episodes 7 (with Takahiro Kagami), 13, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, 85, also the AD of OP1 (with Michiaki Sugimoto), ED1, and OP3

Kazunori Takahashi (高橋和徳): 9 episodes: Episodes 103 (with Takahiro Kagami), 109, 121, 134, 147, 159, 171, 177 (with Takahiro Kagami), 183

Yumeta Company was also given cooperation credit on episodes 74, 144, and 184, due to those episodes functioning as recap episodes

Sunshine Corporation (S.S.C): 64 Episodes

Hidetsugu Hirayama (平山英嗣): 24 episodes: Episodes 2, 8, 14, 20, 26, 34, 40, 46, 52, 58, 64, 70, 77, 83, 89, 95, 101, 107, 113, 120, 127, 133, 139, 145

Masaki Kudo (工藤柾輝): 9 episodes: Episodes 31, 37, 43, 49, 55, 61, 67, 73, 80

Kimiharu Mutou (武藤公春): 17 episodes: Episodes 86, 92, 98, 135, 141, 148, 169, 174, 180, 186, 192, 198, 204, 210, 216, 222, 224 (with Shinichiro Minami and Akio Hirakawa (co-animated with Gallop))

Yutaka Ozawa (小澤豊): 2 episodes: Episodes 104, 110

Jouji Sawada (澤田譲治): 3 episodes: Episodes 116, 123, 129

Hideki Watanabe (渡辺英樹): 2 episodes: Episodes 151, 157

Shinsuke Terasawa (寺澤伸介): 1 episode: Episode 163

Kazuyuki Ikai (飯飼一幸): 2 episodes: Episodes 189, 195

Shinichiro Minami (南伸一郎): 5 episodes: Episodes 201, 207, 213, 219, 224 (with Kimiharu Mutou and Akio Hirakawa (co-animated with Gallop))

SSC was also given cooperation credit on episodes 74, 144, and 184 due to those episodes functioning as recap episodes

JCF (ジェイ・シー・エフ): 5 Episodes

Masahiro Hamamori (浜森理宏): 5 episodes: Episodes 3, 9, 15, 22, 28

Studio Gallop (ぎゃろっぷ) In-House: 62 Episodes

Total includes the 7 episodes animated by Dongwoo Animation (同友動画), which had layout done by Gallop and had Gallop animators as the animation directors.

Michiaki Sugimoto (杉本道明): 14 episodes: Episodes 4, 10, 17, 23, 29, 35, 41, 47, 53, 59, 65, 71, 78, 84, also the AD of OP1 (with Aki Tsunaki)

Hatsuki Tsuji (辻初樹): 4 episodes: Episodes 16, 21, 27, 33

Shuichi Shimamura (島村秀一): 5 episodes: Episodes 39, 45, 51, 56, 62, also the AD of ED2 and ED3

Ikkou Kobayashi (小林一幸): 6 episodes: Episodes 68, 75, 81, 87, 144, 166 (Dongwoo), also the AD of OP2

Kenichi Hara (原憲一): 20 episodes: Episodes 74, 90, 96, 102, 108, 114, 122, 131, 137, 143, 150, 156, 162, 168 (Dongwoo), 175 (Dongwoo), 181 (Dongwoo), 187, 193, 205, 217

Hideyuki Motohashi (本橋秀之): 6 episodes: Episodes 93, 99, 105, 111, 119, 125, also the AD of OP4 and ED4

Akio Hirakawa (平川亜喜雄): 7 episodes: Episodes 172 (Dongwoo), 178 (Dongwoo), 184 (Dongwoo), 199, 211, 223, 224 (with Kimiharu Mutou and Shinichiro Minami (co-animated with SSC))

Group TAC (グループ・タック): 2 Episodes

Toshiyasu Okada (岡田敏靖): 2 episodes: Episodes 5, 11

Studio Dub (スタジオダブ): 4 Episodes

Shinichi Sakuma (佐久間信一): 4 episodes: Episodes 6, 12, 18, 25

Dangun Pictures: 49 Episodes

Yasuhide Maruyama (丸山泰英): 5 episodes: Episodes 32, 38, 44, 50, 57

Yoshikazu Uchida (内田義一): 2 episodes: Episodes 63, 69

Hisashi Mitsui (三井寿): 2 episodes: Episodes 76, 82

Katsumi Shimazaki (島崎克実): 1 episode: Episode 88

Junichi Hayama (羽山淳一): 6 episodes: Episodes 94, 124, 161, 167, 173, 179 (with Kouhei Hashimoto)

Shinichiro Takagi (高木信一郎): 1 episode: Episode 100

Wogawa Ichirowo (をがわいちろを): 9 episodes: Episodes 106, 112, 118, 126, 130, 136, 142, 149, 155

Shinsuke Terasawa (寺沢伸介): 1 episode: Episode 117

Yoshikatsu Inoue (井上善勝): 15 episodes: Episodes 132, 138, 146, 152, 158, 164, 170, 176, 182, 188, 194, 200, 206, 212, 218

Kouhei Hashimoto (橋本航平): 1 episode: Episode 179 (with Junichi Hayama)

Noriyoshi Yamazaki (山崎展義): 7 episodes: Episodes 185, 191, 197, 203, 209, 215, 221

Dangun Pictures was also given cooperation credit on episodes 74, 144, and 184, due to those episodes functioning as recap episodes

JEM: 2 Episodes

Keiichiro Kawaguchi (川口敬一郎): 2 episodes: Episodes 154, 160

Mook Animation (ムークアニメーション): 6 Episodes

Masahiro Sekiguchi (関口雅浩): 6 episodes: Episodes 190, 196, 202, 208, 214, 220

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Anzu randomly changes clothes during Battle City in the anime

So, in the manga during Battle City, Anzu/Téa is only ever shown wearing one outfit, and it’s this one:

This is despite the fact that Battle City stretches over the course of two days, but it makes sense since the overnight of the tournament was spent on the Kaiba Corp blimp and I doubt any of the characters planned to need a change of clothes.

It should be noted that while the outfit shown above is shown as a white shirt and pink skirt, these colors appear to be a change made by the Bunkoban release, which release the entire manga in full color.  During the original run of the manga, a handful of color pages showed Anzu’s outfit as instead a yellow shirt and red skirt.  Here’s an example of the original outfit color from Duel 170 as it was originally shown in Weekly Shonen Jump compared to its Bunkoban recoloring.

Anyway, the anime started off the Battle City tournament with Anzu wearing her outfit from the manga with its original coloring, albeit with one very noticeable difference.

For some unknown reason, the “SPIRIT” message on her shirt was removed.  And no, this wasn’t an edit made by 4Kids.  I grabbed the above screenshot from the original Japanese version of the anime.

This change is odd because the shirt was left completely unchanged in the intro during this season

(Which, ironically, did get removed in 4Kids’ version of the intro.  So much for 4Kids being completely free of blame for removing SPIRIT)

But this isn’t my main point.  My main point is that, for seemingly no reason, Anzu changes outfits in the middle of the day during the first day of Battle City.  Starting in the episode where Jonouchi starts his duel against Insector Haga, Anzu switches over to this outfit:

And this is probably Anzu’s best known outfit, as she wears it for the entire remainder of Season 2 and all of Season 3, which includes the Virtual World and the final rounds of Battle City.

It’s just so weird because there was no change of day in-universe.  Anzu apparently just spent the morning wearing one outfit and then in the afternoon decided to change clothes to wear for the remainder of the day.

I don’t have a problem with the anime putting the characters in different clothes from what they wore in the manga.  Jonouchi wears completely different clothes in the anime version of Battle City after the manga just had him in his school uniform.  But it’s bizarre that they would give themselves a continuity headscratcher like this one.

(For that matter, Honda also suddenly changed clothes in the same episode that Anzu did.  His is a reversal of what happened to Anzu though.  In his case, he switched into his manga clothes after he had previously been wearing different clothes earlier that day)

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Update: In my most recent rewatch of the series subbed, I discovered that episode 63 (part 1 of Jonouchi vs. Haga) seems to imply that it's the start of a new day, making Battle City one day longer in the anime than it was in the manga. Kinda makes it weirder then that some characters didn't change clothes between days. Battle City in the anime is weird

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Got yet another complete set of the Yu-Gi-Oh manga! (This is my 4th complete set, I have 1 in English and 3 in Japanese) This time it's the Shueisha Jump Remix edition released in 2016 and re-released in 2021. These volumes are slightly larger than the tankobon release in terms of paper size, but have way more chapters per volume. As a result the series is condensed into only 13 volumes in this release, compared to 38 in the tankobon and 22 in the bunkoban. This release has all the same edits made to the chapters that were made in the bunkoban.

There is surprisingly sparse information about this release online, so here is the chapter breakdown in each volume:

Volume 1 (School Arc): Chapters 1-26

Volume 2 (Death-T and Monster World Arcs): Chapters 27-59

Volume 3 (Duelist Kingdom part 1): Chapters 60-87

Volume 4 (Duelist Kingdom part 2): Chapters 88-112

Volume 5 (Duelist Kingdom part 3): Chapters 113-133

Volume 6 (Battle City part 1): Chapters 134-159

Volume 7 (Battle City part 2): Chapters 160-183

Volume 8 (Battle City part 3): Chapters 184-202

Volume 9 (Battle City part 4): Chapters 203-230

Volume 10 (Battle City part 5): Chapters 231-250

Volume 11 (Battle City part 6): Chapters 251-278

Volume 12 (Pharaoh's Memories part 1): Chapters 279-311

Volume 13 (Pharaoh's Memories part 2): Chapters 312-343

[thewittyphantom]

Cool, someone posted about owning the 38 tankobon Yu-Gi-Oh manga volumes in Japanese, and the 22 bunkoban volumes! I had no idea the bunkobans were so small compared to Viz’s releases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/yugioh/comments/mqdanv/i_thought_it_would_be_cool_to_own_the_manga_in/

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Can’t believe I didn’t see this when it got posted, that Reddit post is mine!

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Got myself copies of Millennium Book (manga guide) and Millennium Memory (anime guide) to go along with The Gospel of Truth I got I little while ago!  I’ve never seen scans of Millennium Book’s pages before, so I’m most excited to look through that book.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Got another book for my Yu-Gi-Oh manga collection!  I’ve always enjoyed looking at scans online of The Gospel of Truth for research, so it’s nice to finally have a physical copy.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

do you have twitter? easier to message for me :)

I don't have a Twitter dedicated to this blog, but you can follow InvaderWeezle on Twitter where I occasionally talk about Yu-Gi-Oh on there.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

i dont understand was the RPG game from the start in the manga or did the RPG start after the battle city

I'm confused about your question. There's two RPGs played over the course of the Yu-Gi-Oh manga. The first is Monster World, which is the final mini-arc before Duelist Kingdom. The second is (a big spoiler for the final arc) the Shadow RPG, during which Yami Yugi and Yami Bakura replay the events of the Pharaoh vs. Zork in Ancient Egypt, and this happens during the Pharaoh's Memories arc. Not sure what led to you asking this question though, did I have a previous post that brought up an RPG?

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Does the DM anime ever show us Jonouchi's father? I remember that we do get the info about the divorce & Jou and shizuka being separated, but we're never shown that his dad is an alcoholic gambler in dm I don't think?

No we never get to see Jonouchi's father in the anime. Kind of an interesting reverse of the manga, where we never see his mother instead.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

I recently got something I've wanted for a long while: the entire manga in its original Japanese! In fact, I wanted the series so much I got it twice, both in the 38 tankobon volumes and 22 bunkoban volumes. The scans I find online tend to be a little blurry and the text is hard to decipher, so it'll be nice to look at nice, clear pages for future research.

But also I want to show off the size comparison of different releases. From left to right: Bunkoban, tankobon, English graphic novel. I never knew until I owned the Japanese version that Viz enlarges the size of their graphic novels for the English release of tankobon manga. The bunkoban is adorably tiny.

[thewittyphantom]

Reading the manga as a kid I assumed Miho’s hair was blonde due to it not being shaded/colored in, though now that I think about it, it might not go well with her yellow ribbon.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

I thought the same thing!  The way her hair is drawn isn’t that different compared to Ms. Chono’s hair, and she’s blonde in the colorized version.

Strangely, Jonouchi’s hair has more shading than either is them despite being blond himself.

Speaking of the colorized version of the manga, that version made Miho’s hair red, and I think I actually prefer this over her lilac hair that she has in the Toei anime.

[synthient]

every explanation yugioh has ever provided for Shadi’s Whole Deal: a compilation

Early manga: Shadi is a mortal human man. He’s alive. He rides airplanes. His family has guarded the tombs of pharaohs for generations. He’s motivated by things like petty revenge, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to protect Egyptian artifacts.

First half of Memory World: Shadi is a member of the Tombkeeper Clan. His side of the family got into a fight with the Ishtar side, and they each took some of the Millennium Items in the divorce. He’s motivated by the same duty the Ishtars were raised with: to help the Nameless Pharaoh regain his memories. Every fucked up thing he’s done (giving Pegasus the eye, lying to Malik, trying to kill Yugi’s friends, etc) was presumably part of a game of memory-restoring 4D chess.

Second half of Memory World: Shadi was never human. He’s a shapeshifting supernatural being that serves as Zorc’s equal-and-opposite counterpart. He’s also maybe the human incarnation of that tablet with the Millennium Item-shaped indents in it? Bobasa and Hasan were both him, shapeshifted. His motivation is to stop Zorc. Everything he’s done was presumably part of a game of anti-Zorc 4D chess.

DM anime: Shadi is a ghost. We mostly know this because of an anime-added scene where he saves Honda and Otogi from falling and then vanishes, and they’re like “was that a…g-g-ghost?” We don’t know when he died, or who he used to be. He isn’t Bobasa, the anti-Zorc, or Hasan (but he does briefly pilot Hasan’s Memory World RPG avatar, mostly as a convoluted way for the anime to adapt his death scene. Yes, he dies despite being a ghost). We never really get a motivation for why he did anything.

Capsule Monsters: Shadi has been a ghost for thousands of years. He’s been fucking with people the whole time (including Alexander the Great). Motivation: the lulz?

DSOD: Shadi used to be a mortal human man, up to about 5 or 6 years before the start of the series. He somehow got on his hands on the Secret Eighth Millennium Item. He trained a bunch of children to use it to make a utopia dimension. Then Zorkura killed him. After that, he was a ghost. His motivation was…4D chess for the utopia dimension? Which didn’t actually work?

[yugiohmangavsanime]

It's implied as early as Battle City in the manga that Bakura killed Shadi.

[puzzleshipper4life]

What do you know about Shinsuke Terasawa? He's credited as the AD on Eps. 117 and 163. Ep. 117 is credited as a Dangun episode (I accidentally listed it as a Gallop episode on my post on @ygomangavsanime, though weirdly that means Dangun did back-to-back episodes 117 and 118) but most of the key animators were new. Ep. 163 meanwhile is an SSC episode with several animators who worked on other SSC episodes. Terasawa is also credited as an animator on Ep. 126 (Dangun) and Ep. 193 (Gallop)

I dont know much about Shinsuke Terasawa to be honest. His style is actually decent, though it lacks fluidity or intensity. His two episodes as an AD are actually very different from one another when it comes to the key animators but the drawing style itself.

117

163

As regards to the studio change, he could have changed studios during his absence between 117 and 163. I'm sorry i can't help any further, but I havent studied his style at all. I'd say that he's an overall decent AD.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

(I got my own handle wrong, lol)  Terasawa’s first episode really throws me for a loop because, based on the episode rotation, it should have been a Gallop episode.  At around this time Gallop’s 2 episodes per rotation were being directed by Kenichi Hara and HIdeyuki Motohashi, and the schedule looked like this:

Episode 90: Hara

Episode 93: Motohashi

Episode 96: Hara

Episode 99: Motohashi

Episode 102: Hara

Episode 105: Motohashi

Episode 108: Hara

Episode 111: Motohashi

Episode 114: Hara

And for good measure, here’s what the rotation looked like for episodes 111-116. This rotation between companies goes back as far as episode 52 (cutting out the episode 74 recap episode), albeit with different directors phasing in and out:

Episode 111: Gallop (Motohashi)

Episode 112: Dangun (Wogawa Ichirowo)

Episode 113: SSC (Hidetsugu Hirayama)

Episode 114: Gallop (Hara)

Episode 115: Yumeta (Takahiro Kagami)

Episode 116: SSC (Jouji Sawada)

Based on the pattern, episode 117 should have been a Motohashi-directed Gallop episode.  Instead we have this random Terasawa episode, in which all but one of the key animators credited had never animated any Yu-Gi-Oh episodes before (the lone exception is Yoshito Miki, who had done key animation on most of the previous Dangun episodes).  The episode is also credited as being a Dangun episode, which is weird because the very next episode is also a Dangun episode, being directed by Ichirowo right on schedule with the previously established rotation pattern.  And then finally Motohashi’s next episode is episode 119.

I wonder what happened behind the scenes here.  Episodes 117 and 118 are Yugi’s duel vs. Noah in the Virtual World arc, and 119 is the episode in between that duel and Kaiba’s duel vs. Gozaburo, where the gang gets split up again and experience a bunch of flashbacks that aren’t exactly flashbacks.  Maybe Gallop didn’t want anyone else handling a flashback-heavy episode, so they moved spots and quickly needed to add another team to fill in for the spot they vacated?

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Yu-Gi-Oh’s animation rotation

Taking a break from comparing the manga to the anime so I can specifically talk about something related to the anime: the animation rotation.  While Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters was produced by Studio Gallop, they didn’t actually animate every episode in-house.  In total, they only animated 55 episodes in-house, while handling the layout on 7 more.  They didn’t even handle their own episode until episode 4!

Duel Monsters typically operated on a 6-episode rotation involving usually 4 companies, where 2 companies had 1 episode each during that rotation, and the other 2 companies had 2 episodes each.

The Original Six

Early on, Duel Monsters had enough companies working on the show where each company needed only one team each in the rotation.

You can see that the show was kicked off not by Gallop’s in-house team but by Yumeta Company.  Long-time fans of the series will recognize Yumeta Company, more specifically animation director Takahiro Kagami, as the one behind many of the best-looking episodes in the series.

The “Studio Dub” team is a little unclear.  No animation cooperation credit is given in their episodes (6, 12, 18, 25), which would lead you to think that this is a second Gallop team.  However, most of the animators from these episodes never worked on any other Gallop episodes, and the ones that did only worked on episodes where Studio Dub is credited as one of the assisting key animators (there were several companies, including Dub, who worked on key animation in a secondary role on many episodes). The Japanese Wikipedia article for the series also lists Studio Dub in parentheses for the production cooperation credit. Therefore I’m going to treat them as a separate entity from Gallop’s in-house episodes.

TAC Drops Out

Group TAC only lasted two episodes (5 and 11), and they were replaced with a second in-house team by Gallop.  Additionally, Studio Dub and Yumeta Company traded places in the rotation beginning in episodes 24 and 25.

Dub and JCF out, Dangun in

Big changes at the beginning led to the longest rotation group of the series, albeit with a few times where companies traded places.  Studio Dub’s departure led to a new company, Dangun Pictures, joining the rotation, while JCF was replaced by a second team by SSC.  For nearly 100 episodes, Duel Monsters stuck to this 6-episode rotation of having Gallop and SSC handle 2 episodes per rotation and having Yumeta and Dangun handle 1 episode.  As far as minor changes, Gallop and Dangun traded places in the rotation beginning in episodes 56 and 57, and then Gallop traded both of their spots with SSC beginning in episodes 119 and 120 as well as episodes 122 and 123.

You may notice that episode 74 is missing from this chart.  This is technically a Gallop episode (meaning that they handled back-to-back episodes for episodes 74 and 75), however it was a recap episode that credited all 4 companies.  Kenichi Hara is the only credited key animator, handling all of the new footage present in this episode.  As far as the episode rotation goes, episode 74 is essentially an extra episode that exists outside the rotation.

Gallop drops a team, Dangun adds one

As Dangun adds a second team, it moves SSC’s second team and Yumeta down a spot while Gallop drops their second team.  SSC’s second team soon returned to its previous spot, however, after it traded spots with Dangun’s second team beginning in episode 145.

Like with episode 74, episode 144 is an extra episode not in the rotation, as it is a recap episode credited to all 4 companies, while Ikkou Kobayashi of Gallop did all the key animation for the new footage.

The short-lived 5th company

SSC dropped one of its teams, and for two rotations its spot was filled by a new company, JEM.  Not much more to say here.  You can tell though that a new company worked on episodes 154 and 160 because a lot of the characters are off-model.

Gallop outsources all its episodes to Dong Woo

For the remainder of the Doma arc, Gallop stopped animating its episodes in-house.  Gallop animators would handle layout for their episodes, and then the actual animation would be handled by Dong Woo Animation.  Gallop/Dong Woo took over JEM’s short-lived spot, and beginning in episodes 174 and 175 traded spots in the rotation with SSC.

Episode 184 is another episode that credited all the companies and features a significant amount of clips from previous episodes, but this episode was actually part of the rotation and had a full team of animators working on it.

Gallop is back, Yumeta is out

Beginning in episode 187, Gallop returned to handling their episodes in-house without the need to outsource to Dong Woo, meanwhile the other Dong Woo team was replaced with the return of SSC’s second team.  Yumeta, however, exited the show after their last episode of the Doma arc, being replaced by a new company, Mook Animation, for the remainder of the series.  Like with JEM before, you can tell its a new company working on those episodes because there’s a lot of off-model characters.

Episode 224, the series finale, is a unique episode that exists outside the rotation.  It was a combined effort by Gallop’s team as well as both of SSC’s teams.

I hope this post was insightful!  Join me next time as I list off who the animation directors were for each and every episode!

[yugiohmangavsanime]

oh yeah, can't believe i forgot about the anime giving Honda a crush on Shizuka. They also give otogi a crush on shizuka too & had him and honda fight over it during all of battle city&virtual world. Like you said, probably to fill time- & i guess give the 3 of them something to do

It kind of existed in the manga, but it was on a much smaller level.

The anime basically took a couple minor moments and really ran with them in their filler.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

I've noticed that both animes seem to have a much bigger focuses on romance than the manga ever did. Toei anime takes Honda's crush on Miho & expands it to last the entire show. dm alters existing moments between Mai&Jou or creates it's own moments to push them as a ship, & adds in Rebecca as "competition" for Anzu

One of the easiest ways for anime to create filler is to come up with subplots that don’t directly interfere with the main plot.  That way they don’t have to drag out the events of the manga, and they can fill out 22-minute episodes without catching up to the manga too quickly.

Romance subplots are probably one of the most common subplots to use in general.  In addition to the examples you listed, DM also gave Honda and Shizuka way more scenes together during Battle City when the manga cut to them far less often.

[yugiohmangavsanime]

Anzu randomly changes clothes during Battle City in the anime

So, in the manga during Battle City, Anzu/Téa is only ever shown wearing one outfit, and it’s this one:

This is despite the fact that Battle City stretches over the course of two days, but it makes sense since the overnight of the tournament was spent on the Kaiba Corp blimp and I doubt any of the characters planned to need a change of clothes.

It should be noted that while the outfit shown above is shown as a white shirt and pink skirt, these colors appear to be a change made by the Bunkoban release, which release the entire manga in full color.  During the original run of the manga, a handful of color pages showed Anzu’s outfit as instead a yellow shirt and red skirt.  Here’s an example of the original outfit color from Duel 170 as it was originally shown in Weekly Shonen Jump compared to its Bunkoban recoloring.

Anyway, the anime started off the Battle City tournament with Anzu wearing her outfit from the manga with its original coloring, albeit with one very noticeable difference.

For some unknown reason, the “SPIRIT” message on her shirt was removed.  And no, this wasn’t an edit made by 4Kids.  I grabbed the above screenshot from the original Japanese version of the anime.

This change is odd because the shirt was left completely unchanged in the intro during this season

(Which, ironically, did get removed in 4Kids’ version of the intro.  So much for 4Kids being completely free of blame for removing SPIRIT)

But this isn’t my main point.  My main point is that, for seemingly no reason, Anzu changes outfits in the middle of the day during the first day of Battle City.  Starting in the episode where Jonouchi starts his duel against Insector Haga, Anzu switches over to this outfit:

And this is probably Anzu’s best known outfit, as she wears it for the entire remainder of Season 2 and all of Season 3, which includes the Virtual World and the final rounds of Battle City.

It’s just so weird because there was no change of day in-universe.  Anzu apparently just spent the morning wearing one outfit and then in the afternoon decided to change clothes to wear for the remainder of the day.

I don’t have a problem with the anime putting the characters in different clothes from what they wore in the manga.  Jonouchi wears completely different clothes in the anime version of Battle City after the manga just had him in his school uniform.  But it’s bizarre that they would give themselves a continuity headscratcher like this one.

(For that matter, Honda also suddenly changed clothes in the same episode that Anzu did.  His is a reversal of what happened to Anzu though.  In his case, he switched into his manga clothes after he had previously been wearing different clothes earlier that day)