Yu-Gi-Oh! 3D Bonds Beyond Time   Starring: Atsushi Tamura, Kenn, Shunsuke Kazama and Yuya Miyashita Manga Entertainment RRP: £9.99 MANG5218 Certificate: PG Available 25 July 2011

With the world on the brink of destruction one man decides that the only way to save civilisation is to travel back in time to destroy the Duel Monsters card game. Against him stand three of history’s best players, but can Yugi, Jaden and Yusei use their card skills to save the game for all time...

Yu-Gi-Oh! 3D: Bonds Beyond Time (2010) is an anime film made to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this popular trading card game. The film was directed by Kenichi Takeshita (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) from a script by Shin Yoshida.

This film is strictly for the fans of the card game. So much information is presumed, that even with the opening preamble - which tries to explain what is happening - novices are going to get lost really quickly.

Like many other animations which are little more than advertising for the main product, the final film is weak of plot and pretty incomprehensible. The animation is little better than Saturday morning fare and there is little here to give the impression that the makers have done anything other than the bare minimum.

The quality improves a little following the introduction, but still only achieves the level of an average anime show, but in a show which lasts barely an hour, ten minutes is wasted just with the introduction, which contains old footage. So what you’re really getting is fifty minutes of new material. Some of the CGI sequences are ok, but it’s mostly on the non-human elements and vehicles and even these tend towards the plain, in design terms.

The much vaunted 3D does not exists on the DVD version. For that you will have to either see this at the cinema or invest in the Blu-ray version, but to be honest you’d have to be a pretty big fan to justify the purchase. It is after all based on a card game and the battles are just that, watching characters play a card game, not particularly riveting.

Past the intro the print has a nice crisp quality and a DD5.1 audio track. The extras start with Bonds Beyond Recap, which is the introduction again, Original Japanese Version is the film but in Japanese, rather than the English dub and you get a trailer. So, in reality all you really get is a lousy trailer.

Fans of the show and card game may find much that is of worth here, but as an outsider my interest waned before even the introduction had finished.

5

Charles Packer