Here's to a great (early) 12th anniversary to Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal! I loved this series as a kid. Started rewatching somewhere around November 2022. Series is still cool when I'm rewatching it. The season gets too much hate because "the voices are annoying", "it's not that dark as 5D's" or "the protagonist is childish". You can blame the dub for that, because it does those things (it's the reason why I don't like the dub btw). Prove it by watching the sub version. It's much better.

Yuma gets too much hate for acting like child, which HE ACTUALLY IS. He just acts like his age. People his age also do that, whether it's fictional or IRL. His partner Astral and character development taught him how to become more mature. Also YGO card game players can relate to him, he can be bad at dueling first but improves over time. Hey YGO player, why call out that Yuma is bad at dueling when you're actually (technically) not good at dueling the first time you played Yu-Gi-Oh card games?

I think Astral gets hate too. He is actually a good partner to Yuma. And he's just, good lord, he's pretty asf. I may be a weird person, because I also find Astral's voice soothing, especially his original sub voice.

For the series in general, I think it's great. The story, the plot, the characters (except Kotori lol), almost anything are good.

This series may be flawed, but I think Zexal is the best.

I made this drawing for the 12th anniversary of the original airing for Zexal, featuring Yuma and Astral holding a cake. Looks good. Background is mid though and it looks like if SuddeИDeath (a SDVX boss song known for not only having an extremely difficult level but also known for being messy and only made to match the difficulty of the level) turned into abstract digital art. But who cares.

Art by Pyuari/MyuniStar/Phoebe. Don't steal, modify or trace without permission or use it as NFT. Repost allowed with proper credit AND permission required.