Yu-Gi-Oh!
Japanese media franchise
Yu-Gi-Oh! (Japanese: 遊☆戯☆王, Hepburn: Yū Gi Ō; lit. 'Game King') is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kazuki Takahashi. It was serialized in Shueisha's shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump from September 1996 to March 2004, with its chapters collected in 38 tankōbon volumes. The series follows Yugi Mutou, a teenager who solves the ancient Egyptian Millennium Puzzle. This revives an ancient gambling spirit sealed inside the Puzzle, who commonly possesses Yugi to solve conflicts with various games. Yugi gradually learns of the spirit, with whom he eventually forms a friendship as he and his friends aim to discover the spirit's origin. By its later arcs, the manga largely shifts its focus to the collectible card game Duel Monsters (originally known as Magic & Wizards), where opposing players "duel" each other in mock battles of fantasy monsters.
The manga spawned a media franchise, which includes multiple anime series, spin-off manga, video games, and a real-world card game adapted from the fictional Duel Monsters game. The original series was adapted into two anime series: an eponymous series produced by Toei Animation, which aired from April to October 1998; and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, produced by NAS and animated by Gallop, which aired from April 2000 to September 2004.
The public source identifies “Yu-Gi-Oh!” as japanese media franchise. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Yu-Gi-Oh, Japanese and media.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q192015. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2004, 1998 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yu-Gi-Oh!” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.