The Yu-Gi-Oh! Strongest Imitator System is a major step in making those anime duels come to life.

Although I’ve never played any such card games in my life, I managed to get into the anime Yu-Gi-Oh! by chance and gradually developed an appreciation for its game in particular. However, I could never play it in real life because the anime had set my expectations unrealistically high.

Rather than having wizards and dragons emerge from our cards and start attacking one another, a real game of Yu-Gi-Oh! has little more to offer than a fiberboard table and bottle of orange soda to gaze at in awe while playing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’ve always hoped for the day would come when the duels depicted in the anime would become possible.

And now in this age of augmented and virtual realities, it looks as if that day might be on the horizon. Twitter user and evidently brilliant technician, Reo (@reoasxdtmgt) has come up with one of the best Yu-Gi-Oh! simulators to date called the “Yu-Gi-Oh! Strongest Imitator System.”

The video shows some projectors creating the duel arena on the surface of an ordinary table along with each player’s life points. As each player places their cards visual and audio effects occur seamlessly. If you look really closely at the cards in play, it looks as if the images are moving on them as well.

According to Reo the effects are controlled by the player’s smartphones, which he admits can be difficult at times, but also means you don’t need any fancy gear to run it (granted, a projector is arguably “fancy”).

Reo also says the result seen here came from a year of hard work. It clearly shows, however, and online praise was unanimous.

“Whaaaaaa!?”
“That is so cool! I want to duel you!”
“This guy is a genius.”
“This is an OOPArt!”
“If this could work by speech recognition then we’d truly be living in the anime.”
“That was so good I don’t even know what to say.”

Indeed the Yu-Gi-Oh! Strongest Imitator System lives up to its name, but more work needs to be done to truly get humanity into the future promised to us by the anime so long ago. Sadly, I’m too old to start building a deck now, but when they finally do achieve full-sized dragons, I’ll at least have found an e-sport I can get behind.

Source: Twitter/@reoasxdtmgt, Hachima Kiko
Featured image: Twitter/@reoasxdtmgt