In writing this review for Arc-V the manga, a comparative discussion of Arc-V the anime is impossible. I will be referring to each of them to make my points. The first distinction that stands out to me is how differently the manga handles the four dragon wielders from the anime. In the anime, each of the four are manifestations of Z-Arc, separated across the dimension and each using one of his ace dragons as their own. This was in itself not a terrible set-up, but they did one of their characters dirty: Yuri. As the fusion incarnation, Yuri was not very deeply explored, and whenhe was ultimately subsumed into Yuya we never truly got to see the four dimensional characters interact. This is something that the manga remedies: the four characters are all siblings, doting on their youngest brother. The amount of doting was overplayed, but the slow realization of who they were and why they reside in Yuya in this continuity was far more heartbreaking than anything the anime threw at the viewer. Loss and consequences are always an important theme in any YGO story, and the manga really has all the characters experience their own loss in their own way. Yuzu was also handled far better in the manga than in the anime; rather than having three other under-explored dimensional counterparts, Yuzu is the character that holds Yuya together again. The final twist that unveils Yuzu's true relationship to Yuya is also just heartwarming on a level I can't really describe.

The second distinction is the globe-spanning crisis used to compel the characters into action. In the anime, Akaba Leo wanted to unite the dimensions into one, motivated again by loss. We are led to believe that an entire organization willingly follows him and commits genocide on his behalf for this incredibly personal motive cloaked under the shadow of righteousness. In the manga, multiple characters are separately led through regret to the desire to manipulate time using the G.O.D. card. In a review I made on my own blog for Steins;Gate, I noted the power of time travel in narratives that focus on trauma, paralleling the physical ability of the wielder to travel through time with the emotional trauma that locks him into a particular moment in time. For a series about card games, the strength of Yu-Gi-Oh as an entire media franchise has been the way that, through the cards and injecting symbolism into them, each card battle is not simply entertainment - they reveal a great deal of character development. It is this character entertainment that lies at the core of any time-travel story, and for a card game manga, it does a stellar job.

In both these significant departures from the anime, the manga succeeds at reformulating the entire narrative into a much tighter, more compact, yet somehow more emotionally impactful narrative than the anime. What more could you ask for from a story?