Out of an attempt to decide which of them is the true Hero user, a duel begins between Judai and Ed. Judai lands the first strike with Flame Wingman, but Ed immediately summons Phoenixguy from the same Fusion Materials for a draw between them. The battle heats up further into a battle of high-level E-Hero fusions as Shining Flare Wingman takes on Shining Phoenixguy, all while Ed refuses to approve of how Judai is so nonchalantly inspired by his Heroes.
Judai’s duel versus Ed continues with Ed activating his Clock Tower of Seclusion Field Magic, which eerily marks the hour of destiny. He goes on to summon his D-Hero series of Monsters one after the other–a group of Monsters said to freely manipulate time itself with destiny as their guide, and which are more advanced than even the E-Heroes. Judai suffers by way of a combo which deprives him of his own Heroes as they’re thrown several turns into the future, only to be manipulated into attacking by the enemy upon their return. And at last, the D-Hero imprisoned within the Clock Tower shows himself…
So, there are several duels I’ve been looking forward to revisiting as I finalize my subs, and these two episodes, which give us the first real match between Judai and Ed, are easily in the top ten. After I first fansubbed Season 3 in late high school and circled back to Seasons 1 and 2 while I was in college, I eventually burned these episodes onto a DVD and kept flicking them on whenever I was bored–safe to say a lot of the dialogue sounds pretty familiar by now, lol.
That’s how well these episodes hit, though–after he just took out the Kaiser without even lifting a finger (as Venomas6 pointed out on NAC in a great analysis on the episode, Ed literally won without ever inflicting his own damage on him–every single LP the Kaiser lost was his own doing), it’s our first real look at Ed as a character and what drives him beyond just the pro duelist prodigy we’ve been told he is; we dig more into his belief in fate (which we’ll circle back to once we learn more of his dynamic with Saiou), and of course, we touch onto the biggest difference between him and Judai while also planting the seeds for some further development down the line (the “D-Hero imprisoned within the Clock Tower” bit, for example, hinting at the DD duel later on and the assessment he makes about Ed). Between that, the duel itself being our first look at these new Destiny antiHeroes, Judai’s second loss (😲) which sets up some introspection for a few episodes, 59′s pacing in general, “YEEHAWWW”… What’s not to love about these? (Besides how the dub handled a lot of the dialogue around a “hero’s burden” [which, hello Season 3 foreshadowing] or made Ed’s dad “disappear”–though it’s funny we totally forget about Junko and Momoe in 59 lol)
In terms of animation fixes, 58 saw a couple of little footage fixes that were missed by the animators, but 59 saw a fair amount of that and card fixes–all told, I did 18 different fixes for the latter, which is why these kinda took a while to finish lol. List below the cut, as usual.
Enjoy, folks! With these done, I’ll be getting work started on GX 60 and Fubuki’s antics to try and get that out soon-ish; having already revised the script for GoldenUmi’s release of the Duel Selection episodes (where they remastered fan-favorite episodes from each series) on NAC a while back, it shouldn’t take too long, and then I’ll go and finish up my 5D’s Dub-Uncut mini-project with 5D’s 29. Stay tuned~
(Check out my handy masterpost with streaming links to my subs here)