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I really hate that they included motorcycles (D-Wheelers) in 5D’s.  The motivation for doing so is so obvious it hurts.  They wanted to appeal to older audiences.  Namely, high school males (because motorcycles are just so cool, right?  Anything with motorcycles just has to be cool).  The motorcycles thing definitely put a lot of people off.  I was almost put off as well, but I decided to give the series a shot due to a recent interest in the physical card game.  It was worth it.  This is BY FAR the best Yu-Gi-Ohs, and definitely one of the best animes ever made.

The characters are genuinely good.  They deserve to be up there with the other shonen characters that people love so much, but the series doesn’t have enough popularity to make that happen.  Yusei is a great main character, and he doesn’t need a "crutch" to be one.  He’s not copying another successful character (like Yuma in Zexal copies Naruto…).  He’s a completely original character.  The supporting cast is very good, too.  There aren’t too many (though they exist; I haven’t yet seen a shonen anime or read a shonen manga where they don’t) repulsive characters that make you hate your life.

The plot is very good, too, but I’m not going to get into spoiling that.  The very best thing about the series, for me, was the wonderfully made world.  You can FEEL the discrimination that people from "the city" have for "Satellite" residents, and how people who were raised in Satellite might feel.  All of the supporting characters from Satellite are very good at expressing this.

And you may be happy to know that the series doesn’t "level off" in its 154 episodes.  It’s not rare to see a series start out well, but grow really bad over time (Bleach anyone?).  While I do personally feel the first half was better than the second half, both are very good and I would recommend both halves to anyone who likes anime.

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