Yu-Gi-Oh! by Kazuki Takahashi: the 38 volumes
Kazuki Takahashi's Yu-Gi-Oh! ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1996 to 2004 and fills 38 Japanese volumes. It begins far from the card game that made it famous: the early volumes are a dark anthology of shadow games, in which the spirit of the Millennium Puzzle, Yami Yugi, judges bullies, criminals and cheats through games with lethal stakes. The Duel Monsters card game arrives as one game among many and takes over because readers demanded it.
Viz published the English singles under three successive shelf names, which is the single most confusing fact in Yu-Gi-Oh! collecting. Volumes 1 to 7 are titled Yu-Gi-Oh!, beginning at 9781569319031. Volumes 8 to 31 are titled Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duelist. Volumes 32 to 38 are titled Yu-Gi-Oh!: Millennium World, ending at Millennium World Volume 7, 9781421515151, in 2008. A shop listing that seems to show three short series is showing one long one.
The story those names divide is the whole arc: Duelist Kingdom and Battle City under Duelist, and under Millennium World the return to ancient Egypt, the pharaoh's recovered memories and the final duel that closes the series. The manga's tone stays darker and more violent than the anime adaptation throughout, and its ending is entirely Takahashi's own.
The Japanese volume one is Shueisha Jump Comics 9784088723112, a standard 978 conversion of the pre 2007 ISBN-10 4-08-872311-2, checksum verified and matching the JAN barcode form in Japanese catalogues, as disclosed in the census record.
The singles are out of print. The living English form of this series is the 3-in-1 edition, covered on its own page, 13 volumes from 9781421579245. Singles are now the collector form, valued as first English printings with the three name title pages intact.
