Season three of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is a bit of a weird one. It completely interrupts the Battle City arc’s action-packed finals and the many great cards it includes to transition to a filler arc that had no reason to be placed where it was in the series. The arc is all about Noah Kaiba, Kaiba’s secret adopted brother. While Noah severs as the main villain of the season, the Big Five, who made a very small appearance in season one, return as his employees.
The Big Five are really more or less introduced in this arc of the show, as they had no backstory prior. While their backstories aren’t necessarily great in this arc, they at the very least are differentiated from one another as distinct people. The worst of the Big Five is far and away Johnson.
Johnson
Johnson, who takes on the role of Judge Man as his Deck Master, is the worst of the Big Five. While they’re all generally horrible people, Johnson goes so far as to cheat in his duel with Joey, altering his luck to favor himself.
Noah steps in once he realizes that this is happening, as he wants to win fair and square. Joey allows the duel to continue as he knows he has the right cards to win and defeats Johnson despite his cheating, which goes to show just how bad of a duelist that Johnson really is.
Leichter
Leichter takes on Jinzo as his Deck Master and duels against Kaiba. Leichter does seem like a pretty decent person, but he was still willing to join up with the Big Five in order to steal other people’s bodies. That said, he at least doesn’t stoop to cheating.
His duel with Kaiba is a tough one, as he disables all of Kaiba’s trap cards, effectively getting rid of one-third of his deck. In the end, Kaiba does manage to take him out with his Blue-Eyes White Dragon, one of the most on-brand ways for Kaiba to take out any of his opponents.
Crump
Crump is inoffensive at best; his entire personality is that he likes numbers and penguins and nothing else at all. His best idea that he ever presented to Kaiba was a penguin-themed amusement park. Why he thought that Kaiba would accept a proposal like that is anyone’s guess.
Crump tries to take the easy way out and duel Tea for her body. Despite not being much of a duelist herself, she’s able to work with her Deck Master, Dark Magician Girl, to defeat the penguin and remain in her body. Johnson lost to Joey while cheating, and Crump lost to Tea—what is going on here?
Nezbitt
Nesbitt’s featured duel in the Virtual World arc is hilarious. He duels against Tristan, Duke, and Serenity, who are dueling as a trio. Serenity starts failing from the second that the duel begins, to the point that Tristan literally sacrifices his life in order to keep her safe in one of Yu-Gi-Oh!‘s most wholesome moments.
Serenity literally just falls to the ground and sobs for half of the duel after this before coming back and singlehandedly destroying Nezbitt with about three cards. Nezbitt was beaten by Serenity, who didn’t know how to summon a monster in defense mode. Truly, how did any of these people not defeat anyone? He only took out Tristan because he gave up his life for Serenity.
Gansley
Gansley is at the top of the list when it comes to members of the Big Five members for no real reason—he’s just sort of inoffensive. He doesn’t cheat, he doesn’t like penguins too much, and he loses to Yugi, which, almost everyone does, so he’s not that bad of a duelist. Gansley is basically just the most generic member of the Big Five. Of course, given how cruel they all are, he could be far worse.
Gozaburo Kaiba
Gozaburo is an absolute coward who retreated to Noah’s virtual world once Seto took KaibaCorp from him and made it a gaming company with the help of the Big Five, and he has no problem cheating to steal Seto’s body once he’s there.
The reason that Gozaburo is higher on the list than the rest of the Big Five is that he actually has character. Despite his brutal treatment of Seto as a child, he gave him a chance to take over one of the largest corporations in the world, which Seto took. The star of this arc, however, is without a doubt Gozaburo’s only biological son, Noah.
Noah Kaiba
Noah Kaiba is Gozaburo’s original son who suffered an accident in the real world that left his body destroyed. Nevertheless, his mind was still sharp, which led Gozaburo to create a virtual world for him. Despite Noah’s grand plans to lure people in and steal their bodies, he’s still very childlike.
He gets angry when he doesn’t get what he wants, and he resorted to pure trickery in his duel with Kaiba and pretended to start a relationship with Mokuba. He’s vindictive, evil, a complete brat, but these qualities make him one of the best villains in the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise.
