Entry 004: A Mammoth Graveyard Match

"I am thiiiiiis close to absolutely losing it."

Going back to a monster with a much simpler "family", here we have Mammoth Graveyard. Despite being an animated skeleton, it's not a "Zombie" type, but rather a "Dinosaur" type, which it very much isn't one, but oh well. I guess that's just the rub when you have so many fairly specific types and each monster can only be one.

While it is an animated mammoth skeleton and little more, I don't think there's any real denying that it's a simple but nice fantasy to have a "tameable" mammoth skeleton. But hey, it's a very nicely rendered skeleton! The only anatomical inaccuracy my not-an-expert-on-anatomy-ass can point out is that a real mammoth skeleton's tusks poke out of a huge protrution in the skull that looks like a double-shotgun barrel, rather than from within the mouth like on Graveyard here, but that's almost just nitpicking. It's a cool monstrous version of a mammoth skeleton, and it achieves being that quite well!

Don't forget to brush your bones, kids.

And this is our first instance of a monster that has a straight up recolor, like an early-JRPG palette swapped mook. Early on in Yu-Gi-Oh's history, there were quite a few of these floating around, and that was mostly for the benefit of the video game tie-ins they were making. Back then, a cost-cutting measure for a lot of video games was to have several assets get re-used in one way or another. Especially to save on precious disc space, since recoloring a model saves a lot more memory than a whole separate model from scratch. Obviously as technology got better, this became less of a necessity, so while you still see it, it's nowhere near as often, or is at least more cleverly hidden.

But hey, if you prefer your mammoth skeletons golden, then Great Mammoth has your back!