Dartz

Dartz is a character in the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime and the main antagonist of the Waking the Dragons arc. He was the last potentate of the city of Atlantis, and his history was tied to the lost city.

Design

Appearance

Dartz' design incorporated multiple layers of clothing and a wide range of expressions. Depicted here is the Duelist in full regalia from front and side views and alongside views of his head from different angles.

Full view of Dartz in his business clothes.

Dartz's usual outfit consisted of closed white and blue robes. His outfit also included a foot length cloak which trailed behind him, padded shoulders, cuffed wrists, a raised collar and a stone that bore the symbol of the Orichalcos around his neck. Dartz wore piercings on his left ear. He wore a fragment of the Orichalcos Stone in a chain on his forehead. His light blue hair featured a two locked fringe and trailed to near knee length and was tied at waist length. Dartz originally had gold irises, but after he was corrupted by the Orichalcos, he had heterochromic irises; his right iris was green and his left was gold. His right eye returned to its original gold color after he was defeated by Yami Yugi. During his Duel with Yami Yugi and Seto Kaiba, he wore a Chaos Duel Disk. When he at Paradius Inc., Dartz wore a periwinkle colored suit with red tie and white shoes.

After he gave his soul to the Great Leviathan, Dartz's physical body became glassy, shattering into powder at a touch. His consciousness inhabited a tiny section of the Leviathan, taking the form of his upper torso messily merged at the wrists and waist into the Leviathan's head (the dub obscures the points where Dartz is merged with the Leviathan). His skin became purple, and his eyes fully yellow, while his face became mouthless.

Abilities

As the master of the Orichalcos, Dartz was granted powerful magical abilities that rivaled those of the Millennium Items, like materializing Duel Monsters, Summoning his Orichalcos Soldiers all over the world and also recalling them, and also the power to brainwash others. Dartz also demonstrated the ability to cause weather storms, rain lightning blasts from the sky, conjure a sword from nothing, communicate with people telepathically, remote viewing, show visions, and using telekinesis. The Orichalcos also seemingly granted Dartz eternal youth, as 10,000 years had passed since he ruled Atlantis and he didn't age at all.

Dartz is also shown to have an extremely strong fighting spirit. It was so strong that when he manifested his fighting spirit during his Duel with Kaiba and Yami Yugi, they noted he was no ordinary person. Outside observers like Tristian, Tea, and Mokuba noted outside observers shouldn't be able to sense a Duelist's fighting spirit, but they clearly felt his.

Etymology

The names of Dartz and his underlings (known as Doma's Three Swordsman in the Japanese version) are drawn from The Three Musketeers; Dartz's name is derived from d'Artagnan.

Biography

History

Ten thousand years ago, Atlantis, an island that was isolated from the rest of the world, was a perfect civilization. One day, however, meteors rained down upon the kingdom. Those meteorites were mysterious and powerful Stones of the Orichalcos, and glowed a bright greenish blue. Those stones imbued the people of Atlantis with ultimate knowledge and power. In just a few years, Atlantis became the most advanced civilization on the planet, and was even more advanced than the modern world. However, with power came corruption and greed.

Ironheart, the King of Atlantis, gave his throne to his son, Dartz. Soon, the stones of the Orichalcos began to expose the evil in people, and turned those with darkness on the inside into monsters on the outside. Dartz witnessed his own wife, Iona become a horrid, ugly beast. (In the Japanese version, she attacked him and he was forced to kill her with his sword.)

Confused and frightened, Dartz consulted a stone of the Orichalcos for guidance. The Orichalcos granted Dartz great power and lent him the Orichalcos Soldiers to do his bidding. It told him to resurrect an ancient mystical beast known as the Great Leviathan, which would help him to destroy the world and create a new one that would be free of evil. Dartz became corrupted and misguided.

Ironheart and Chris, (Dartz's daughter) fled and called upon the world of Duel Monsters and its guardians, the three Legendary Dragons (in actuality, three soldiers whom Dartz had transformed into dragons) for help against the corrupted Dartz. One day, an army of benevolent magical creatures—including the three dragons—led by Ironheart, met with Dartz’s Army of the Orichalcos Soldiers and the Great Leviathan, and the Battle of Atlantis took place. The battle concluded with neither side victorious: The three dragons were frozen in ice, the magical creatures were sent back to their own world, the Soldiers of the Orichalcos were destroyed, the Great Leviathan was sealed away from the world, and Atlantis sank beneath the sea.

The corruption of the Orichalcos made Dartz believe that the world was a wicked place, and that humans had an inherent malice in their hearts. The transformation that the Orichalcos had inflicted on his fellow Atlanteans was, he believed, the punishment for being evil, as the outside of man became as twisted as their inside. Dartz was driven to revive the Great Leviathan to raze the world, so that he may reconstruct it in the image of glorious Atlantis. To do so, Dartz required human souls.

Dartz wandered the Earth for 10,000 years, presumably kept alive by the power of the Orichalcos. He knew that he had found one of the powerful souls that he required when he encountered the Pharaoh Atem in ancient Egypt, and witnessed his control of the powers of darkness and his ability to command Duel Monsters. He also witnessed the Pharaoh, with Slifer the Sky Dragon pursuing Thief King Bakura and Diabound. While Dartz did not seem to fear Zorc nor see him as a threat, he could not capture the Pharaoh's soul because Bakura and Zorc Necrophades were in his way, so he had to wait another 5000 years (3000 in the Japanese version) to capture the Pharaoh's soul.

It was unclear precisely when Dartz began to collect souls, but eventually, he established a multinational conglomerate that was named Paradius, which became a well-known, yet mysterious force in the business world. But that was not the only organization that Dartz had formed. Dartz also controlled the Doma Organization (Paradius in the English version), a group formed to gather souls to feed the Great Leviathan by challenging unsuspecting players to games of Duel Monsters only to have their souls taken by "The Seal of Orichalcos", a card that he had suffused with the Orichalcos' power.

For ten thousand years, Dartz collected the souls of his adversaries and many innocents in order to ensure the return of the Great Leviathan into the world. With time, the number of souls that Dartz had stolen stretched into the millions, thanks in part to his underlings.

Waking the Dragons

Dartz's family aiding his enemies.

Dartz's underlings, Rafael, Valon, and Alister, a trio of Duel Monsters players (called Doma's Three Swordsmen in Japan) had their lives manipulated by him to make them feel only hatred, and molded them to be ideal servants to his cause. Dartz gave them each a small fragment of the Orichalcos, which could be used to break the "Seal of Orichalcos" from outside in case of emergency, and gave them magical abilities that rivaled the Millennium Items.

Once aware of the fact that the Pharaoh had been reincarnated and his spirit revived in the present day, Dartz began his agenda to take his soul by freezing over the Tablet of Memories, and prevented the Pharaoh from remembering his own past. Later, he ordered his minions to steal the Egyptian God Cards, and used their power along with human souls to revitalize the Leviathan. Subsequently, Yugi Muto, Seto Kaiba, and Joey Wheeler released and joined forces with the Legendary Dragons as the souls of both them and their friends came under threat. Dartz's surviving family, Ironheart and Chris assisted Yami in recovering his self-confidence and the trust of "Timaeus". Events gradually converged on a Duel between Yami Yugi, Kaiba, and Dartz, in which Yami Yugi claimed victory by releasing the power of the Legendary Dragons and returned them to their human forms. Kaiba, Joey, and Yugi's souls were emancipated from the clutches of the Leviathan.

However, Dartz sacrificed his own soul, and his human body was reduced to dust, to give Leviathan enough power to fully resurrect and raised Atlantis once more with himself combined with the Great Beast. In the ensuing battle, Yami Yugi released the spirits of the Egyptian Gods from within the Leviathan and together they destroyed it, and discharged all of the captive souls. However, a trace of its darkness remained, and revealed the Leviathan's original form, along with Dartz's soul, which Yami Yugi was able to banish, released Dartz from the influence of the Orichalcos, allowed him to be reunited with the spirits of his family, and entered the afterlife as Atlantis sank back beneath the sea.