Yu-Gi-Oh!

He decided to create a battle manga where the main character does not hit anybody, but also struggled with that limitation.

With friendship being one of the major themes of Yu-Gi-Oh!, he based the names of the two major characters "Yūgi" and "Jōnouchi" on the Japanese word yūjō, which means "friendship".

Takahashi added that this is "a pretty consistent theme." The editor of the English version, Jason Thompson, said that the licensing of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga had not been entirely coordinated, so Viz decided to use many of the original character names and to "keep it more or less violent and gory".

Because the core fanbase of the series was, according to Thompson, "8-year-old boys (and a few incredible fangirls)", and because the series had little interest from "hardcore, Japanese-speaking fans, the kind who run scanlation sites and post on messageboards" as the series was perceived to be "too mainstream", the Viz editors allowed Thompson "a surprising amount of leeway with the translation".

In the initial planning stages of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Takahashi had originally wanted to draw a horror manga.

Since there were so many manga based around fighting, he found it difficult to come up with something original.