97 chapters, huh? That's impressive!

If this is discontinued, mark this as 'complete'.

It's been 7 years since you updated this wonderful and very awesome story.

It's also been 4 years since someone review this masterpiece of a yugioh gx fanfic story.

My point is this story is amazing and it shouldn't go to waste because the story was taking place in the final year of the academy for the more main characters and the characters been through a lot with many unresolved issues such as those that need saving, the final group of enemies that need to be defeated, the much needed closure for all the main characters, and the conclusion of the status of their relationship between Mizuki and Shiro.

So much is still left to be told and I'm one of many readers of yugioh gx fanfiction stories that want to see this story through to the end.

So please consider jumping back to this story, continue where you left off, give the ending it deserve, and make many readers such as myself, happy because at this point there aren't many stories (as of 2014) that can top the classics from back then.

- No. XIII (Reader of this story from December 2013-January 2014.).

For a fanfiction that is often described as the crowning achievement of the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom, I have to admit I was very underwhelmed. There are some good points I can make about this story: the writing is very solid, and the duels didn’t have any mistakes from what I can remember. I can see there was a certain level of effort put into this story missing from most other fanfictons. However, that is where the good points end unfortunately.

The most important thing to a story is arguably the main character: they are the gateway into the universe, and it is their story the reader is following. Mizuki Mitsuhiro, as a main character (and a character in general), quite honestly falls flat. She is so overpowered it makes it near impossible for the reader to relate to her on any real level. Quite honestly, I went through this fanfiction wondering why she bothered to enter the academy in the first place; her dueling skill, or rather her ability to wield broken cards (I’ll get to her decks a little later on), puts her miles ahead of what Duel Academy would conceivably teach. Admittedly this is a problem most Duel Academy stories, and the actual GX anime itself, fall into but it is still worth mentioning in my opinion.

My major issue with Mizuki is there is no balance to the character. She is described as exotically beautiful, which pretty much gives the reader the impression her attractiveness is on the level of supermodels. Her mathematical ability is quite quickly displayed as godlike (having the ability to solve problems in her head in half the time it takes another genius to solve on paper), and we’re never given anything she is equally bad at. I could’ve gotten behind her godlike math ability if she was also presented as incredibly terrible at dueling (which would’ve made sense given this is a story about a character going to school to learn) for example.

The biggest problem I had with her mathematical ability was it never really impacted the story. She never used it to help her in her duels, or never really used it to overcome any problems, so ultimately it felt like it was just there to express to the reader how awesome Mizuki actually is. That’s the major problem: all of her abilities are random and have little to no bearing on the story itself. Her dancing ability came out of nowhere and seemed to disappear after the chapter it appeared in. You did explain she had taken dancing lessons before, but honestly what was the point? All it did was detract from Chizuma since Mizuki was on equal footing with her with her one talent.

Any weakness the character may have had was quite quickly swept under the rug. Her self-consciousness played a fairly major role in the chapter it was introduced in, and we did get a fairly nice conflict when she struggles with whether or not she can be beautiful and taken seriously as a duelist. Unfortunately, this struggle quickly goes away in subsequent chapters and her self-consciousness is brought up only when it is comedically convenient.

I’ve heard some people defend Mizuki saying if she was a Mary Sue she would’ve scored far higher in the entrance ranking than she did. My issue with that is, while she was ranked twenty-third we never really saw any new applicant that was superior to her in intellect or dueling ability. Three chapters in, and she beats the applicant that got the top score in both intellect and dueling ability. Also, people claim that she cannot be a Sue as there are people she loses to, but who does she lose to really? Vlad is the number one duelist in the school so losing to him doesn’t really count (besides her deck, which I will get to, became considerably weakened in that duel) and Harrison, who she soundly defeated not long after.

The way she is affected when it comes to the Shadow Games is weird. While it is true she adopts the personality of a little kid, it never really detriments her when it comes to her dueling. She never makes any stupid or foolish moves, and duels with the competence of an adult. Considering no one else is affected in this way, it just feels like more “look how awesome Mizuki is”. Not to mention her ability to create Shadow Games without any kind of outside item, the fact she has a Yami form, and the fact she has the ability to create life. Now I really hope I misread that last one, so if I have please message me and correct me on that.

All of this would be fine except none of her abilities are depicted as common; they’re all used to make Mizuki stand out from the rest of the pack. Now you should make the main character stand out from the other characters, but this was the wrong way to go about it. Considering how much attention Mizuki gets, it results in the other characters becoming bland and uninteresting. I understand you’ll get the occasional red-shirt, but I cannot remember anything about the other characters beyond their basic character trait (Harrison Lone Wolf, Tobias Evil, Vlad Heart of the Cards Speeches

As another reviewer pointed out, there is never any challenge provided to Mizuki for her to overcome. In the Seven Sins saga we get the occasional “if I were to face as I am now, I’d lose” but really we only had Mizuki’s word on that and I don’t think she lost once to any of them. Oh, and going off topic, please stop having every time a new sin appears Mizuki going “Compared to Envy is an amateur”. It is rather annoying to keep hearing it.

The amount of fake cards in this story borders on ridiculous. I have nothing against made-up cards, but it gets a bit much when most of the characters are running decks filled with them (aside from obvious cards like Pot of Greed). The two I would like to make special mention of are:

Repayment of Losses:- While this card seems simple and balanced, the fact that you get a free card no matter how it hits the graveyard makes it one of the most splashable cards in the game. It essentially covers the cost of any card that requires you to discard one from your hand, and also gives you an extra card when discarded for the likes of Hand Destruction, Card Destruction, etc…

Phoenix Soul:- Do I really need to point out how ridiculous this card is? It completely breaks the gameplay mechanics, and quite honestly is just cheap. There seems to be no restriction as to what deck you can switch out to, which means all you really need to do is build decks to counter the most popular builds and sub them in as needed. I get this card was used to change Sanzo’s E-Hero strategy to a D-Hero one, but Edo essentially did the exact same thing in the anime, and even though it meant his deck just randomly changed strategies it was still far less awkward than this card.

The final matter I want to bring up here is Mizuki’s decks: specifically her Rune Deck and her Eden Deck. I’ll start with her Rune Deck since it is the more prominent of the two. The first problem I have with it is despite the fact they all have “Rune” in their name, there really isn’t anything tying these cards together as an archtype. The cards all have random effects with seemingly no synergy with each other. The spells and traps are just remakes of already existing cards: they have costless draw, burn, non-specific monster destruction, and a Swords of Revealing Light that leaves the field (so the effect cannot be stopped until it ends by itself). Not to mention the amount of free revival packed into the set. There is a reason Magician of Faith is banned.

The idea of the cards having different effects depending on if they were set first or not is a fairly interesting idea, but it was never really played up in the story. It could just be I didn’t have the patience to remember each different Rune card’s name, but most of the time it felt as if each card only had one effect. Really, all it did was give the set a lot more versatility than it needed. Look at the Deformers; they had different effects depending on what mode they were in, but the two effects often had something in common with each other.

However, the biggest problem of the set is the rune layouts. First of all, there is no where convenient where the effects of the rune layouts are written and Mizuki is one of the few people who has seen the list, so the opponent really only has Mizuki’s word on what the effects actually are. They come off as cheap “get out of situation free” effects most of the time, and even if the Rune Layout fails, Mizuki gets three to seven cards recycled back into her deck as an added bonus. Again it’s the whole problem of far too much versatility since the impression is given a Rune Layout can be made from any combination of three, five, or seven Rune cards.

I’m not going to talk for long on her Eden deck since I’m running out of space, but I’ll just say it is probably the most broken deck I’ve ever seen. Adam and Eve, by themselves, have the ability to completely control the field (Eve taking care of the spells and traps, and Adam taking care of the hand). Not to mention that other card (whose name escapes me) that automatically nukes anything the opponent tries to summon. Seriously this deck is far too powerful, and the duels it is in are boring since there is no possible way to beat it.

In short: rewrite this fanfiction without Mizuki and make Shiro the main character. He is the only character in the entire story I could stand, and the only one who seemed to get any real character development. His evolution from annoying prankster to someone who truly cared for Mizuki was nice, and it’s a shame we didn’t see more like that in the story.

It's odd. You've had over one thousand reviews, and not a single person in the reviews column here on has articulated any of the major problems in this fanfic either in depth or coherently. I suppose it's time I actually contributed my two cents. After all, I'm something of a fanfiction scholar, and no matter where you look the general opinion seems to be the same: Rising Star to the Heavens is 'the greatest GX fanfic of all time'. I'd like to respectfully disagree with that opinion, I happen to believe the best GX fanfic of all time is "Yu-Gi-Oh: Negative Zero", a sadly-ignored fanfic that will now never reach completion due to the recent death of its author, Jujube. However, my opinion on superlatives is beside the point. What IS the point is that, from one writer to another, I have several points I want to make about this fanfic overall.

The first point is that yes, Mizuki is wearing a "Sue" sign. Aside from the multiple times she's been described with superlatives as regards her beauty, her god-like powers, and her inexplicable ability to control the universe with mathematics, Mizuki has several problems as a lead character- the first being that she has no obstacles to overcome. She has "challenges", yes, but most are surmounted almost instantly and with relatively little effort on her part. This is a real pity, because when reading the fanfic several things Mizuki did really amused me (see: her reaction to Duel Academia's uniforms, I've always held that the designer of those things was a bit of an ephebophile). My other problem with her? Claims about her 'dueling strength' simply do not hold up to examination, even in the context of the fanfic itself. The reason for this is simple- the Rune archetype.

Do not get me wrong, fakie archetypes are a passion of mine, and I've pulled some very silly ones in the past. However, it's EXTREMELY difficult to accept that Mizuki has 'skill' in dueling when her deck is essentially... a bunch of spell cards that blatantly rip off the effects of actual staple spells, a group of monsters with effects ranging from 'worthless' to 'holy hell that's abusable', and two or three cards to endlessly spam the Rune staples she's already played. There is a reason Magician of Faith and Dark Magician of Chaos are banned- recycling spells for free is a VERY powerful ability, and Mizuki's deck makes use of it in such a way that she can essentially play Pot of Greed, Monster Reborn, or Smashing Ground three times in a single turn without actually losing anything. The other problem with her deck? Aside from the draw cards and a few other staples here and there, it's a straight archetype build. It really doesn't take much skill to grab a bunch of monsters with an archetype name in common and throw them all into a deck. Archetypes should ideally be used in conjunction with cards outside their narrow themes when wielded by characters who are supposed to have dueling skill out the wazoo. The Eden deck Mizuki uses later is honestly no better, and in fact, it's just plain worse- nearly ever card is unworkable or broken. Also, the Rune Layouts were a serious mistake.

That brings me to another complaint I have with this fanfic- one too many fake cards. A few in each character's deck or one or two characters with a deck full of them? Fine by me. Spamming fake cards across the board like this fanfic does, however, gets very old very fast. Most characters either run a deck with so many fake cards (ranging, again, from Worthless to Broken as Hell) that you have to wonder what happened to the ACTUAL cards used to play this game, or they play... a straight archetype with no out-of-theme support.

Characters in this fanfic range from paper-thin and stereotypical (Vlad would like all of us to know that he is proud to be the latest fictional Soviet to pledge his undying passion to MOTHER AND FATHER RUSSIA) to annoying (Mizuki for her sue-ness, Harrison for being... Sasuke from Naruto) to tolerable (Shiro). Envy was actually a welcome change of pace for me simply because she was a villain with a genuinely threatening ability with a developed personality. Honestly, though, I don't so much see characters as 'archetypes'- the brooding anti-hero consumed by a desire for REVENGE (Harrison), the lovable pervert/prankster (Shiro), the rival who suffers from serious mental retardation and/or jealousy (Tobias).

Other problems of mine include... well, where the hell is this fanfic set? When is it set? If we're in Japan that's fine and dandy, but then shouldn't most if not all of the students have Japanese names and follow Japanese speaking practices (such as observing sempai/kouhai conventions, referring to fellow students and co-workers primarily by their surname, etc.)? I know you mentioned a large number of 'transfer students', but having this many is quite unusual for any school, even a large one like Duel Academia.

Other aspects I should really mention... the use of Judeo-Christian imagery honestly confuses me because, like Evangelion, it really doesn't do more than add a veneer of 'depth' to the story that it doesn't really have. The imagery is ultimately just plain meaningless, and it's integrated in with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. True Sins, devils, and the rest are also all concepts that are just plain alien to YGO mythos, and even in an alternate universe they just plain feel like they're out of place. Duel spirits? Ancient deities? Yeah, those are pretty much staple for this franchise. Demons? Um... not so much, really.

Overall this isn't really a bad fanfic, it's just an over-rated one. This isn't the best GX fanfic ever written- though arguably it's the most popular and definitely head and shoulders above other fanfics (say the "Trial" series by cypsiman2). Ultimately, for me, the lack of anything that really resembled an interesting duel, the unengaging character, and the sheer length of the thing brought it down for me.

This is friendly advice from one writer to another, so don't look at this as a personal attack or a challenge. I genuinely hope that if/when you pick up your pen (keyboard?) again and return to actively writing fanfiction that you keep some of these comments in mind. Good luck, and Godspeed.

-Scarlet Weather, Soldier of Ohu, Canine Critic, Furry first degree.

Love the story, in fact this is the first Fic I've faved... but... I haven't seen an update in years. I can't take it! Please update...

well, let me first say something I've een meaning to say for a long time: thank you. It was this fic, as well as some other veteran writers on the site whose work first got me interested in fanfiction at all. i hope that you someday return to writing and finish this work.

It's hard to believe that a year has already passed, isn't it? Almost one and a half now.

*sighs* I really don't have much of a life at all do I? Still, its always nice to go back and re-read old favorites. Especially when summer's just getting here. I can't believe.. that's I've been reading you and Wolf General ever since I was back in Mr. C's history class.

From Jr. High to Graduation this year, these fics have kept me entertained and given me a lot of laughs. Even if it looks we'll never get to see the conclusion, its still a blessing to read. (God forgive me if I sound as corny saying that as I think I do...)

Anyway, good luck with whatever you're doing these days. I hope you accomplish everything you want to, and maybe we'll see you around again one of these days. I wandered back here again since all of the other sites I'm on are down, and I felt like dropping a line.

~Sorry if I inconvenienced you, Fenris

*tosses you a plushie* (No~! I still haven't stopped with that!)

I just finished reading the story and all I can say is wow. It's well written, has great characters, and it has fun decks. I think your story is one of the best that I've ever read on FFN. Can't wait for the next chapter in this amazing story. Until next time!

Sesshomaru the Lord :)

While the quality of writing, plotline, and characters of this story are excellent, there is one thing that brings this down- Mizuki. As others have pointed out, her deck is entirely broken and her personality characteristics fit that of a Mary-Sue. This would not be a problem if she was a minor character, but as she's the MAIN hero it really drags it down. Her personality isn't that bad in itself, but that in combination with her deck is what makes her so annoying. As for her deck, her Rune Symbols are simply too overpowered- costless monster destruction, non-specific draw power, etc, etc, etc. There's no fun in her duels because she has access to so many powerful cards, and so many ways to re-use them. Tone down Mizuki's deck (or replace it altogether), and you have something excellent. As it is, she's just an example of how NOT to create a likeable protagonist.

Well, I'd first like to start off with the name. It doesn't lie. Everybody talks about how popular this story is, but honestly, all I see is a sue whom humbled themselves.

-Girls who go to Duel Academia are instantly placed into Obelisk. Hopefully I'm not the first to point this out to you

-You gave her all the traits of overexaggerated beauty, exponential talent that exceeds everybody else (with that whole; dumbass math problem), and I'd like to know; why is Mizuki in DA if she's already better than everybody.

-Leading me back to the whole math problem. What's the deal with her 'god-like' math ability. Quite "la vie faux" if you ask me.

Basically, in total of skimming through to Ch. 10, I give this story a D, just because you try to make her the best, yet humble her by placing her in the next best dorm, in which isn't capable in the first place according to the anime and manga. Maybe you toned down the "sueness" of "Miyzuki" or however you spell her name, it could be an alright story. But honestly, it seems quite generic.

Update soon, man! The new chapter sounds very cool, and this chapter was amazing by itself... I love Skull Servant decks! Yay, I was review 10!

Finally I have finished this wonderful story. I hope you haven't given up on it. If you need any duelists for the upcoming arcs I have two you can borrow. Their in my discontinued fic the Takeo brothers. they duel with monsters based off the game Dungeons and Dragons.

That deck was insane, it would half to be well over 100 cards.

Still not exactly sure how these Rune Lay outs work, their effect just seems to me whatever will allow Mizuki to win. But hey the story is still good.