Character · Yu-Gi-Oh!
Joey Wheeler
A former street brawler who learned the card game badly, on purpose, and kept getting further than anyone expected.
In Otakana the clue reads: Loud friend who duels with a red-eyed dragon
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Yu-Gi-Oh!
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Joey Wheeler starts out shaking Yugi down and ends up the friend the series leans on hardest. His deck is a mess of luck-based cards and coin flips, which is how the writers keep him plausible against opponents with better collections, and his ace is the Red-Eyes Black Dragon, weaker than Kaiba's white one and considerably more beloved for it.
He duels for other people. His sister Serenity is losing her sight and the tournament prize money would pay for surgery, so the Battle City arc has an actual stake underneath the holograms. He also loses more often than the lead does, and the show treats those losses as real, which is unusual for a rival-shaped best friend in a card game series.
In Japanese he is Katsuya Jonouchi, and his English name and Brooklyn accent came from the 4Kids dub, which rewrote most of the cast that way. Kazuki Takahashi started the manga in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1996, when it was still about many kinds of games rather than one.
Spelling JOEY
JOEY is four letters and the answer is the English dub name, not Jonouchi, which the Japanese version uses and which would need seven. Three of the four letters are vowels or act like one, and the J opening is uncommon enough to be a strong first guess. Nothing here comes from Japanese, so no romanisation trap applies.