Ryo Bakura - Design

Design

Bakura's character design was overseen by Kazuki Takahashi. In the Duelist Kingdom arc he wears a white wool jumper and green undershirt. His usual outfit in following seasons consists of a blue opened shirt over a blue and white horizontally striped T-shirt with matching pants. His white hair trails halfway down his back and becomes more erratic as Dark Bakura. In the final story arc of the series, Dark Bakura wears blue jeans and a blue and white striped shirt underneath a long black trenchcoat when not dueling, his trenchcoat not usually shown in his duels on the blimp where the Tournament is being held. In the Memory World, Thief Bakura wears a long red robe with white trimmings, a navy blue kilt and golden anklets and armlets. His chest is bare, tan and muscular, and he possesses a pale double-crossed scar under his right eye.

Bakura is polite, and uses honorifics in his speech almost all the time; in the 4Kids English-language dub of the series, he speaks with a British accent to represent this (conversely, the Singaporean English anime gives him a Western/Southern US accent). By contrast, Dark Bakura speaks with no honorifics and refers to himself as "ore-sama" in the Japanese anime, a boastful and prideful way of saying "I". While the English-dubbed Bakura retains his host's accent, his voice is deeper and his speech patterns are still more casual than his good counterpart. In all incarnations, Dark Bakura is able to mimic his host's voice and speech patterns to avoid detection when possessing him so Yugi and the others think they are talking to the good Bakura (Ryo).