Yami Bakura

闇獏良

The strange dark spirit residing within the Millennium Ring. He serves as Yami Yugi's primary archenemy and harbors a 3,000-year-old grudge against him. Dark Bakura seeks the Millennium Items to open the Door of Darkness, which grants evil power to whoever opens it. To achieve this, he takes control of Bakura's body against Bakura's will, as he lacks a body of his own. At the start of the story, he torments Bakura by taking over his body whenever Bakura plays games with his friends, using Penalty Games to trap their souls in TRPG miniatures for the Monster World game, causing Bakura to constantly change schools. With the help of Yugi, Yugi's other self, Jonouchi, Anzu, and Honda (and Miho in the 1998 anime), they manage to temporarily purge Dark Bakura's influence on their friend by defeating the final boss of Monster World, Dark Master Zorc.
However, later on, when the group appears to be trapped within the labyrinth below Duelist Kingdom, the spirit's voice inside the Millennium Ring tricks Bakura into wearing it again, assuring him that his other half will help save his friends and that the dark spirit has changed his heart. With Bakura's friends unaware that he has once again put on the Millennium Ring, Dark Bakura helps Yami Yugi in a game designed to outwit the Meikyuu Brothers' trickery, and they head to the surface. For a while in the manga, it remains unknown whether Dark Bakura is still a malevolent spirit. On one hand, he occasionally helps Yugi and his friends, trying to gain their uneasy trust, and seems to allow Bakura more free control of his body compared to his earlier treatment of his host (who remains unaware of what happens whenever his other half takes over). On the other hand, unbeknownst to the others, he is revealed to be the one who killed Pegasus by tearing the Millennium Eye out of his eye socket and taking it for himself, licking the leftover blood. His true intentions become clear during the Dungeon Dice Monsters arc: after giving Yugi moral support during the game against Ryuji Otogi and helping him retrieve the pieces of the shattered Millennium Puzzle, Dark Bakura secretly plants a portion of his soul into one of the pieces to uncover the True Door from within. He intends to manipulate everything into place until the day all Millennium Items gather, in preparation for the Shadow Role-Playing Game / Shadow RPG, with the ultimate goal of opening the Door of Darkness and unleashing the darkness sealed within the Puzzle. Unbeknownst to Bakura, throughout the later portion of the manga, his other self occasionally takes over his body whenever he sees a chance to further his own selfish goals.

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