The biggest triumph of the movie is its storytelling and plot compared to the its two predecesors, the movies shows that despite being just giant ad for a children card game, YuGiOh (anime) can have compelling characters and plot if put the effort (albeit a bit restraint by the format but still compelling storytellign nonetheless.)
In many ways you can say that this is Kaiba´s movie (I like to call it Kaiba´s Ego: The Movie), he takes most of the feature screentime, gets the best one-liners and has the most over the top and ridiculous (in a good way) moments of it. His obsetion in trying to bring back Atem was delightful to see and how eventually finds a way to challenge him (via some time travel shenanigan using high tech and egyptian magic with Aigami´s cube) fun to see (a true Bond Beyond Time ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )) but probably the best aspect from said obsetion was seeing how over the course of the movie he comes to accept that Yugi is also a worthy rival for him.
Yugi got some good development despite not really being the main character here. As I said above, finally seeing him really embrace his title of #1 duelist and stand up to Kaiba to the point where Kaiba gives in to him was a huge moment for him, he is no longer lacking in confidence and is becoming more and more like Atem. Some of his speeches were also very well done in terms of countering Aigami’s ideals.
Aigami was a well done villain, they gave him a full backstory that linked into the already established lore very well, connecting him to the other 7 millennium items, having Shadi be his mentor and saviour and having his hatred stem from the incident where Bakura became the host for Yami Bakura/Zorc was well done while also completing Bakura’s arc explaining how he got his item from the original series. That said, there are some rough edges, his powers are not exactly well explain and his demonic transformation by the Millenium Ring (and some stuff involving said item), while easily explainable, came a bit forced to me.
It was a bummer not seeing Joe having a single duel
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The overall animation was visually appealing and crispped but the CGI for some monsters were a big jarring next to other hand drawn monsters. As ever the duels are very over the top, loud and dramatic as usual - children card games are serious bussiness- , the highlight being Yugi vs Kaiba as this matchup usually is.
The inclussion of Dimension Dueling can be seeing a simple gimmick with nothing particular interesting but I think it´s an acceptable excuse to streamline and make duels faster to keep them more or less up to pace with how fast current YuGiOh duels work so not problems from my end. The only problem that some duels migh have had would be the nature of the Cubic archetype not coming across very clearly and the unnecesary additions of more effects to other monsters, the would have worked perfectly fine the one they already had in the anime.
As a critic I´d probably give this movie a 7/10, as a fan I´d give it an 8/10 or even an 8.5/10 .... fuck it, let´s give it a 8.5/10