Anna Kozuki, while she's only appeared once, is my vote for best random character to appear so far.Now, as I've noted, the younger ages of most of ZEXAL's characters is... a bit uncomfortable for me. They're much closer to actual children than most Yu-Gi-Oh! casts. But they don't really draw Anna here as a child (they even have her Gainaxing, for crying out loud!-also note that, if you don't know what that is, you should be cautious about clicking the link) and I guess that means that it's a bit less problematic for me.
Anyway, there are a lot of things about the character that are pretty great, so I'll list a few:
Her first appearance, mere seconds after the episode opens, involves her standing on a roof and sniping at the main characters.
With a cannon.
A cannon that can transform into a small aircraft.
Aside from the fact that she can and does wield a portable cannon with proficiency, even without that we have evidence of her being very strong-at one point, to punctuate a statement, she swings and misses at Yuma, and makes a small crater in a concrete wall.
And now we come to my favorite part of the character. Here we have a minor character (as opposed to an important villain or something, although the intro suggests that she may become a recurring character) who is a female duelist who does not use a single "girly" card.
Folks, that just hasn't been done before in Yu-Gi-Oh!'s various series.
Further, her few monsters are huge. They have a physical presence that's incredibly dominating, giant trains casually circling like sharks around Yuma and his tiny wimps, a presence greater than that of the vast majority of monsters since the Battle City era. And their statistics-one of them, in fact the first one we see, has 5000 ATK-are ridiculously hyperbolic.
So, in short, I think that this alone is perhaps the best thing about ZEXAL so far-equity in deck types. She's manlier than the guys, for crying out loud!
-Signing off.
