In the "Yugioh" franchise its simply a given fact that every main character of each new series will be a young boy who is coming of age. He will often have friends among whom one is woman who is roughly his age. While in the case of the first "Yugioh" that all these friends (except Joey and Bakura) were kind of bland, there's a special blandness reserved for the female cast. Warning: Spoilers for "Yugioh", "GX", "5Ds", "Zexal", and "Arc V" ahead.
In the original "Yugioh" manga by Kazuki Takahashi, ancient Egyptian spirits use magical artifacts to take over people's bodies and play games with each other. Often they play a game called Duel Monsters (known to us as Yu-Gi-Oh) and sometimes they inflict extremely terrible tortures on the loser. In the main cast, there were four duelists who mattered: The Pharaoh, Joey, Seto Kaiba and the Spirit of the Millennium Ring. There were two prominent female characters in the cast, namely Tea (who didn't duel) and Mai (who came extremely close to actually beating a bad guy but dropped the ball). When the manga was adapted to an anime, the creators must have felt that the omission of duals for Tea made her seem useless, so they gave her four duels. Coincidentally, I'm pretty sure she is the only character from the original anime to be undefeated. They gave Mai additional development during a filler season as well.
In "GX" we're introduced to Alexis Rhodes, who comes off as a competent duelist at the start of the series. Then she gets brainwashed by a cult. After the cult is defeated, I don't remember her getting any major moments. She has returned in "Arc V" and blows up some robots there, but so far that's about it.
"5 Ds" is much the same as "Yugioh". The major change is that the card games are on motorcycles and all the characters are now reincarnations of South Americans that help a giant fire dragon stop a guy from the future from blowing up the past. One of these reincarnated South Americans is Akiza, a psychic cult member who falls for the main character, Yusei. Akiza eventually breaks free of the cult, gets to living a normal life, learns to ride a motorcycle and then in the later half of the show she mostly just stares at Yusei. You might start seeing a pattern soon.
Usually the less said about "Zexal" the better. Even early on, the most likeable character is the bland Tori, whose main characteristic is that she has a full wardrobe (unlike other characters in the franchise). She doesn't really do much, the intent seeming to be that she'd play the straight man to everyone else's goofball. Unfortunately, those goofballs are all assholes and as a result, there is less care in her. She ends up brainwashed and is knocked back to her senses when she loses a dual. That is her only dual in the series.
By contrast "Arc V" is a good series so far. That said, it has a terrible treatment of its female lead Yuzu. At first, the viewer is confident that she knows what she's doing and the plot seems to be centered around her. Then she loses a duel because she dives head first into a pillar. Then during a battle royale she just barely manages to escape a kidnapping attempt only to be magically transported to another dimension- where she ultimately gets kidnapped. Once saved, she is then transported to yet another dimension- where she is once again kidnapped. Interestingly, the show allows for a second female lead to take her place for a while, Serena. Serena starts as a child soldier working for the antagonists. Then she becomes a good guy, learns the lesson that dueling can be fun, gets temporarily paralyzed, kidnapped and brainwashed. Soon after this, we learn that two other kidnapped characters have been brainwashed (in their first appearances no less).
In short, "Yugioh" seems to have an overarching tendency of brainwashing female leads and rendering them relatively useless to the plot compared to the male characters.
