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The Anime Backlog - Yu Yu Hakusho Season 1




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Joe Mello



Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Online Terminal
PostPosted: Fri Feb 28, 2025 8:20 pm Reply with quote
IIRC the problem with Botan is that the field of memorable female characters grows to a half-dozen pretty quickly and several of them become higher priority.

Also fwiw, I only just now internalized than Japan Yusuke's thing was called a Rei Gun, and that is doing untold amounts of psychic damage to me.
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SaitoHajime101



Joined: 31 Mar 2013
Posts: 287
PostPosted: Fri Feb 28, 2025 8:21 pm Reply with quote
Yu Yu Hakusho is a personal favorite. I'm in the same age group (almost 39 here), but fortunate enough to have seen this on Toonami. Toonami is where I fell in love with this show and even recorded a few episodes on VHS back in the day so I can rewatch some favorite episodes.

There're numerous reasons why this show has the following that it does. I will specifically call out the focused story. In a time where filler episodes were common in anime, Yu Yu Hakusho has surprisingly little which helped make the transition from arc to arc and (ultimately) the length of the series feel better paced than its contemporaries.

HONORARY MENTION: Dub voice acting was actually damn good. Loved every moment of it. Younger Toguro's voice actor owned it in the Dark Tournament Arc.

I hope you're able to finish it. The Dark Tournament arc, while a little awkward in places by today's standard, is still a solid run and has the best fights in anime for its time.


Last edited by SaitoHajime101 on Fri Feb 28, 2025 8:22 pm; edited 2 times in total
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malvarez1



Joined: 17 Nov 2008
Posts: 2253
PostPosted: Fri Feb 28, 2025 8:21 pm Reply with quote
To this day, I genuinely consider YYH to be one of the best Shonen Jump anime adaptations period. The animation has aged better than many of its peers, the pacing is brisk compared to many other long runners, and they even do their best to fix the manga ending, IMO. It does the manga justice.

And yes, Botan is best girl.
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Wyvern



Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Posts: 1620
PostPosted: Fri Feb 28, 2025 8:24 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
The first season is not interested in padding out the audience's time, letting us get right into Yūsuke and the team's yokai-fighting adventures.


In fact, it's so eager to get to the yokai fighting that it skips past most of the first two volumes of manga and modifies a few characters' stories in the process. The early YYH manga was a comedy series where Yuske got into wacky episodic hijinks as a ghost; almost all this stuff is skipped in the anime to get to the point where it evolved into a battle series. I don't knock the anime adaptation for that, because by the time the anime premiered the manga was firmly established in the action genre so that's what viewers were tuning in to see.

Nontheless I feel like this factoid gives insight into the way the anime team approached this series. I don't think you'd be able to do it that way today: modern production committees usually want to adapt the manga as faithfully as possible and not skip anything, to avoid upsetting fans or overtaking the manga. In fact, if a YYH remake ever happens, I expect they'll adapt every one of the skipped chapters simply because they've never been animated before.

YYH really feels like an anime from another time (I mean that in a good way) and is also one of the few shonen adaptations of its era to adapt the manga right to the end.
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FanGamer24



Joined: 10 Apr 2024
Posts: 128
PostPosted: Fri Feb 28, 2025 8:54 pm Reply with quote
Having checked it out recently I lost interest after about 30 episodes. Maybe I'll return at some point but it might be a little too dated at this point for me to enjoy. I probably would have loved it as a kid if it aired in Canada (if it did I was never aware of it).
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