Yu Yu Hakusho: Season 2 Blu-ray Review
Fighting like your life depended on it.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 3, 2011
No good deed goes unpunished.
That old adage, dredged up by everyone from your Mom in her best martyr mode to television's Judge Judy to a plaintiff before she lays into a defendant who has absconded with a loan, might also be knit onto a sampler hung on the animated wall of Yusuke Urameshi, the hero of
Yu Yu Hakusho. This anime got off to a very promising start with a story arc which saw Yusuke, not exactly a paradigm of nobility or good behavior, finally do something selfless, namely running into a crowded highway to push a small child out of the way of a marauding car. Yusuke's reward for this laudable act? He got hit by the car and promptly died. You might think that would make for the shortest anime
ever, but that, as they say, was just the beginning, and the
real adventure of
Yu Yu Hakusho then started up, one where Yusuke is given a second chance at life, but as a Spirit Detective, a "career" I likened in my
review of the first season of the series to that of a sort of Scully and Mulder
X Files idea. Yusuke and his demon fighting buddies encountered all sorts of ghouls and goblins once the main story arc of
Yu Yu Hakusho was developed in the first season, and much like many series that start out with a bang and then settle into their formula, that's when this series lost at least a little bit of its initial head of steam.
Yu Yu Hakusho, at least about six episodes in or so, became a sort of supernatural
Yu-Gi-Oh, one battle after another in fairly standard
shonen form. Sure, Yusuke's opponents were often otherworldly sprites, doppelgangers and outright monsters, but aside from that perhaps slightly unusual element, the show wasn't as innovative as it might have been, and in fact became pretty rote pretty quickly. So how does this second season fare?
There's a little bit of that old maxim about nothing ever happening (at least very fast, anyway) on soap operas about
Yu Yu Hakusho. Soap operas were famous for dragging even momentary incidents on for days and days, where a chance meeting took weeks of air time or a one night stand went on for months. Take a deep breath and get used to something very similar in this season of
Yu Yu Hakusho, for nearly the entire season is built around a fighting match called Dark Tournament, where Yusuke and his team face down a series of other, usually pretty nefarious, teams. What's a little off putting and simultaneously pretty funny about these matches is just when you think they're over, you find out you've only made it through the first part of Round One in a multi-part, multi-round match. What ups the hilarity somewhat are the interstitial coming attractions and previous episode summaries, which continually tell us (in excited and breathless tones) that the "final showdown" is only moments away. In your dreams, maybe.
But despite the undeniably formulaic aspect to
Yu Yu Hakusho, this second season tends to be at least reasonably entertaining most of the time. This is due to the variety of foes Team Urameshi finds themselves up against, as well as a couple of long character arcs that play out over the course of the season. Now, there's nothing overtly revolutionary in any of this, so anyone coming to
Yu Yu Hakusho expecting something truly innovative is most likely going to be extremely disappointed. But within the bounds of a traditional
shonen, the series is certainly no worse, and is at times a good deal better, than several other shows of this general ilk.
One of the things that gives the series its edge is the often odd assortment of foes, foes who might fight with something as unexpected as a yo-yo. At other times, we get foes who don't even want to be foes—bad guys who are under mind control by a mad scientist, or who have a weird dendrite attached to their nervous systems which force them to fight when they don't want to. That in turn puts Yusuke and his teammates in the odd predicament of having to decide how to handle nemeses who don't really deserve a pummeling, let along death.
While Yusuke of course is the primary focus here, and does get some decent character arc within the show, what's kind of interesting in this season is how much time is spent on several other characters. In fact the opening episodes have Yusuke taking a "long winter's nap," as it were, leaving the battling to his cohorts, chief among them Kuwabara. But a number of backstories and related character beats are attended to in this second season, which at the very least provide a little break—sometimes
very little—from the nonstop battles.
Yu Yu Hakusho is one of those series which has limited ambitions, but which manages to fulfill those ambitions reasonably well most of the time. Lovers of action animes, those who can't get enough of knock down, drag out fights, often with a sort of outré element that give them at least a somewhat fresh feel, are going to love this series, no matter what its flaws. Those who may yearn for something a bit deeper than head butts, sliced appendages and relentless smackdowns may wonder what all the fuss about this series has been all about. Sometimes, though, it's better to have those limited ambitions and to do well with them, then to aim for the stars and come up horribly short.
Yu Yu Hakusho may indeed be a pretty standard
shonen, but that doesn't mean it isn't a lot of fun.
Use the thumbs up and thumbs down icons to agree or disagree that the title is similar to Yu Yu Hakusho. You can also suggest completely new similar titles to Yu Yu Hakusho in the search box below.
