The Big Picture
- The new series Yu Yu Hakusho strikes a balance between key moments fans expect and bringing something new to viewers.
- The series deals with themes like death, legacy, motherhood, and romance.
- While the series introduces way too many characters, it still tells a self-contained story and delivers powerful action scenes.
Adapting an established manga and anime series is tricky. At the same time that writers and directors need to give fans some key moments they expect to see, the adaptation also has to bring something new so it doesn’t get dismissed as a mere copy. Fortunately for Yu Yu Hakusho, this adaptation series manages to find a balance between both. However, its biggest enemy proves to be the minimal episode count.
Based on one of the most classic shounen anime series and created by mangaka Yoshihiro Togashi, Yu Yu Hakusho is one of the titles that, along with One Piece and Dragon Ball, helped establish anime as a mainstream medium across the world. The story centers around Yusuke Urameshi (Takumi Kitamura), a 17-year-old rebel who dies (in the very first scene, not a spoiler) randomly in a car accident. After dying, he discovers there’s a Spirit World not prepared to accommodate him, so he’s tasked with being a supernatural detective while the deities decide what to do with him.
Yu Yu Hakusho
The story revolves around Yusuke Urameshi, a delinquent junior high school student who spends his days getting into fights. He dies after saving a child in a car accident, and gets resurrected to serve as an investigator of the supernatural.
- Release Date
- December 14, 2023
- Cast
- Takumi Kitamura , Shuhei Uesugi , Jun Shison , Kanata Hongô
- Seasons
- 1
- Streaming Service(s)
- Netflix
You can tell that there’s a whole slate of themes that writer Tatsuro Mishima (Zoom 100: Bucket List of the Dead) wants to touch on in Yu Yu Hakusho. Across its five installments, the series deals with death, legacy, motherhood, apprenticeship, ageism, bad blood, and greed, as well as more common themes like finding one’s true strength and romance. While the almost five hours should certainly be enough to cover all of this, the show also has a bunch of characters to introduce – the main cast alone has eight members – and suddenly, five episodes don’t seem all that generous.
Takumi Kitamura Shines Bright in 'Yu Yu Hakusho' Season 1
Despite this, Kitamura manages to stand out as the indisputable lead of the story. He is a character that you really can connect to the more you stick with him. From the very beginning, you can see in Kitamura’s eyes that Yusuke’s bad boy demeanor is just a front for a young boy who desperately needs to fit in somewhere and wants somebody to see his worth. This is never blatantly stated, but you can see it clearly by his reactions when he realizes what people really thought of him and his skills but never told him.
Yu Yu Hakusho uses sober and down-to-earth cinematography for the human world scenes, which makes the colorful and vibrant Spirit World contrast even harder. It also makes this realm a lot more inviting than our world. On the other hand, Yu Yu Hakusho doesn’t seem all that interested in exploring this world. It is the cinematic equivalent of dangling a piece of meat to tease a hungry person, creating a persistently frustrating feeling.
Of course, this could all be a big, long introduction to something bigger with further episodes, but Yu Yu Hakusho never makes the mistake of setting up plot points to be resolved in future seasons. Even with its problems, it settles on telling a self-contained story that at least attempts to find coherence amid all the info-dumping that happens throughout its run. For all the characters surrounding Yusuke, we at least have a sense of who they are and what moves them, and that’s more than you can often say for a slate of other, longer series.
'Yu Yu Hakusho's Action Scenes Make Season 1 Worth Watching
Yu Yu Hakusho is also fully committed to embracing its combats and its weirdness, and that’s when the series really comes to life. The youkais (or demons) wield wildly creative powers and a lot of them are pretty distinct and unique. It makes every fight in the season feel like a box of surprises that’s exciting to unpack. Take, for example, the eldest Toguro sibling (Kenichi Takitō), who is the embodiment of weird and creepy. His morphing powers vary between the disgusting and utterly surprising, always keeping the viewer guessing as to what his next move will be.
If the idea of Season 1 of Yu Yu Hakusho was to showcase what the series can deliver, we’re sold. It’s not that common to have stories that deal with life and death in such colorful but also meaningful ways, and it’s clear that there’s even more for the show to deliver on. When two important characters meet in the Spiritual World by the end of the season, you know that they share a deeper connection that the series just doesn’t have the time to delve into. Similarly, the season touches on the background stories of several other characters, but makes the conscious decision not to go any further than the surface level — which is understandable but also begs the question: Why not focus on a smaller quantity of characters?
All in all, the first season of Yu Yu Hakusho feels like dipping your toe into an incredibly inviting pool on a hot day. With some unique concepts – the bureaucracy of the afterlife definitely deserves more exploring – as well as excellent fights and characters that you want to care about but don’t know enough to get fully invested in, the series has its work cut out if it gets renewed. For now, we’re stuck with the basics.
Rating: 7/10
Yu Yu Hakusho is now available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
Watch on Netflix
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