#Yu Yu Hakusho live action spoilers

[islandofthesnakes]

OUGHJTITN THE LIVE ACTION YU YU HAKUSHO WAS SO GOOD

AHHH IT WAS SO FUN TO SEE THEM ALL TOGETHER W THEY COLOR CODED ASSES

my only gripe is the pacing towards the end like they coulda ended it w the first tournament arc and then like next season coulda been dark tournament

OH AND MORE SPIRIT DETECTIVING I WISH I COULDVE SEEN THE GUYS BONDING N STUFF AHH IT WAS TOO RUSHED WE COULDA HAD IT ALLLLL

[brokenangelwings22]

I didn’t know that Michael Jackson was in Yu Yu Hakusho 🤣

[maesonc-artistic-adventures]

Watched the YYH live action and I’m obsessed! They did such a great job adapting the show and I just had so much fun watching it! Enjoy some doodles!

[hlkproductions]

this guy is hands down the funniest fucking creature to ever

[nightblood]

I think it was a smart choice to merge Hiei's part of the opening arc with the Yukina Rescue arc because it lets us ignore his weird characterization at the start in favor of the more aloof personality he has for most of the series.

And I'm fine with them condensing Genkai's training arc. But they didn't really build up her dynamic with Yusuke, so it was just weird for her to give him the Spirit Orb. Especially this early on.

I'm only three episodes in, so I don't know if she's really dead. But it'd be a waste if she is.

[sunlightfeeling]

Yu Yu Hakusho: Episode 2 (2023)

Inagaki Goro as Sakyo

[alotofrandomfangirling]

Would seriously DIE for him

[honoviadakai]

So the live action series for Yu Yu Hakusho drops tomorrow…

Possible spoilers down below. If you don’t wanna see spoilers, keep scrolling!

***

Imma level with ya’ll…my expectations are so low for this to be good that the bar’s not even in hell, it’s under it.

Like this

This scares me.

It could potentially be interesting. Like maybe he was viewed as too violent and brash so he was initially denied the jagan eye surgery. Instead of calming down, Hiei steals a jagan implant and does an impromptu surgery on himself with 0 medical training, thus proving Shigure’s point.

That would be cool right?

Well…

This looks like a warehouse…in the human world…

This kinda looks like he gave himself a jagan eye using the conjuring blade he stole in the spirit detective saga arc…

I really hope they don’t have him do that, especially not in the middle of his fight with Yusuke

But I’m also just fully prepared for that to 100% be the case…

I could list other things that scare me but this is already getting long and I just wanted to point out Hiei cuz he’s my favorite character. Lol

We’ll see what happens but man do I want this series to prove me wrong.

(Also…did anyone else notice they lowkey gave Hiei a pompadour??? Hiei straight up stole Kuwabara’s look XD)

[rouge-the-bat]

huh. well. i didnt want to keep my hopes up to high for the yyh live action, and thankfully so bc then it ended up being better than i was expecting! itll never be able to live up to the anime, but it was enjoyable enough at least.

unfortunately it was. extremely fast paced. they condensed so much into so little time, giving the characters very little room to banter with each other and show their, yunno. character. at least for kurama and hiei, which are my favorite characters of ever (tied with my two faves from sth). kurama never even got to show any of his dorkiness or love for messing with others, especially hiei! their interactions were so limited... it makes me so sad :( also the fact that kuwabara made a jab at hieis height even though hiei is now only a few inches shorter than him ..........

while the humor was rather limited, im glad that it was there at all (bc i worried it was only going to be super serious), and there were def some moments that really made me laugh! n i liked that hiei was still a little shit to kuwabara lol. and also that keiko got to have some badassery :) the action scenes were all pretty cool too, and i do think it was cool how they made some stuff a lot creepier (like those demon bugs possessing people and like, elder toguro in general lol)

ill also say, while as weird as it was to have so much of the story condensed and altered, it was also kind of interesting how they were able to tie in everything into a more streamlined story. while i way prefer the pace and storyline of the original, it was neat how they made each major plotpoint slide into the next like they did.

[fallenqueen2]

Yu Yu Hakusho Netflix Live Action Review

As a long-time fan [this is my favourite anime] I did enjoy the acting/characterizations [they all fit their characters well], CGI, Costumes, Locations and Fight Scenes

But, it's like they took canon events and new ideas, tossed them in a blender and hit 'speed-run' for the plot & character development thus relationships and deaths weren't as impactful as they were in the anime/manga [I still sob at Genkai's death in the anime], but those feelings just didn't appear in the short time Genkai was on the screen.

It was so rushed that by the point of the last 2 episodes [even with the Spirit Wave Orb], Yusuke and Kwubara should never have been ready to fight the Toguro Brothers.

Even Kurama shouldn't have been able to become Yoko so quickly, not to mention somehow Hiei had the Dragon Of the Darkness Flame ready to go already summoned on his arm?

I can't recommend this as your first look into the world of Yu Yu Hakusho.

[busylazy]

YuYu Hakusho (Live Action) Trailer

Random rambles (spoilers):

Keita Machida as Koenma is a perfect fit. 🥰

I love the foursome:

Takumi Kitamura as Yusuke Urameshi Shuhei Uesugi as Kazuma Kuwabara Jun Shison as Kurama Kanata Hongō as Hiei

They all look better than the anime. Sei Shiraishi as Keiko too.

I've seen Kanata Hongō in other anime adaptations (Attack on Titan, Full Metal Alchemist, etc.) and I remember him from Kingdom (2019).

Lol at that Karasu vs Kurama introduction, "do you use hair treatment?" Said vain ninja to red-haired Kitsune.

Amazing how they condensed such a lengthy anime series into 5 episodes. I look forward to the rest of the series. I'd love to see how they interpret the introduction of the Demon Plane rules Raizen, Mukuro and Yomi.

[asterofthevoid]

The way that the live action is like watching the Saint Beast arc, the Save Yukina arc, and the Dark Tournament arc simultaneously.

Aside from lamenting the short span of these episodes, the bits that they kept are iconic. The little details are like nods to existing fans.

The fight scenes are impeccable.

And most importantly they got the boy's dynamic right.

Yu yu hakusho: Helen's revenge

Highlights:

BOTAN

iPad of Darkness

Gouki's tummy

Kuwabara

KARASU

keiko and yukina tag team

Dislikes:

- lack of shizuru

- keiko got nerfed a bit

-spirit orb was too easy to absorb

I'm sure I'm forgetting things.

[brokenangelwings22]

Seriously Netflix? 5 episodes? That’s unfair. How can I judge something that brief?

[yue-muffin]

the yu yu hakusho live action was everything I didn't know I needed. I'm usually a bit wary of live action anime adaptations, especially adaptations of shounen anime, but it really blew my expectations out of the water???

overall, I like the changes they made to the plot, tying many of the major beginning story arcs together actually worked and made it less broken up and episodic. of course, we're left mourning a few of the really good scenes that couldn't fit (genkai!! we hardly knew you in this one...) but i liked the changes. as a long time fan who hasn't seen the anime in ages, it was neat to see it done slightly differently but still recognize all of the story beats.

also, like i was never really attached to kuwabara in the original that much but he is such a bro here. kuwabara was so well done. love that goofy loudmouth. hands down like one of my favorites this time around!!

also i was surprised that i recognized some of the actors? like, HONGO KANATA as Hiei haha. (for reference, i follow hongo kanata's youtube channel...kind of randomly found him and he's a huge pokemon nerd and it's just fun watching his videos to practice my japanese). and Machida Keita as Koenma!

one of the changes i didn't like that much was that one scene of yusuke, still a spirit, trying to save keiko from pulling his body from the burning building. like, the wording they chose for this adaption just loses the gravitas of the original. in this one, he finally agrees to help spirit world with their little spirit detective thing so he can come back to life and save her. but in the original, he is fully willing to throw the egg (which understandably isn't in this version) and his chance of ever returning to life away to save her. that sacrifice means much more, especially because he did decide before that moment to come back to life and was willing to throw it away. and, it's that selfless act of being willing to sacrifice himself to save her that actually saves him (and her too) in the end.

overall, I liked most of the special effects! I feel they went a little too hard on the...alien monster look for some of the demons though. it felt very western-esque. if you didn't tell me they were yokai, i wouldn't have guessed it. special effects for the yoko-karasu and hiei-bui fight, and the toguro brothers were all great though. a...little bit sad we didn't get any KOKURYUHA (is that it...?i'm not double checking that) call outs but stone cold yoko/kurama going ham at the end with his death plant will always be delightful. i will forgive the logic slip that says he shouldn't have appeared in that form at all lol.

they weren't the focus, but i also liked the keiko-yukina friendship! they were cute, and also keiko is totally underrated. the girl is tough as nails. i didn't realize it when I first watched the series way back when.

[lorbanery]

Oh interesting!

**Speculation on spoilers below the cut!**

So yeah, the teaser trailers have shown a few things that have raised some questions: The setup is relatively straightforwardly from the anime with Yusuke dying and then being revived to become the Spirit Detective. But later, we not only see shots of Hiei, Kurama, and Yukina, who don't appear until later in the first arc; we see Sakyo and the entirety of Team Toguro, two of whom we don't see until the second arc.

Now this isn't that surprising. Even though they don't actually show up until episode 6, Hiei and Kurama became protagonists in the show and are wildly popular characters. It wouldn't feel like Yu Yu Hakusho without them.

Likewise, even though it's the second of four arcs, the Dark Tournament Arc, where we meet the entirety of Team Toguro and they clash with our protagonists, is undeniably the most popular and well-known arcs of the series. So it makes sense that, with a one-shot movie adaptation, they would want to find a way to include that.

The question was: How are they going to do it?

And the answer seems to be by carefully mixing together ingredients from the first, second, and third arcs.

Koenma's exposition mentions a hole in the barrier between the Human and Demon Worlds, and that it's manmade. The cut to Sakyo and the Toguro Brothers is then meant to lead us to the connection that it was made by Sakyo.

The hole in the barrier being forced open by a human antagonist is the plot of the third arc, the Chapter Black Arc. So it appears that they're just reassigning that supervillain plan to Sakyo, an antagonist from the first and second arcs. Which, honestly? I think that's in character for him. Not for the reasons that the original antagonist had for doing it, but it's highly unlikely that they're using that justification instead of just ... using Sakyo's own canonical Rich Fuckboy Ennui.

Since we know that, like in the anime, the Toguro Brothers are working for Sakyo, we can safely assume that Bui and Karasu, the rest of Team Toguro, are working with them as muscle for Sakyo. They're there to keep Team Urameshi from getting to the hole or Sakyo.

There are still some things that we don't know yet, like how Hiei and Kurama end up meeting and joining up with Yusuke, since it seems that they're largely skipping the early cases from the series where he normally first encounters them. It's unclear, but it seems like they appear either on the way to or at Sakyo's hideout. Which implies that Kurama and Hiei either have some personal investment in stopping Sakyo, or that they are also working for Sakyo at first and then switch sides.

As much as I find the latter a really interesting possibility, I do think it's more likely to be the former. If only because Yukina, Hiei's long lost sister, also makes an appearance in the trailer, but it's still unclear exactly what her role is. In the original series she was part of one of those early Spirit Detective missions, being imprisoned solely to harvest the very valuable gems that form from her tears. Maybe that's still just what's happening and Sakyo's using her to fund his evil plot, but I don't know. It seems likely, though, that Hiei is there to rescue her, which is pretty close to the series.

I'm less sure about Kurama's motivations if that's the case, though. We know that he's kept his backstory about having an ill mother and being desperate to cure her. In the series he stole a wish-granting mirror to do so. I'm not sure what they could have given Sakyo to make him a target for that particular motivation. In fact that setup kind of makes the "he's working for Sakyo" option more plausible since Sakyo is obscenely rich and presumably pays well for talented, powerful muscle who are more than willing and able to kill.

I know a lot of people are probably going to be pissed about all the liberties being taken with the plot and character arcs.

But fuck that, I'm excited. I don't need to see an exact adaptation of the original story, I've already seen that story. Multiple times. I'm perfectly happy to watch a new and interesting take on the story and characters.

Also to finally see the Dragon of the Darkness Flames semi-decently animated for the first time.

Netflix's Yu Yu Hakusho Live Action Final Trailer and Key Art

After a couple of teasers, the final trailer has finally been released by Netlix! It seems there are many changes in the script. Is this series already showing the big final fight of Yusuke VS Toguro? Is there going to be a Dark Tournament Saga in the future? We will all know the answers on December 14!

The action scenes are really amazing, I wanna see Genkai kicking Yusuke's ass 😁

[comicaurora]

Hi Red! I was curious if you've watched the new Yu Yu Hakusho live action, and if so, what your thoughts were on its pacing and handling of various plots. Personally I thought it did some very clever things and it genuinely pleasantly surprised me at a couple points, but at the same time the fact that it's only 5 episodes hurt its ability to do the story justice a bit.

Also I was rewatching the Dark Tournament arc of the anime today and wondering what it must've been like to watch when it originally aired, considering all the multi episode fights. Do you remember any of your thoughts at the time?

On an unrelated note, I'm really excited for arc 2 of Aurora!!!! Also sorry this is so ramble-y

I have watched it! For the most part, I really enjoyed it, although in pursuit of compressing everything down to five episodes it did a couple things I think definitely harmed the overall impact and characterization.

Spoilers below!

The first episode is I think nearly pitch-perfect. The visual design on the Spirit World is top-tier, and the choice to make everything that was a sacred artifact move like ferrofluid was a very clever bit of visual design. It's absolutely weird and original and I think it was a very fun way to spice up Fluffy Cloud Heaven.

Of all the things they sped through, I'm very glad they did not speed through the crucial characterization of Yusuke initially choosing to stay dead on the assumption that everyone is better off without him, and the show subsequently taking its time to show the wake, let Yusuke's mom and Keiko really feel their feelings, etcetera. The adaptation of the wake was, to my memory, almost 100% true to the anime version, including the gut-wrenching moments like Kuwabara starting off angry and then breaking down, and the toddler Yusuke saved not really understanding that he's dead. And I had no complaints about the parts of this arc that they did speed up - a lot of the timeline of the original show is training arcs and Yusuke having to prove himself, and I had almost no problem with them skipping over that. Yusuke not having to do any tasks before coming back to life is A-OK with me.

I also entirely lost my shit at The Dropkick.

And then the last bit of episode 1, where they have to deal with the possessed kid, was absolutely top tier. The way they make demonic possession look and feel in this show is truly horrific, and I loved the way they played it like a one-man zombie apocalypse. The fight choreography was also very impressive and I liked how much they used the environment. Also, letting Kuwabara fight this guy first was a very good way of making the power-scaling clear and establishing that Kuwabara is a fundamentally very decent person willing to punch above his weight class to try and help.

However, this episode did get me excited for something they ended up not doing, which was a bummer. The first thing we see in the show is a Makai insect, which in the anime are the tools of the villains in the Four Saint Beasts arc - at the climax of that storyline, Makai-insect-possessed students and faculty corner Keiko and Botan in the human world while Yusuke fights an increasingly desperate battle against Suzaku to try and stop him. If the full-on body horror zombie thing was what makai insect possession looked like, that scenario immediately seemed like it was going to be butt-clenchingly terrifying.

Of course, they ended up entirely sidestepping the Saint Beasts arc, which is understandable - narratively speaking its only real function is to let the four protagonists team-build after their contentious first meetings. It became clear pretty quickly that with the time they had, it wouldn't be worth it to go there. That said, I think they really could've used a little more team-building time - more on that later.

The first episode also pretty solidly established the tone they'd be taking for the rest of the show - much more dark, almost no comedy. Normally I find those sorts of adaptations pretty dour and joyless, but in this case I thought it helped make the stakes feel solid, and if anything it lined up better with the original premise of "the demon world is a truly horrifying place and its incursion into reality would be an absolute nightmarish apocalypse." I didn't mind that it felt like the stakes were real and the heroes fighting demons was really necessary.

The second episode made it pretty clear where they were going with the series adaptation. While it speeds through the intro of Goki, Kurama and Hiei, it also lets Yusuke's fight with Goki feel - again - extremely well-choreographed and tense. The choreography in this show is consistently very impressive, especially considering how often our heroes have to fight fully CGI bad guys - and this fight doesn't even have any dialogue in it, but it still makes it entirely clear what Yusuke is thinking at every point, which is very impressive, especially since he goes through an entire arc from "I don't need to figure out how to use the Spirit Gun" to "I desperately need the spirit gun to start working right the fuck now". They also handle Kurama's intro very well, making it very clear that he's cunning and kind of inscrutable but not necessarily malicious, and in the scene where Yusuke's tailing him it's pretty clear from the choreography that Kurama knows he's there and is very carefully waiting long enough for him to follow him without feeling like he's being lured, which is entirely in-character, and again a very impressive way to show characterization without any dialogue required. And of course the reveal that Kurama is in fact a Nice Boy who is trying to sacrifice himself to save his mom is real good, and letting Yusuke's past experience with seeing how his mom reacted to his death make him immediately ride or die for Kurama was a very solid bit of characterization - and adding Kuwabara to this subplot where he wasn't originally there helped balance out the characterization a little bit with an entirely justified naysayer pointing out "dude he's a demon maybe don't trust him immediately." It also helps get Kuwabara involved in the main story nice and quick, where he originally is a bit of a late arrival.

The part I was getting a little worried about at this point, and an element of the adaptation that I legitimately think is a detriment, was how they were handling Hiei. A huge part of what makes Hiei fun in the original series is that he is legitimately a huge bastard, and in his introduction is a full-blown bad guy who Yusuke very nearly dies fighting. Classic Hiei kidnapped Keiko and nearly turned her into a demon just to fuck with Yusuke. And what makes their relationship great is the team-building that happens in the Four Saint Beasts arc the adaptation is evidently skipping over, where Hiei is so baffled - and so touched - by Yusuke's completely unearned trust in him that he immediately becomes 100% ride or die for Yusuke and only Yusuke.

He's a vicious little asshole who takes himself very seriously and legitimately has the power to back up his grandstanding 90% of the time, and that's what makes him so fun to watch - those little slivers of characterization where he's goofy or baffled or vulnerable or lets himself be visibly impressed with one of his teammates, mixed with the moments where he's like "okay this has been fun but it's time to die now" and just one-shots the bad guy with another dangerous forbidden technique he picked up for shits and giggles.

So I was getting a little worried that the adaptation wasn't gonna let Hiei be, like. An actual asshole. Because what makes him fun as a character is that he is an asshole, he just also has a handful of sympathetic motivations and nice qualities that he usually doesn't own up to. And I ended up being right about that, which was a bummer, but again, the way they did it was a bit of extremely efficient streamlining. In the anime, Hiei's introduction is just him being a dick for no reason - then everyone has a team-building bonding arc with the Four Saint Beasts, and then Hiei is revealed to have a real heroic motivation hiding somewhere in there: rescuing his secret twin sister Yukina from a nasty human holding her prisoner.

So the adaptation basically just streamlined the entire rest of the show into that arc. Hiei's intro stealing the fancy knife? He's using it to get the Jagan Eye to look for Yukina. Hiei storming this compound full of humans? They're the ones holding Yukina prisoner. It's 100% sympathetic, he's just not willing to own up to that to anybody. Everything he does that's dubiously moral or kind of a dick move? It's actually fine, or he's being framed (like in the shot they perfectly remake from the anime where he kidnaps Keiko, except just kidding it's a shapeshifting bad guy framing him), or Yusuke's the one who attacks him in the first place.

And that's extremely efficient storytelling! It just makes Hiei kind of an antisocial dick and not even slightly a villain, which I think dramatically reduces how fun his character is - it just flattens him into a very standard-issue lancer archetype who refuses to express any sort of emotional or physical vulnerability to anyone, which is a fine character trope, it's just kind of more boring than the dickhead outdoor cat I was hoping for.

The same thing also happens to Genkai, who in the original series has dozens of episodes of screentime to show off how she is the best kind of mentor ever written - a dickhead mentor.

She's rude and snarky and a full-blown asshole, and she and Yusuke have a truly hilarious mentor-stydent dynamic because they're both assholes. And it's not until a good way into the Dark Tournament that we see them in a dynamic that's not just being assholes to each other - when Genkai consolidates all her power into a sporb for Yusuke to absorb, and he spends several episodes nearly dying about it. The fact that Genkai truly cares about him as her student - and the fact that he truly cares about her as his master - only comes out in this subplot, when she honestly believes she's fucked up and killed him and he goes beyond his limits to absorb the power she's given him. It's a beautiful moment of payoff after dozens of episodes of planting, and right after that happens, Genkai is killed.

So when the live-action show introduced Genkai, and after a good solid montage of training and anime-accurate fight scenes and some really good Kuwabara moments, she told Yusuke she had one final technique to give him, I said out loud "oh my god please don't speedrun this." And then they did. She gave Yusuke the sporb and he absorbed it immediately and painlessly, and then they left, and then she immediately gets killed.

My notes on that part were just

So I didn't like that part. Like Hiei, Genkai is such an effective character because her moments of vulnerability and non-assholeness are so rare, and the rest of the time she's an absolute goblin nightmare. Getting rid of that reduces her to another, much flatter trope, and killing her in the same episode she's introduced almost entirely removes the impact of the moment and just makes her another dead mentor. But again, this is episode 3 of 5. This isn't the writer's fault, this is the writers making a very hard decision on what they need to get into the plot if they're planning on speedrunning the entire Dark Tournament arc - which they are. The primary rule they seemed to use when adapting Yu Yu Hakusho is "if the heroes fought this bad guy more than once, no they didn't." So the first fight with the Toguro brothers is going to become the only fight with the Toguro brothers, and they need to speedrun the entire core plot of the Dark Tournament arc within the confines of Toguro's introduction in the Rescue Yukina arc.

And the thing is, hot take? I'm not mad about that. The Dark Tournament is an iconic moment in Shonen anime history, but like. it's a tournament arc. Like all tournament arcs, it goes on a very long time, a lot of it is extremely repetitive, and it eventually arrives at the foregone conclusion end state of "team protagonist vs team final boss". In a five-episode adaptation, you pick the smallest number of good fights with real stakes and you just use those. And that's what they do here. Kurama and Hiei both get little bottle-episode fights with their respective most plot-relevant opponents from the Dark Tournament, and they both get to show off their dangerous forbidden techniques.

And it slaps. It could've used more buildup for maximum punch, but again, five episodes. And frankly in the original they didn't get much buildup either, just "this is a thing I've been working on, hopefully I don't die about it."

And consistently, the fight choreography continues to be really good. The physicality of the actors is very solid and the way CGI attacks and opponents get worked into the choreography is so fluid it's sometimes hard to tell where the CGI ends. And considering the final boss is two full-CGI photorealistic bad guys, I think they do an incredibly good job making the fights feel real and solid.

Characterization-wise, since so much of the final episode is just a lot of fighting against a big damage sponge, there's not a ton of time for talking, but the choreography is, again, a standout. Even outside combat, the secondary characters get a lot of little moments to shine - even Damsel In Distress Du Jour Keiko gets to pull the "oh no, I, your valuable prisoner, am sick, please come into my cell within easy throttling range" trick and breaks herself and Yukina out, which slaps and makes the whole breakout feel like much more of a team effort, and it also lets Keiko and Yukina share some brief but extremely tender moments of characterization that does a lot to make them feel like well-rounded characters. And back in the main fight zone, the characters don't have much dialogue but show where they're at through how they move. Everyone is exhausted and beaten down and has already used their finishing moves, but Yusuke's in trouble, so it's time to scramble back up and tackle the bad guy. It's just such good choreo and such good acting that it makes me forgive a lot of the pacing struggles they're dealing with from boiling everything down to 5 episodes, and without dialogue - just through fight choreography - they manage to make me buy the teamwork dynamic they've thus far failed to establish due to speedrunning past all the stuff that's supposed to help them bond. This is the first part of the show that makes me believe that Hiei has any affection for the gang and any reason to fight alongside them beyond coincidence.

And they continued the trend of hitting all the major plot beats from the stuff they were speedrunning, which led to me counting down the minutes to the Kuwabara Fake-Dies To Motivate Yusuke moment.

The rest of the fight is pretty much just a shot-for-shot adaptation of the final stage of the Toguro bossfight, plus the added fun that it's the first time in the show Yusuke has actually yelled "spirit gun" out loud, which is neat. And it took every second of those five episodes, but in the closing scene they finally reached the group dynamic I was hoping for.

All things considered, given the parameters they had to work in, I think this is the best we could've possibly gotten in only five episodes. I would've probably preferred one where instead of cramming the entire dark tournament into three episodes they just left it alone and just did Rescue Yukina plus maybe the Saint Beasts, but if this is what we were getting, this was a very solid way to do it. I, at least, had an overall very good time, and have been thinking about rewatching it, which is wild since it's only been like three weeks since I watched it the first time. But yea, overall the pacing is wild but I think there was a lot of love and thought put into it, and it really shows.