Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Yu Yu Hakusho: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie 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.

Yu Yu Hakusho: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For an older series, Yu Yu Hakusho looks surprisingly spry on Blu-ray, courtesy of an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. The best thing about the series is the often extremely vivid color palette, which is reproduced here with excellent saturation and at times really eye popping vivacity. Line detail is for the most part quite good as well, This second season has a couple of anomalies which weren't quite as much in evidence in the first season, for whatever reason. First of all there are quite a few frame to frame alignment issues, creating slight shifts that are nonetheless pretty noticeable. There is also fleeting aliasing and something akin to motion judder as the camera moves across the individual cels, something that really didn't crop up that much in the first season's Blu-ray. These may sound alarming, but they're relatively minor issues and really only crop up for seconds over the course of over 600 minutes of programming, so don't let it dissuade you if you're interested in the series.

Yu Yu Hakusho: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Yu Yu Hakusho features two lossless audio options, the original Japanese language track in a Dolby TrueHD 2.0 mix, and a rather good English dub offered in Dolby TrueHD 5.1. The original language track is presented with excellent fidelity and a rather surprisingly robust low end (with some good LFE), despite its narrowness. I opted for the English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track, which features some kind of goofy voice work at times, but which also offers some nicely immersive surround placement of a lot of fanciful sound effects, as well as a perhaps better representation of the show's nice underscore and songs. Fidelity on the 5.1 track is also very good, with abundant low end and quite a bit of oomph in the utilization of LFE.

Yu Yu Hakusho: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Textless Opening Song - Smile Bomb (HD; 1:29)
• Textless Closing Song - Sayonara Bye Bye (HD; 1:26)
• Trailers for other FUNimation Releases

Yu Yu Hakusho: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's hard to take Yu Yu Hakusho too much to task, for it really doesn't aim to be much more than what it is. If the endless battles get to be repetitive, that's part and parcel of what this series has to offer, for better or worse. What keeps the show afloat is some rather interesting characters, as well as a kind of goofy sense of humor that pops up frequently in relatively unexpected places. While the premise of the show has never really been fully realized, at least after the really fascinating opening episodes, within the very narrow confines of what Yu Yu Hakusho attempts to offer, this is by all accounts a successful action anime that should delight most lovers of the shonen genre. Despite a few niggling complaints about the image quality on this second season, overall the show is still Recommended.