Jex
Member
[Yu Yu Hakusho: Dark Tournament Arc] - Complete
There's spoilers for the series up to this point present, unmarked, in this review.
This particular arc was thoroughly entertaining helped in no small part by the excellent production values throughout and well established 'villain' of the piece. While I'm not thrilled by Toguro's character design, or some of his later character development he served as a fitting rival and end point. In addition the pacing is surprisingly brisk for an arc of this nature and so they avoid the awful slog that these tournaments can turn into.
My only problem with the Dark Tournament Arc is my problem with the series in general - with this particular event wound up the series has no forward momentum and the characters have no goals. Yusuke started out as a character with a very defined goal (do good deeds and reclaim his body) and then another defined goal (work as a Spiritual Detective and ensure you do good things or else). Unfortunately that just left him as Koenma's muscle, to be deployed wherever he needed something punched in the head. He has as much agency as a GTA character, forever pulled by someone else's strings.
It feels like Togashi radically re-wrote the series as he was going along and it really shows, not just in Yusuke's lack of any goals but in other things as well. For example, Keiko feels like a vestige of a completely different series, she has no reason to exist for much of the show up to this point and she brings nothing to the series. She only made sense in a show grounded in school and in the real world, not a world of demon combat. Then there's the storyline with Sakayo and Shizuru which Togashi appears to have written a start and end for but literally no middle at all. Really bizarre stuff.
All this makes me feel distinctly uneasy about pursuing the rest of the show because I just don't know if it will hold my interest. I do want to see Shinbo's next episode but beyond that I have little motivation to continue. I can only imagine some bigger, badder threat lies in wait. As always.
On Tournaments
I just wanted to drop a few thoughts on Tournament Arcs in general. I know that they generally have a bad reputation and that's not undeserved. Rather than writing a story where characters travel from location to location with some goals and fight bad guys along the way you simply toss out all the work of actually creating a story and just have an endless series of fights in one location. Moreover, in a tournament you know that the main good guys will have to fight the main bad guys in the final round and so every other round should be completely tension free as you know the outcome in advance.
Now there are a number of reasons why The Dark Tournament isn't a boring series of pointless fights against scrubs until the 'main event':
- Firstly, the aforementioned production values really help. While Shinbo's episodes stand head and shoulders above the rest on a whole the fights look pretty decent throughout.
- The pacing is certainly a god send. Each individual round will generally be two episodes at the most and sometimes they'll be far shorter than that.
- Most fights have an interesting and unique gimmick both from the hero character and the opposing fighter. This is important to stop us from getting bored of the action.
- There are things going on besides the main fights e.g. Yusuke's training.
- The tournament is heavily weighed against the heroes. In other words, the tournament is actively trying to screw the main heroes. I know people can find this plot device annoying but it is extremely useful. Most people have a clear sense of what is just and unjust so when the heroes are treated unfairly it makes the audience more sympathetic to their cause. In addition it's another source of tension.
- The composition of the hero team varies wildly depending on their circumstances. Sometimes they'll fight as 5 against 5, other times they'll only have 3 or less available to bring to the fight because of outside reasons. This adds more tension to each individual round.
- For the most part, the fights are tense. You actually don't know for sure which members of the hero team will triumph over which competitor because many fights are fairly close. Crucially, sometimes the heroes will lose a round so you can't be sure they'll just streamroll the whole thing. Theoretically some of them could even die although considering the nature of this show I always considered that impossible.
- The characterisation of the other fighters is surprisingly robust. Considering how little time some of them get I feel they all look and feel sufficiently different from each other to make them stand out as defined characters who could theoretically exist outside this structure.
- With regards to the last two points, Gundam Build Fighters Try could really learn a thing or three from YYH. Every single fight feels like our main team vs faceless goods who we know they're eventually going to be beat with some kind of super-robot move. The opponents feel flat and boring. Heck, you just need to go back to Gundam Build Fighters to see a near-perfect representation of a classic tournament arc.
That show did it even better than Yu Yu Hakusho because a number of the main fighters in that tournament were present in that show way before the tournament even began and so the cast had a real chance to develop relationships with each other before they got down to the main battle arc. This really added weights to fights against known rivals such as Ricardo Fellini. That show also had lots of weird, crazy gimmick fights to keep things interesting AND comedy stuff on the side AND great pacing. It was a real refinement of the essence of the tournament arc.
There's spoilers for the series up to this point present, unmarked, in this review.
Wrapping up the Dark Tournament Arc on this series has left me with decidedly mixed feelings, both on the show itself and the 'trope' of Tournament Arcs in general.
This particular arc was thoroughly entertaining helped in no small part by the excellent production values throughout and well established 'villain' of the piece. While I'm not thrilled by Toguro's character design, or some of his later character development he served as a fitting rival and end point. In addition the pacing is surprisingly brisk for an arc of this nature and so they avoid the awful slog that these tournaments can turn into.
My only problem with the Dark Tournament Arc is my problem with the series in general - with this particular event wound up the series has no forward momentum and the characters have no goals. Yusuke started out as a character with a very defined goal (do good deeds and reclaim his body) and then another defined goal (work as a Spiritual Detective and ensure you do good things or else). Unfortunately that just left him as Koenma's muscle, to be deployed wherever he needed something punched in the head. He has as much agency as a GTA character, forever pulled by someone else's strings.
It feels like Togashi radically re-wrote the series as he was going along and it really shows, not just in Yusuke's lack of any goals but in other things as well. For example, Keiko feels like a vestige of a completely different series, she has no reason to exist for much of the show up to this point and she brings nothing to the series. She only made sense in a show grounded in school and in the real world, not a world of demon combat. Then there's the storyline with Sakayo and Shizuru which Togashi appears to have written a start and end for but literally no middle at all. Really bizarre stuff.
All this makes me feel distinctly uneasy about pursuing the rest of the show because I just don't know if it will hold my interest. I do want to see Shinbo's next episode but beyond that I have little motivation to continue. I can only imagine some bigger, badder threat lies in wait. As always.
On Tournaments
I just wanted to drop a few thoughts on Tournament Arcs in general. I know that they generally have a bad reputation and that's not undeserved. Rather than writing a story where characters travel from location to location with some goals and fight bad guys along the way you simply toss out all the work of actually creating a story and just have an endless series of fights in one location. Moreover, in a tournament you know that the main good guys will have to fight the main bad guys in the final round and so every other round should be completely tension free as you know the outcome in advance.
Now there are a number of reasons why The Dark Tournament isn't a boring series of pointless fights against scrubs until the 'main event':
- Firstly, the aforementioned production values really help. While Shinbo's episodes stand head and shoulders above the rest on a whole the fights look pretty decent throughout.
- The pacing is certainly a god send. Each individual round will generally be two episodes at the most and sometimes they'll be far shorter than that.
- Most fights have an interesting and unique gimmick both from the hero character and the opposing fighter. This is important to stop us from getting bored of the action.
- There are things going on besides the main fights e.g. Yusuke's training.
- The tournament is heavily weighed against the heroes. In other words, the tournament is actively trying to screw the main heroes. I know people can find this plot device annoying but it is extremely useful. Most people have a clear sense of what is just and unjust so when the heroes are treated unfairly it makes the audience more sympathetic to their cause. In addition it's another source of tension.
- The composition of the hero team varies wildly depending on their circumstances. Sometimes they'll fight as 5 against 5, other times they'll only have 3 or less available to bring to the fight because of outside reasons. This adds more tension to each individual round.
- For the most part, the fights are tense. You actually don't know for sure which members of the hero team will triumph over which competitor because many fights are fairly close. Crucially, sometimes the heroes will lose a round so you can't be sure they'll just streamroll the whole thing. Theoretically some of them could even die although considering the nature of this show I always considered that impossible.
- The characterisation of the other fighters is surprisingly robust. Considering how little time some of them get I feel they all look and feel sufficiently different from each other to make them stand out as defined characters who could theoretically exist outside this structure.
- With regards to the last two points, Gundam Build Fighters Try could really learn a thing or three from YYH. Every single fight feels like our main team vs faceless goods who we know they're eventually going to be beat with some kind of super-robot move. The opponents feel flat and boring. Heck, you just need to go back to Gundam Build Fighters to see a near-perfect representation of a classic tournament arc.
That show did it even better than Yu Yu Hakusho because a number of the main fighters in that tournament were present in that show way before the tournament even began and so the cast had a real chance to develop relationships with each other before they got down to the main battle arc. This really added weights to fights against known rivals such as Ricardo Fellini. That show also had lots of weird, crazy gimmick fights to keep things interesting AND comedy stuff on the side AND great pacing. It was a real refinement of the essence of the tournament arc.
