Hello and welcome, this is a comparison of YuYu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter, two manga turned into anime by author Yoshihiro Togashi. If you have not read either of these manga or watched any of the involved anime, I highly recommend you do, at least watch the YuYu Hakusho anime and the Hunter X Hunter 2011 adaptation.
It's very rare that I like multiple series that are made by the same person or lead mind. While there are many people whose works are just not my thing no matter what they make, generally I will like one work by a given person but not their others.
I like Fullmetal Alchemist but the rest of Hiromu Arakawa's works are pretty garbage. I like Rurouni Kenshin, and the remake is certainly good, but the rest of Nobuhiro Watsuki's works are uninteresting to me. Eiichiro Oda, after leaving the team that made Rurouni Kenshin, has only so far ever made One Piece and it's too early to tell if any later works will be any good. And while I do like Bleach, I have not read Tite Kubo's first series, Zombie Powder, which I think I might give a try eventually just to see how it holds up, though the fact that it was discontinued is unsettling.
Togashi, however, is a bit of an interesting case. YuYu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter are two very different series from the same mind that came back to back and while I only got into Hunter X Hunter recently, everything about it so far is quality.
That said though, before this goes any further, I want to stress that, because I'm not particularly far into Hunter X Hunter yet, I'm only going to be comparing the first seasons of each respective series, since it's only fair that I do so. I may bring up later arcs in YuYu Hakusho but only if doing so is relevant to a character comparison that takes place in the first season of Hunter X Hunter, which may happen quite a bit, given that HXH came after YuYu Hakusho.
The star of YuYu Hakusho is the young adolescent Yusuke Yurameshi, a delinquent clad in green that dies and goes on a quest to get his life back after finding out that his death was not something that was supposed to happen. Now, here's where things get interesting because the first arc in the manga is quite different from the first season of the anime. The first arc of the manga has Yusuke going around helping various other characters, dead and alive, overcome some of the problems that they have while trying to earn karma that he can use to spark his body back to life.
In the anime, this only lasts for about two DVD's before Yusuke is revived and becomes the Spirit Detective. Bearing in mind two dvd's for YuYu Hakusho is still around 7 episodes and that is quite slow but, in comparison to the manga, it actually gets to the spirit detective stuff quite fast, at the cost of one character in particular.
In the manga there's a little girl who's been dead for a long time who's also been kidnapping the souls of children so she can have someone to spend time with. Yusuke sets her straight and she becomes his little puppy until she's ready to move on to her afterlife.
In the anime, they retain this girl's same character design but instead her personality and role have been shifted to helping Botan out with her work because she doesn't trust Yusuke to be a good person once he gets his life back.
I honestly felt this change detracted from the experience because, when I first watched the anime, I thought that girl was completely pointless. However, after reading the manga, I not only felt she was pointless, but I also felt that rewriting her character just to keep the character design was completely unnecessary. If you're going to make an adaptation and change or remove most of the beginning, don't rewrite an entire character just because you think they're important, especially when removing their original arc removes their importance.
Even with the cutting down of the slower parts, though, the entire first season suffers from two major problems: the first is that it's still slow as hell. Even for a lot of anime that have slow beginnings, like Stein's;Gate, once they get the ball rolling, they really get it rolling. YuYu Hakusho, however, gets the ball rolling earlier than other shows do but, once the ball gets rolling, it takes an eternity to get to a good speed, so much so that when I go and rewatch the series in my adulthood, I just skip the entire first season because I find it just detracts from my overall opinion of the series and in its current state, with the exception of the Rescue Yukina arc (because that's the catalyst for the Dark Tournament), skipping the first season and going straight to the second is largely painless because of it.
Hunter X Hunter largely solves this problem by having every episode filled with something that impacts the journey. Sure there are times where there's downtime, like for example, when the group of Gon, Killua, Kurapika, Leorio, and Tonpa are stuck in a room for fifty hours because of a gambling match (no, that's not a spoiler, because that's not enough context for you to tell when or how it takes place), it feels much more like downtime needed to just play around and have fun because all the episodes leading up to it had so much going on.
What Hunter X Hunter does well, in comparison to not only YuYu Hakusho but also other shonen anime in general, is that its entire first season sets the tone fast and sticks to that tone for a good majority of its run time, and it never feels stale. This is helped by the fact that a large portion of problems are solved in ways that, if you or I were to attempt them, we'd never think of these solutions before someone else points them out to us first.
One of the strongest aspects of Hunter X Hunter is that it takes tropes that are commonplace in its genre like exams, tournaments, and action, and breathes new life into them with ingenuity and creativity. I'll talk more about that as I go on, though, because I want to get to YuYu Hakusho's other problem, which is a bit more egregious.
The other problem YuYu Hakusho's first season has is that, most of the fights, are not won or lost based on a character's skill or ingenuity. Sure, Kuwabara's fights are usually lost because he's not good enough, and Kurama almost universally wins or loses based on things that are within his control but, outside of them, the only character that really seems to deserve every win he gets is Hiei.
This is particularly problematic with Yusuke because, for most of the first season, he wins his fights based on dumb luck or coincidence. In the entire first season, the only times where that's not the case are the Rescue Yukina Arc, where they fight mostly mooks, and Maze Castle, which is just the most spotless arc of the first season.
Yusuke only survives his first fight with Goki because the cops showed up, he never actually fights Kurama, he only beat Hiei because of Hiei's hubris, he beats Kibano because Genkai threw a cigarette into the arena, he beats Kazamaru by tripping and forcing Kazamaru to blow himself up, and he only beats Rando because he had gunk in his ears that also happened to be the weakness of the spell that Rando wanted to kill Yusuke with. Notice how most of that is within the Genkai Tournament. This was also my biggest problem with One Piece up until the CP9 arc, namely that so many of the characters were useless to the point that the crew didn't really deserve any of the wins they had acquired, except for maybe a handful.
Now, while it is true that Gon usually survives against most opponents, he still ends up winning or losing based on his own skill and power. Gon is not usually protected by Plot Armor to the same degree that Yusuke is in the first season, which makes the whole ride a lot more enjoyable.
In the first season alone, Gon either won because of his ingenuity and creativity, he managed to outwit or outclass an opponent, or when he loses or feels like he should've lost, he survives or keeps whatever trophy he wins because of his opponent's pity. I want to cite two particular examples that both take place within the same 3-5 episode span. The first is when Gon gets a hold of Hisoka's badge when Hisoka goes in to kill someone. One of the applicants poisons Gon right as he goes in for the badge, which would've rendered the victory pointless. However, as it turned out, the guy that was hunting Gon was also Hisoka's target. And, since Hisoka had already acquired three other badges and had 6 points already, he didn't need his own badge anymore, so he let Gon keep it as a reward for his patience and diligence. And when Gon decided to combat him on that, Hisoka punches him right in the face and basically tells him "I'll take my badge back when you're strong enough that you're worthy of killing."
The other example happens a few episodes later where Gon fights Hanzo. Hanzo completely outclasses Gon so much so that Gon could've ended up dead if it weren't for Hanzo taking pity on him. Hanzo surrendered and Gon became a Hunter.
These examples are in stark contrast to how Yusuke usually gets by. Whereas Yusuke got by on dumb luck, Gon got by on pity but, in the end, the difference is how the story frames these occurrences. In YuYu Hakusho, the story and characters frame Yusuke's luck as a positive when, in reality, it's only a positive to the degree that it is because of sheer incompetence. In Hunter X Hunter, Gon only gets praised when he actually has a victory or positive experience, and while his defeats are never played as "Gon is trash" in any way, they're not glorified either, the narrator just comments on it by saying that we'll have to wait and see what happens should Gon run into something like that again.
One other thing that Hunter X Hunter does really well that YuYu Hakusho admittedly can't be faulted for is taking outcomes that are obvious, such as characters passing an exam phase, and instead covering up how they got to their victory and scrambling it so that, while the destination may be obvious, the journey is much more rewarding because you get to see how it plays out in a satisfying way.
This has to do with how the two series were built. YuYu Hakusho was designed to be a standard Shounen Manga and, at the time, the only other popular Shounen Manga were Dragon Ball, Fist of the North Star, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Rurouni Kenshin.
Hunter X Hunter, however, was designed to take tired tropes and make them enjoyable again rather than try to come up with new tropes, which is honestly a better solution. If you make a new trope, eventually it will get so played out that everyone will grow tired of it fast. However, if you take a familiar trope and use it in a new way, you don't start any trends, but you maintain the novelty, so it never gets stale unless someone is intentionally ripping it off.
So now that we've got the formula, I want to talk about the different characters and how each of them is handled. Each series has a total of around 4 main characters that the series follows most often, though only two are actually seen in the first episode in the case of YuYu Hakusho but I'm getting ahead of myself.
So I already talked about Yusuke. Next is Kuwabara.
Kazuma Kuwabara is a rival thug to Yusuke that constantly gets his ass kicked but, he has a sweet side, and a very strong sense of honor. Gifted with the power to detect spirits and ghosts intuitively, he initially goes to Genkai's Temple to get rid of it and finds himself with the ability to channel his spirit energy into a sword.
Next up is Kurama, the human bodied demon that contains the nine-tails that was attacked by the Spirit world and inhabited the body of a fetus in order to heal itself. Known as Shuichi, this human with a demon's soul now simply wishes for his mother to be happy.
And last but not least is Hiei. Hiei is the short demon swordsman noted most for his sheer attack and movement speed and his third eye, known as the Jagan. The Jagan grants Hiei many abilities, such as mind reading, transformation, telepathy, and fire control, but even without it, Hiei is the member of Team Yurameshi who most consistently wins his fights.
Now for Hunter X Hunter.
Gon is a young 12 year old boy who wants to be a Hunter so that he can meet his dad. He wants to find out why being a Hunter was so important that he would abandon his child and, in doing so, Gon now wants to see just what his father is really like.
Next is Leorio, the man who, spoiler warning, is much younger than he actually looks, who wants to become a hunter so he can use the massive amounts of money to pay his way through medical school so that he can save lives. His original motivation was to save a sick friend and give free operations to spite the doctors who wanted payment, only to find out that life's not so easy.
Next we have Kurapika, the sole surviving member of the Kurta Clan. His clan was hunted by a band of thieves known as the Phantom Troupe, for their exotic eyes, which become a bright vivid scarlet color during bouts of great emotion. Now fueled by rage, Kurapika wishes to avenge those that died during the raid and get back the eyes that were stolen.
And finally we have Killua, a young, white haired assassin whose only desire is to be friends with Gon. Not really much more to say since most of Killua's past is not actually found out until after the Hunter Exam ends.
Now, first I'm going to take some time to highlight the similarities between these characters and then their differences because I feel like those that have seen both draw a lot of conclusions about the character's influences based on these few similarities, when in fact more differences appear than not.
First we have Gon and Yusuke. Both are the protagonist, both are predominantly green, and both are hired to do a job that very few others can. Got it? Good, next.
Kuwabara and Leorio are both widely considered to be the most compassionate ones on their teams, as well as the weakest.
Kurama and Kurapika are both geniuses who were hunted by some elite group and are now friends with the heroes.
And finally Hiei and Killua, both are skilled, high speed warriors, who have mysterious origins in their respective first seasons.
If these similarities sound superficial, that's because they are. When you look at things in a general sense, often the details get lost, at least to some extent, and because of that, many who lose sight of those details will often misunderstand them on some level.
Gon is a green clad hero, yes, but he's also a lot more innocent, a lot kinder and more trusting to those around him, and he also has an easier time making friends. Yusuke, up until the end of the spirit detective saga, pretty much just had Keiko.
Kuwabara and Leorio are both considered to be the weakest of their groups, however, that's not entirely the case. While it is true that Kuwabara was easily the weakest one throughout the series, and Killua and Kurapika are hard to hold a candle to, Leorio has never been seen in an actual fight and, though I'm mainly talking about the first seasons, that doesn't seem to change throughout the series, so Leorio's actual combat ability is largely unknown.
Kurapika and Kurama were both hunted by an elite force but the nature of that force and their intent are completely different. Kurama was hunted by Spirit World's Elite Demon killers and overwhelmed by them. While Kurama is a main character and is never painted as a bad person, he was never shown to be in the right either. Those demon hunters were not painted as evil or antagonistic, they were just doing their job. Kurama ends up as more of a redeemed hero as a result. Kurapika, however, had his entire clan murdered by a band of thieves for their unique eyes. While Kurapika is painted as just as special as Kurama, Hunter X Hunter never makes the engagement so ambiguous: Kurapika is clearly the victim, or at least one of them, and the Phantom Troupe are clearly the bad guys; even if they were doing their jobs, they are thieves nonetheless, so you could argue that they'd be bad regardless.
Finally, Killua and Hiei are both portrayed as incredibly skilled and tiny, but these are for different reasons. Killua is around Gon's age, so it makes sense that he'd be on the short side, especially considering he probably hasn't hit puberty. Nonetheless, Killua's skill comes from his training as part of an assassin family. Hiei, on the other hand, shows that he has quite a bit of unique ability bestowed upon him by his Jagan but his defeat of Seiryu makes it clear that he has experience wielding a sword, at least enough that he has one of his own design, even if we're not certain as to why or how. Killua is also a lot more playful than Hiei ever was. For as sarcastic as Hiei could be at times, it was always played straight and he was always the most serious of the group, never one to participate in jokes unless it was to make fun of Kuwabara. Killua, on the other hand, is much more energetic and playful, which could be seen as a good and bad thing. On the one hand, he's twelve, so you could argue that he has the right to be as playful as he is. On the other hand, he's been trained as an assassin and even used to do it professionally, he says as much himself. You'd think that a trained killer would be a lot more stoic and in control of their emotions, even if they're children.
And that's where we get to the contrasting argument. Namely, that a character that's based on another could have certain aspects of their design become the opposite trait to disassociate them from their inspiration.
Is Yusuke a delinquent? Make Gon innocent. Is Kuwabara a melee fighter? Make Leorio an Emitter. Is Kurama too much of a hero? Make Kurapika angrier and more tragic. Is Hiei too serious? Make Killua more like Botan.
That last one in particular seems to be a pretty valid argument. Namely that, Killua's powerset and experience make him relatively comparable to Hiei but his occasional cat-features, and playful attitude even in relation to death are much more similar to Botan, who not only had those same cat-features, but is also the grim reaper. What's also worth mentioning is that Hiei and Botan had a semi-close playful antagonistic relationship, particularly during the dark tournament in matters involving Yukina, which only adds to this issue.
In everything else, though, that's not the entire story. In fact, in a lot of cases, it would seem that Hunter X Hunter characters are actually mixtures of more than one YuYu Hakusho character in a number of ways. We already discussed Killua, so let's work backward from here and talk about Kurapika.
Kurapika does have a lot of Kurama's mannerisms. But he also has some notable traits that make him a bit more like Hiei. Kurapika has a family that was separated from him, like Hiei, he has bokken nunchaku, which could be seen as some amalgamation of Hiei's sword and Kurama's Rose Whip, he has Hiei's tendency to be serious or angry in most situations, and Kurapika also has red eyes, though in his case it's much more contextual, whereas Hiei's eyes were red by default.
Leorio is as compassionate as Kuwabara in a lot of ways, and his desire to become a doctor also is in line with how Kuwabara finishes his arc in the series, but the way he treats other characters and behaves in a lot of situations is a lot more like Yusuke. Now, to be fair, since both of them were street thugs, the difference may be a bit blurry in some situations. However, if Yusuke were taking the Hunter Exam, he's much more likely to make some of the decisions Leorio did than Kuwabara. Also worth mentioning, Leorio is openly hostile to everyone in the first episode. Kuwabara was always painted as tough but never hostile unless someone antagonized him first, this evident when he attacks Yusuke for beating him up in a previous encounter.
Gon takes some of Yusuke's color palette and physical abilities but has some of Botan's playfulness, and Rinku's innocence put onto him so that he can differentiate him. Gon can be as honest as Yusuke in some cases but he's never as openly hostile unless it's over a matter of principle, like with Illumi and his treatment of Killua.
And finally, Hisoka has some physical traits of Suzuki, at least the clown aesthetic but his personality is much more inline with the elder Toguro brother. Suzuki could be just as knowledgeable on things as Hisoka but never quite as sadistic. In fact, you could argue that Hisoka's abilities are an amalgamation of the two. His Texture Surprise is surprisingly similar to the Onji disguise he took during the Dark Tournament, and his Bungee Gum behaves very similarly to Toguro's body in general.
In fact, we don't even have to stop at characters. The first season of Hunter X Hunter, namely the Hunter Exam Arc, seems to be an amalgamation of the Spirit Detective Saga and the Dark Tournament Arc, offering the variety of the former but the overarching goal and pacing of the latter.
That may just be Hunter X Hunter's design philosophy in general: innovate by taking old ideas and combining them to make something new. Some things are not that clear cut, though. Some things may just be rip-offs from YuYu Hakusho to save time on characterization or design, like Hanzo, for example, is a complete rip of Kazamaru both in terms of design and their occupations as Shinobi. However, other things don't have a direct comparison. Illumi is probably the biggest example: design-wise, he doesn't look like anyone I recognize in YuYu Hakusho, his demeanor and affiliation with Hisoka could bring him closer to Karasu or to Shishiwakamaru, given that Illumi lasts as long as the latter but has more characteristics of the former, and nobody in YuYu Hakusho I can remember manipulated anything comparable to the needles that Illumi uses.
Netero might be comparable to Genkai or he might just be an old man. Even with the rules I've stated, none of the comparisons I've listed are one-to-one transplants and that's perfectly fine. While I do enjoy YuYu Hakusho as a series, if Yoshihiro Togashi made Hunter X Hunter just YuYu Hakusho with a new coat of paint, you could justifiably wonder what the point of making it would be.
That's all I've got to say. I'm making some quick progress on Hunter X Hunter so, if I ever revisit this topic, it will be to pick up by comparing the remaining seasons of each respective series.
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