The old meets the new.
Yu-Yu Hakusho’s third season showcases four discs of fists, demons, and silly ogre henchmen. But its simple packaging really understates the amount of action crammed into this series. It’s a thin box with two slim DVD cases, each housing two of the four DVDs. On the box covers you have various images of Hiei, fans’ favorite hateful midget. On the back is a lengthy summation of the series season and some screenshots were tacked on at the bottom, almost as an afterthought. Each cover of the DVD cases sports the spirit detectives in varied poses with their current opposing bad guys (Toguro and Sensui) for those batches of episodes. They also have reverse sides to see through the clear casing, which is just line art of the boys looking battle-weary and cool. The menus remain simple, with either artwork of Kuwabara (the first two discs) or Koenma (the last two discs) on each menu slide, accompanied by moody background music to fit the overall series theme of the season. The English voice cast is as good as the Japanese voice cast, and the sound quality is undiminished. If you’ve bought any of the previously released uncut 2-disc sets of the series, you’ll notice nothing has changed. The boxed set is the exact same discs as those earlier sets, but now compiled by season rather than in large chunks. Ironically, though, the boxed set is cheaper than the retail price of the earlier 2-disc sets and more space saving because of the slim boxes.
There’s a lot, and also a little.
While each of the four discs in this set has extra content, it’s less than what you might expect. On the first disc you only have trailers. The second disc has trailers, textless opening and ending songs, and character profiles of the current characters seen in the episodes (which comes in handy for such large casts and for catching up). This pattern repeats with the third and fourth discs. As for the trailers, they’re actually sparse for each disc, only having three or four titles such as DBZ, Moon Phase, Case Closed, etc. But, honestly, when you’ve for thirteen episodes of high-action and story related episodes of anime per case, the extras don’t come to mind much. And, as I said earlier, these are likely the same trailers you’ve seen in past discs, so you won’t miss much. The best features are the two lengthy character profiles.
No punches pulled here.
Yu-Yu Haksuho has been one of the finest examples of shonen anime since the mid-90’s. You take a group of boys with limitless potential, throw them into the fire, and watch them fight their way out. It’s an age-old formula, but it shines bright for this series because along with heavy action, there’s also a large amount of story content to absorb about each character and, ultimately, Yusuke’s progression through these growing years of his life. Fans of the series will be overjoyed with season three as everything is building up in both action and the story. But another key point of the series is that newcomers to it will also have little trouble jumping in, once they get a handle on who everyone is (see why the character profiles are useful). It’s a series that will stand the test of time and popularity in the eyes of anime fans, and it’s certainly a must-have for any collection.