☆ Rereading Yu Yu Hakusho - Three Kings Saga - Part 2 ☆

5/10/2025

With an absurd amount of simplicity and within three chapters of the tournament starting, Yusuke has seemingly solved the demon world's problems to basically universal agreement. Not to harp on the exact point again, but it's too easy. This war has lasted for hundreds of years, and basically everyone in the demon realm has agreed to choose a ruler by combat? Wasn't the power struggle before basically the same thing? The pacing of this at this point is in line with early episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged.

There is one volume left. It's not all devoid of humor, charm, or character at this point, either. Things jump ahead slightly to after the tournament, which is quickly recapped by Yusuke. It's nice to be back on our home turf for the very end. It seems like everything worked out in the demon world, and I think the way it resolves is the way it may have been planned before Togashi's exit. A humble demon laying out a "common sense" rule for demon society is, again, very simplistic, but it's the kind of twist Yu Yu Hakusho can pull off.

The Big Twist

In that same chapter comes what I consider the biggest twist in the entire series. Kurama reveals that King Yama has been forging the data on demon criminal activity. He has also been brainwashing demons to commit actual crimes that pump up the statistics. All of this to justify the existence of the Underworld power structure keeping the realms apart. Holy shit. Where do you even start with this?

This is beyond a twist. This is a huge part of the fundamental premise of the series being completely upended! And it keeps going! Demons were frequently accosted by humans into doing bad deeds, according to Kurama! Was Sensui justified in some way...? Well, probably not, but holy cow! I just wish the series had a little more time, because this is CRAZY! A huge transition is going to occur with demons and humans living side-by-side. Yusuke even laments his role in the criminalizing of demons. It's amazing, it's interesting, annnd...well, that's about it. I have to confess, even imagining YYH going on for another full year or two, surely this was the intended ending. That is to say, I don't know if there was ever a "Transition Arc" (haha) where the logistics of the realms merging were an extended part of the story.

That said, just like everything else that happens as the series closes, it's awfully convenient, easy, and chill. Maybe it says something that the demons weren't really all bad all along and that the divide was artificially induced by basically a corrupt police force? Or at least one corrupt leader? The only real change that's noted about all this is that everyone still likes Koenma Jr. Yeah. It's a shame.

Well, regardless, Yusuke crossdresses and Keiko takes him on a sort of last hurrah for the Spirit Detective part of the series. It's touching to see it revisited. As we learned way back in part one, the transition from those "feel-good" stories to a fighting manga was intentional and planned. It still reads warmly to me to see it acknowledged and brought back one more time.

That chapter also plainly states what we've been learning in almost every arc of the series. Humans can be as bad as demons. In the comedic end panel, Togashi's editor reminds him that Yusuke is part demon. It's a gag, but I can't help but feel validated that it really doesn't fit the character at all. As it reads in the manga, it pretty much didn't matter. There was no big confrontation against the underworld, or Yusuke going rogue. It was an unnecessary justification for Yusuke's strength and only used as an excuse to involve him in the demon world plot at this arc's outset.

There's another big story bit with huge potential here, and that's the momentary return of Yusuke's human father! Just like with the human/demon merger, I have to imagine that it was the intent that this wouldn't exist in the story for an extended period of time. This is a scene that leaves me longing because it's kinda good. It's still maybe too quick considering everything else that's going on and tossed around, but for the most part, I think it works.

Last Mission

Enki (the funny lil dude who is ruling the demon realm now) calls up Yusuke, and the gang get to go on one last operation. Religious terrorists(!) have taken over the gate to the Underworld, and are threatening to blow up a major city with a big laser cannon.

While it's impossible not to smile at moments like this, this insanely dramatic scenario begins and ends in this one penultimate chapter. One thing I want to point out is that I swear the terrorist leader, I swear, looks just like the former captain of the Special Defense Force. I had a hard time telling it was him, but apparently it is. It fits his character, but I would have loved some elaboration on this in the manga. Apparently, the adaptation in the 2018 OVA adds this.

It's a fun, though ultra-compressed, adventure. Much like with the explicit Spirit Detective chapter, I'm very happy to see this brought back for that last hurrah. It just weirdly ends with what now feels tired and played out, a Yusuke death fakeout. And it's over pushing the right button on a console to disarm the cannon. This doesn't feel right at all. I get what we're going for. Yusuke is the type of person who would be presented with this choice and sort of blindly pick a button while thinking of Keiko. The idea itself is nice. It's just...he's pushing a button; the physical action doesn't match up with the dramatic weight. It's Yusuke's character in a tiny nutshell, if this is the end of the series, it should be one huge nut to crack.

In the final chapter, Genkai is very casually mentioned as having passed away, and then everyone convenes to read her will. Again, it feels to me she really should have just stayed dead. It's a sweet reason to bring everyone together, but it feels surprisingly distant for a character that was just telepathically grilling Yusuke over the button. We knew she was old, but she just fell over one day? This is the kind of thing that I think wouldn't have been the case had we the time. In the anime TV series, she apparently just doesn't die and still gives everyone the house and land. Works for me!

Yusuke and Keiko have a genuinely beautiful moment in the sunset together. And...that's it. All's well that ends well. I'm anyone reading this knows the famous photo that falls off the table.

It's a miracle that the ending has as much to enjoy as it does, considering the circumstances of Togashi's health and Jump editorial. Let's hear from him again in the "exit interview."

"It saddens me to say this, but I had explored every possible direction for the YYH characters that I could in the context of a professional publication. All I could do at this point was to start deconstructing the characters, or go on repeating the same storylines over and over until the readers got bored. My attempts to deconstruct the characters were, of course, turned down by Jump. I didn't have the strength, physically and mentally, to keep doing the same thing over and over."

So I went ahead and did what I had always wanted to do: “If I ever manage to have a long serialization in Jump, I will end it on my own terms.” I knew that Jump dropped a manga after 10 weeks if the readers' surveys proved it to be unpopular, and I knew this when I started working for them. This system proved encouraging for me, and I learned a lot by being aware of readers' reactions. But I ended up wanting to draw manga for myself, without thinking about anyone's reactions. I don't believe that anything I came up with on this premise will live up to Jump's standards, so I will not try.

Hints of this deconstruction approach are everywhere. We just went over half of them. But even if Jump had agreed to it, it's hard to imagine that Togashi's health wouldn't have caught up with him at some point. It's possible that YYH would have been put on the same kind of production that Hunter X Hunter found itself in. In my mind, Yu Yu Hakusho was always going to crash out. I'll say again that destroying yourself isn't worth it, even for something you're passionate about, for something with a fanbase.

Taking the series as something you read with little outside knowledge, I think it's fair to say it does start falling apart exactly where Togashi said it does. It's tragic. Because the first half (or so) of the manga fucking rocks. There's so much promise, flair, and character in the back half as well. The TV series, to my knowledge, does extend certain things and let others play out differently. It's just a shame Togashi's original version became so disjointed and strange to read. For a manga that began with a well-planned genre transition, I can't help but wonder what could have been. That list could go on and on, but it'd be pointless fangirling on my part.

We can talk about what is there, though. For a character he supposedly didn't like, the ending chapters give a spotlight to Keiko that hadn't been seen since the very beginning. Her initial breakup with Yusuke as the arc begins is one of my favorite moments in the series. There is a warm, "post-game" kind of feeling to everything after the tournament, something that not every series gets.

On the Three Kings tournament itself, I have almost nothing positive to say. If that's the "same stories forever" approach that Togashi was trying not to do, well, perhaps it's better to have sped past it. The new characters are largely uninteresting. The time allotted for the story absolutely does not allow for the scale it wants to have. It's kinda nice to see Chu and company again, but it's all gone in a flash.

When I read Yu Yu Hakusho in its entirety for the first time in 2015, with stories past the Dark Tournament new to me, the flaws weren't so apparent. I was still taken aback by the speed of the conclusion and Three Kings. Re-reading it recently, a feeling of dread came over as the pace ramped up higher and higher. The lesser-used characters, the hinted-at plot points that stayed hints. Identifying these is what ultimately got me inspired to write this retrospective.

Yu Yu Hakusho will always hold a special place in my heart. The ultimate fate of the manga is somewhat tragic to me, but Togashi did the right thing by letting it go. The ramifications for the story, and watching that unfold, are a bit compelling in their own right. The first half, of course, is classic manga, top-to-bottom. It's a series of tremendous, unforgettable, page turning highs, and head-tilting lows. It's filled with fascinating, deeper ideas about what it means to be human, and the potential everyone has for good and evil, somewhat obscured under all the macho action. Yu Yu Hakusho is a wild, one of a kind ride.

And I'll probably read it again in 2035.

If you've just finished reading this retrospective, I thank you! It's been one of the larger undertakings for the site. It's no Hunter x Hunter hiatus, but I took my time getting here. I enjoyed writing this greatly, but it was sometimes an active decision to get the next part done instead of blogging about whatever else was on my mind. If you read any of this and thought, "That's interesting" or "I never thought of that before," I triple thank you.

In this retrospective, including filenames, I wrote Yusuke's name 159 times.

See you around!

- Jane