Episode 10

EPISODE 10

暗闇の死闘!桑原・霊気の剣 (Ankoku no Shitou! Kuwabara・Reiki no Ken)

Death Match in the Dark!  Kuwabara’s Reiki Sword

First Broadcast: December 12, 1992

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): chapter 27 (WSJ #27, 1991, June 24), first half of chapter 28 (WSJ #28, 1991, July 1)

Summary: A tournament between the 8 finalists begin. Kuwabara beats the samurai Musashi with his new Spirit Sword technique.  In the 4^th match, Yusuke fights the martial artist Kibano, who overwhelms Yusuke with his spiritually enhanced strength and senses.

Anime/manga differences after the jump.

Differences from the Manga

(What's all this about?  Read here)

• We don’t get any details for Genkai’s pitch black arena in the manga, but in the anime there’s a large Buddha statue there.

• After Kuwabara tells Yusuke he feels as if there’s a monster lurking nearby, in the manga Yusuke just thinks to himself that he forgot about Rando, while in the anime he actually tells Kuwabara a little about Rando, but says he’ll explain the rest later.

• We don’t see how the tournament matchups are determined in the manga, but the anime has everyone picking arrows from the ground.

• In the anime as they start to determine the tournament matchups, the scene switches to the afterlife where Koenma is as usual watching everything on his TV.  The TV displays an image of the tournament chart, which in the manga is something just shown for the sake of the reader.  The TV then shows the various stats of the fighters, taken from how well they did on Genkai’s arcade games.  In the manga these stats for the 8 finalists were all given in the last chapter, as another thing for the reader’s benefit, rather than something shown to anyone in the context of the story.  It’s nice to see the anime incorporating these little details from the manga, though it does get tedious hearing Koenma’s ogre assistant read through everyone’s stats.

• Speaking of ogre assistants, in this episode Koenma’s seen with a bunch of them.  The anime-original character Jorge Saotome hasn’t quite emerged yet.  An ogre who looks like him stands next to Koenma and reads off some of the fighters’ stats, but his voice is completely different than Jorge’s.

• In the manga Botan comes to see Yusuke inside the dark arena room, while in the anime she calls to him from outside and he goes out to see her.  Kuwabara goes out too, and thinks Yusuke is two-timing Keiko with this girl, so Yusuke has to explain who see is (and about his mission as a Spirit World Detective).  In the manga Kuwabara has no reaction to Botan showing up, while in the anime he seems to instantly fall in love with her.  We also see street clothes Botan materializing from nothing, and floating on her oar in the air.  In the manga whenever Botan’s in street clothes it means she’s in her physical (and therefore earthbound) body.

• After Shorin beats Chinpo, in the manga Botan’s the one to note that Shorin’s stats were all slightly higher, while in the anime Koenma (with his magic stat-displaying TV) says this.

• In the manga Musashi’s Photon Sword attack consists of just a single slash, while in the anime he hits Kuwabara about a billion times.

• When Kuwabara comes out with his Spirit Sword ability, in the anime Genkai gives an actual explanation of what a “materialization ability” consists of, while in the manga she just throws the term out.  Togashi built an elaborate system out of this sort of ability categorization in his later manga, Hunter X Hunter.

• Genkai’s seen smoking throughout the episode in the anime, something she doesn’t do in the manga.  Then when she gets mad at Yusuke for messing around, she throws her cigarette at him in anger.  It’s this cigarette that Yusuke later uses in his fight with Kibano.  In the manga though, Yusuke himself brought a pack of cigarettes along, much to Botan’s displeasure (she struggles to take the pack away from him while Kibano asks if they could please start the match).  So basically the anime didn’t want to show Yusuke smoking.

• In the manga Kibano himself explains his technique of making his arm big via concentrating energy into it, while in the anime Genkai gives this explanation.

• This is the first anime episode to stop midway through a chapter like this.  Chapter 28 goes all the way to the end of Yusuke and Kibano’s fight, while episode 10 ends after Kibano first uses his big arm attack on Yusuke.  Up until now the pattern has generally been for an episode to cover either one or two chapters in their entirety.