First Impressions / InuYasha

Summary:

While Kohaku joins up with Kikyou, Kouga decides to leave his lackeys behind from now on because of the danger. Sesshoumaru meanwhile watches as Mouryoumaru tricks two demons and absorbs them both, and afterward, he challenges Mouryoumaru to a fight with his own new ability. Mouryoumaru, however, gets away and Sesshoumaru isn’t able to chase him because Byakuya distracts him. At around this same time, InuYasha has to deal with the fact that he can’t handle Tessaiga’s new ability, so he has Toutousai take a look at it, and Toutousai sends InuYasha to train with his acquaintance Yourei Taisei. When they reach the Yourei Taisei’s place, they find that the old man has gotten his innards taken by a demon, and it thus becomes InuYasha’s job to recover them. To make things harder, Yourei Taisei puts a seal on Tessaiga to prevent InuYasha from using it against just any demon. The group ends up at a private residence where they encounter a serpent demon, and although he still can’t use Tessaiga, he is able to use his own claws.

After Yourei Taisei advises InuYasha to look for the demon vortex, InuYasha is able to see swirls of demonic energy. He’s eventually able to find the right one and slashes it to destroy the serpent demon. However, this turns out to not have been the demon that took Yourei Taisei’s innards, and when the group returns to Yourei Taisei’s dwelling, they find an ox demon there. InuYasha is finally able to use Tessaiga again, but he still has to find the right demon vortex, and even worse, cutting the ox demon cracks Tessaiga. InuYasha, however, figures out that the real demon vortex is centered around Yourei Taisei’s body, and one swing ends the battle. In the aftermath, Yourei Taisei reveals that all this had been part of his plan to retrain InuYasha to be able to detect the true demonic energy and so that InuYasha would remember that Tessaiga is a sword for cutting. Tessaiga is also now bathed in a great amount of demonic energy because InuYasha had cut Yourei Taisei’s demon vortex, but what Yourei Taisei doesn’t tell InuYasha is that Tessaiga has one more form to discover.

 
Impressions:

The Sesshoumaru and Mouryoumaru parts of this episode turned out to be pretty good even though I was a little disappointed that Mouryoumaru ended up running away again. I really just want to see Sesshoumaru kick some ass now in a fight that matters. In any case, despite liking that first part, I didn’t really like the rest of the episode. I’m not sure if it was the pacing this time or what, but the whole run-around to train InuYasha seemed unnecessary. I think part of the problem is that these swirls of demonic energy are made out to be rather important, yet they didn’t develop the concept enough, and having those swirling neon targets just floating around in the air looked sort of silly. I assume though that since they spent most of an episode on it, InuYasha will make use of this new ability pretty soon. And on that note, the title for next episode appears to spoil the fact that Mouryoumaru will meet his end in next week’s episode. So much for him being a good antagonist…

13 Comments

  5. I’m glad it wasn’t just me who thought the pacing was kinda fast. Man, they sure are pushing through this quite fast. I got used to the FMA pacing, but this is like a notch above that.

    Still, gotta appreciate another new version of the tessaiga. <3

    chingoo
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  7. I’m happy about Tessaiga getting more powerful and more forms but doesn’t it seem that they are putting too much power into the sword and not Inuyasha because if he ever faced and incarnation of Naraku bare handed he wouldn’t be able to do much. I didn’t mind when it got the backlash wave or the diamonds but now its getting even more powers and Inuyasha stays the same. Sesshoumaru is badass without a sword but he too is becoming way to reliant on his new sword ability and Koga well I’m not gonna say anything because he was never strong to begin with and relies too much on the claws and shards. Seems to me the weapons get more development than the characters (and I know that it takes skill to use the weapon but still even though you have technique and skills the power is the sword because Inuyasha wouldn’t be able to defeat Naraku with a plain sword and his skills)(surprised Kagome hasn’t gotten a super bow or Sango getting a super boomerang lol.) It’s not that I’m hating the new weapons and the way the story is going just would like to see Inuyasha show more demon feature without going out of control or new abilities. Also maybe its time they powered up Miroku, Sango and Kagome to gain some balance since mostly they don’t do anything or try but fail.

    shadowmagius
    Reply

  9. The manga actually never explains very well what this “youketsu” thing is either, other than it’s the “source of demonic energy”. The only thing I could come up with is that since youkai are supernatural creatures, the “youketsu” is the point where their energy manifests in the real world. And since Tessaiga is a “sword that cuts”, the only way for it to properly use its dragon-scaled form was to actually cut through something with it rather than just standing there sucking.

    Patches
    Reply

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