Inuyasha: The Final Act Episode One Impressions

Well, I finally got around to watching Inuyasha: The Final Act on hulu, and I originally planned on talking about the first four episodes, but I decided to just talk about the first since A LOT happened. What’s really going to be hard is keeping this spoiler free, but I’ll do my best.

Episode One: Naraku’s Heart

The very first thing we see is, of course, the opening. The first opening is titled “Kimi ga inai mirai” and is performed by Do As Infinity, who have done two of the ending songs for the first Inuyasha series. It’s an okay song. The video portion is a typical montage of characters with some cool moves thrown in. It’s a little above the standard for anime openings, except for the scene of Shippo and Jaken playing Red Light, Green Light (seriously).

The end theme is titled “With You” and is performed by AAA and it is awesome. The art style of the video supports an already strong song making the ending sequence a nice desert to the episode’s main story entrée.

Watching the show, I noticed that the animation looks a lot better. All the characters and scenery look sharp and well detailed.

One thing this episode reminded me of is that there are A Lot of characters in the Inuyasha universe. And in this episode, we see all the main characters as well as most of the supporting characters. Here’s a complete list of everybody in episode one:

• Inuyasha
• Kagome
• Miroku
• Sango
• Shippo
• Naraku
• Kagura
• Kanna
• Moryomaru
• Hakudoshi
• Kohaku
• Koga
• Koga’s two followers (who are pointless by the way)
• Sesshomaru
• Jaken
• Rin
• Kikyo
• The two floating fairy things that follow Kikyo
• Kagome’s Mother
• Sota
• Kagome’s Grandfather
• Kagome’s three friends

That’s a lot of people to cover.

Most of the people are given about a minute of screen time and really are only there to show that they’re still around and that they have been continuing their quests. The good news is that you will have one less person to follow after this episode because one of the people on the list dies in the episode. Quite frankly, I found this to be quite surprising, but in a good way, because it was enjoyable.

Despite the segments of other people, the main story of the episode was quite good and actually didn’t end on a cliffhanger (one of my complaints with the first series). The animation overall has improved dramatically, which makes the show look that much better. The music during the episode is the same as the first series, so it brings an extra sense on familiarity when watching the episode.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy with this episode was some the voice acting. This may be because I’m more familiar with the dub, but Viz’s English voices for some characters just sound as a stronger suppot to their character’s personality. This is especially true for Inuyasha himself. Richard Ian Cox does a great job making InuYahsa sound like this stubborn badass that I can really get behind. Kappei Yamaguchi makes him sound high pitched and, quite frankly, a little annoying and wimpy.

Despite my small criticism, it was a great way to start the series and I look forward to see how the story finally ends. Now if you excuse me, I’m going to get back to watching some more Inuyasha.






If you would like to watch Inuyasha: The Final Act (subbed) right now, you can go to Viz's official website. Click here to watch.

Just keep in mind that you might not be able to watch it due to region restrictions.