Character · Ranma 1/2
Ryoga Hibiki
He set out to find his rival's house, walked for days, and arrived in a different country entirely.
In Otakana the clue reads: Rival with no sense of direction at all
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Ranma 1/2
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Ryoga Hibiki has no sense of direction, and the manga treats this as a physical law rather than a flaw. He aims for a street two blocks away and surfaces in China. He is chasing Ranma over an insult that Ranma barely remembers, and the pursuit takes years mostly because Ryoga cannot locate him. When he does, he is genuinely dangerous.
His own trip to Jusenkyo went badly. Ryoga fell into the spring of the drowned piglet, so cold water turns him into a small black pig, and Akane adopted that pig as a pet named P-chan without ever connecting the two. He is in love with her and the disguise is accidental, which makes it the most uncomfortable running joke in the series and one of the funniest.
As a fighter he is heavy where Ranma is fast. The Breaking Point technique lets him find the weak spot in stone and destroy it with a finger, and the Lion's Roar Blast converts misery into a shockwave, which means he gets stronger the worse he feels. Rumiko Takahashi built a character whose despair is a weapon and then gave him almost nothing to be happy about.
Spelling RYOGA
RYOGA is five letters and hides a long vowel. The Japanese is Ryouga, 良牙, and English drops that U the way it does for Tokyo and Gojo. The other snag is the opening: RYO is one syllable, not two, so do not reach for an I. Five tiles, two vowels, and the family name Hibiki is not what the game is asking for.