Ryouga Hibiki

Ryouga Hibiki is a character from Ranma 1/2 anime and manga.

Ranma is Ranma Saotome's eternal rival and a friend to him, the only one he has outright stated to truly consider as such, arguably one of the most powerful fighters in the series.

The name "Ryoga" can be broken down to read as "good fang," which refers to the fact that he possesses rather prominent canines. Hibiki is translated as "to echo" or "to resound."

In the AWA fics, Ryouga is a student at the AWA Academy and is part of Class 12.

Appearance
Ryoga's usual outfit consists of a yellow and black speckled bandana around his head, a yellow long sleeve tunic with pale yellow collar and the folded sleeves, black trousers with yellow leg bands around the ankes and a black sash-like belt and black Chinese shoes and pale yellow socks. He is sometimes shown wearing a pale yellow sleeveless shirt and his trousers are now dark blue. His hair, particularly the front fringe, is quite long, obscuring his bandana at the front. Quite often, Ryoga carries around a black backpack and a red bamboo umbrella either tucked into straps on top of his backpack or in his hand.

Before he was cursed into his P-chan form, he was seen wearing an indigo sleeveless shirt in matching pants, and his bandana is pale yellow.

In his P-chan form, Ryoga's clothes can be seen falling off when he got washed up by cold water in various occasions in every episode. He appears as a small black pig as his yellow and speckled bandanna on his head becomes his collar.

Personality
Ryoga's most notable characteristic is that, like his parents (and even his entire family), he has no sense of direction whatsoever. He is unable to go the right way, often sticking to the letter of any directions given to him, regardless of whether the path eventually turns. He has an inability to understand even the simplest of directions or draw any legible maps, once running the wrong way at the start of a three-legged race or getting lost in Shampoo's house for hours; looking for the exit. He cannot even follow someone pointing in the correct direction.

In the anime, this condition is worsened by Ryoga's ability to traverse obscene distances in surprisingly little time on foot. This, combined with Ryoga's complete lack of direction, results in him having essentially no idea where he is at any given time, which allows him to miss his destinations by insane margins.

Inversely, the manga depicts Ryoga needing much longer travel times, and has not explicitly been seen to swiftly and randomly traverse continents under his own power. However, in his first appearance he quickly overshot Tokyo by 500 kilometres twice in a row, apparently within the span of a few days. Through the aid of the Gekkaja, he also quickly made it all the way from Jusenkyo to Moscow and back while out to get some dumplings in Peking. His map was also once shown to contain a forest, a café, a road with a red car, the Tendo dojo, some Oni, China, and France, and he once sent Akane a postcard in which the photograph displayed that he had unwittingly traversed to Hong Kong. Ryoga's family house is within sight of Mount Fuji, where his dog Shirokuro and her puppies live.

Ryoga generally leads a nomadic lifestyle, and only occasionally manages to find his home. His poor sense of direction and his curse have regularly subjected him to imminent misery, constantly placing him lonely and lost in the wilderness, at the mercy of hungry predators. When first introduced, he is a very angry and seemingly unapproachable individual. Ryoga is very emotional, often following his heart rather than his head. However he has shown capability of using strategy when he is focused or lacking distractions. He is emotionally fragile, straightforward and naive. He regularly feels depressed, which thus far has served as the source for his chi projection. He is generally shy, humble and polite, especially around women. He is often easily tricked and used by some of the more manipulative characters, particularly Ranma, and turns extremely grateful, loyal and self-sacrificing for any kindness offered to him, and his compassion is just as overemotional as the rest of him, even bringing him to tears after realising that he is incapable of even trying to harm Ranma when the latter was weakened by Happosai. That said, while he is often used by Ranma, he's not above manipulating himself, albeit somewhat unknowingly. This is usually done in his P-Chan form. In addition, like many other characters in the series, Ryoga is always willing to blame others, mainly Ranma, for his misfortunes, regardless of how involved the other party was in them (for example blaming Ranma for not meeting him to fight, despite missing the fight being his own fault). Sometimes he cares for what happens to him, which makes him a friend of Ranma.

Abilities
Ryoga is an exceptionally proficient martial artist, roughly comparable to Ranma, whom he has defeated or fought to a draw on many occasions. Unlike most cast members, Ryoga seems to be mostly self-taught, with only some of his special techniques passed on to him by others. When staying focused and keeping his emotions in control he proved efficient enough to simultaneously parry, disarm, and effortlessly overwhelm Kuno, Mousse, Principal Kuno and Gosunkugi in around a second.

Due to his harsh hiking Ryoga has great physical strength, which appears to heighten when he becomes overly emotional. This has led Ryoga to unintentionally destroy walls, lampposts and even large portions of buildings. Along with his strength, Ryoga is also shown to be very durable during battle.

Although significantly slower than Ranma after the latter had received training from Cologne, Ryoga eventually managed to improve himself to a point where he could easily outmatch Mousse, or Genma. (During the final Saffron story).

Despite his competent fighting skills, Ryoga does suffer from several limitations, most severely his Jusenkyocurse which typical causes any fight he's partaking where he transforms to end in his defeat. He is also easily distracted, creating openings for his opponents. Ryoga also suffers from being easily embarrassed at the sight of a woman's breasts, along his own sense of decency whereby which he refuses to fight anyone who he sees as weaker than himself.

It is noted that Ryoga is much tougher and stronger than Ranma, especially as Ryoga was able to effortlessly overpower and almost render female Ranma unconscious with a single finger during the "Yoiko" story, however Ranma is more agile and quicker than Ryoga.

Special Techniques
Ryoga has learned a number of techniques from a variety of sources, mixing and matching them freely in battle.
 * Iron Cloth (Tetsu Nuno): Ryoga seems to have a never-ending supply of his trademark bandannas, using them as razor sharp missiles, and can even turn his belt into a blade capable of easily cutting through a tree, or a steel pole, with a single slash. These attacks are assumed to be possible by Ryoga channelling his Chi into them, vastly enforcing the tensile strength and cutting edge of the fabrics. His umbrella is unusually resistant, but Ryoga easily wields it with one hand to deadly effect and increased impact damage. However, female Ranma was also able to use this, and it's unclear if Ryoga strictly carries this dense version towards the end, as even the Jusenkyo Guide's small daughter Plum was able to effortlessly lift it at this point.
 * Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics: For some unknown reason, Ryoga has a fair knowledge of this martial art. The only time he really uses it is early in the series, when he tries to teach it to Akane, then to Ranma, to prepare them for a fight against Kodachi. Given his proficient use of "iron cloth" ribbon technique whip attacks, it is possible that he studied it for this purpose.
 * "Bakusai Tenketsu" (Explosive-Breaking Point-Hole): or Breaking Point, is a technique taught to Ryoga by Cologne. Originally used by construction workers to clear away debris, this technique enables Ryoga to shatter rocks and similar substances with a finger. The training is gruelling, consisting of tying yourself and a boulder to a tree and repeatedly slamming yourself, finger first into the boulder until you figure out the "breaking point". The technique is useless on humans, but the training's side effects make the user nearly invulnerable to physical attacks. Also, this technique is what allows Ryoga to tunnel underground. At some point, Ryoga also develops a version which works on wood. He is also seen using a "Rapid Fire" version at times, striking quickly and repeatedly to produce several small blasts in a row.


 * "Shin Shishi Hōkōdan" (True Lion Roaring-Bullet): The secret to perfecting the technique lay in the use of the chi and the strength of the user's emotions. As chi generated by depression and anger is "heavy," by projecting it into the air, Ryoga creates a massive sphere of chi that has been shown capable of instantly creating an even larger smoking crater in what appeared to be a stone foundation, and later crack the earth around it, reaching the onlookers at what had been considered a safe viewing distance away from the epicentre. The more ki generated and used in this attack, the larger the resultant sphere of destruction; the greatest visual effect was shown when used to utterly vanquish Lime in a single blow. Simply being grazed by the outermost boundary of one of its most powerful strikes was enough to immediately conquer Ranma, despite the latter's attempt to lessen the impact with his weakened Moko Takabisha. But a full hit from a later (seemingly weaker, given the lack of increased crater size) attempt simply stunned the latter for roughly a minute, quickly followed by a strike with even less impact.


 * "Dairokkan" (Sixth Sense): Like several other martial artists in the series, Ryoga has displayed an extrasensory awareness, which warns him from incoming danger/attacks. However, at least once in the manga, during the Musk Dynasty arc, his Sixth Sense and poor directional sense combined, causing him to predict an incoming attack, but to expect it from entirely the wrong direction!.

Trivia

 * Ryoga is similar in appearance to Kōga from Inuyasha, who is also romantically interested in the female protagonist and has a similar name that in part means "fang".
 * On Tvtropes.org Ryoga is considered the undisputed "king of getting lost" and with good reason, another interesting fact is that since his debut numerous other mangas and animes have featured characters with an almost identical sense of direction as Ryoga, also of note is that these characters also share similar attributes to Ryoga such as monstrous super-human strength and endurance, examples of such characters are Roronoa Zoro from One Piece, Sagara Sanosuke from Rurouni Kenshin and Kenpachi Zaraki from Bleach.
 * In The Obstacle Course Swim Meet OVA episode of Urusei Yatsura he appears in his cursed form as one of the drown students.
 * His P-chan form makes 2 cameo appearances as a tiny doll in episodes 4 and 39 of the anime version of Kyokai no Rinne, another work of Rumiko Takahashi.