Review of Tokyo Revengers

“Both sides lose somebody. Somebody dies, somebody goes to jail.” --Kid Cudi “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” --some goofy mf named mitch or something idk Tokyo Revengers is an anime about middle school kids, but they’re actually RUFF N’ TUFF DUDES who spend most of their time punching people, riding motorcycles, and punching other people who also enjoy punching people and riding motorcycles. Given such a gritty subject matter that is rarely touched upon in shounen anime, it’s pretty clear to see why there’s so much hype for this series. And I certainly respect that. But in reality, the display of violence and conflict in ToRev is comical, to put itnicely. To put it meanly, it’s a mafia anime for children. Every conflict in this series begins and ends with characters punching each other, and other characters scream so often that Ear Revengers would’ve been a more appropriate name.

A lot of the screaming is done by our boy Takemitchi. I wish he was Takenoutoftheshow. *pauses for pre-recorded studio laughter* His entire character is that he has regrets about things that happened in his current life (if that wording threw you off, we’ll get to it later), he gets scared by everything, is in constant disbelief at every element of his surroundings, and is constantly FUCKING SCREAMING. Many assume this MC has a special power of time travelling, but no. His power is yelling to draw attention to himself, where every other character in the show can only express confusion and then go along with it like a practical joke.

How anyone takes Takemitchi seriously is the biggest mystery in this anime. He yells at people to try and get his way, he’s too cowardly to hit anyone and too weak to deal any damage anyway, and whatever he does is motivated by time travel reasons, so nothing he does comes off as logical to other characters. Instead they just say “well he’s a nice guy I guess” and keep him around. If these middle school biker gangs were realistic, Takemitchi would be accepted into the gang as a joke, then have him go on a “secret mission” that ends with him getting raped by a beaver or something. No one in their right mind would actually give him the time of day, but I guess no one in the show is in their right mind because they get punched all the time lol

It’s Talk-no-Jutsu and Power of Friendship taken to incredible degrees, two of the most picked on tropes in shounen anime. These aren’t automatically bad tropes; a lot could be said about one’s way of reasoning and motivating others. Takemitchi doesn’t have the charisma or intelligence to do either of these things. At best, his screaming and whining is so childish that others get lifted up by thinking “Ha! What a dumbass!” Seldom does he have any real consequence on anything happening.

And not to mention, this dude has to express shock and disbelief at EVERYTHING in this series. Even twenty episodes in, when an all-out gang war has been set up for episodes--this being some days or weeks in anime time--he enters the battle like “Wow! I can’t believe this is actually happening!” It doesn’t help that when something occurs within his general vicinity, the camera has to keep cutting to Takemitchi’s look of surprise, as if we need a reminder as to how he feels about something.

While we’re at it, the other goofy shounen trope this anime has is the comically old-looking “middle schoolers”. Not that I really care, it’s just funny seeing some dudes be like “i had a rough childhood” bro you’re like 12 you ARE a child ☠️

But a bad main character can be made up for with a good supporting cast, right? To an extent I can see the potential Tokyo Gang:re has with its characters not named Takemitchi. The two that get the most screentime, Mikey and Draken, are practically the best characters by an objective margin. Mikey has a childlike demeanor that doesn’t go too far and stands out among the rest of the cast, and yet his goofiness doesn’t go too far for me. His calm presence mixed with some weird complexes he has are genuinely fun. His sidekick, Draken, comes off as genuinely tough compared to everyone else, with a strict personality that clashes wonderfully with Mikey. Plus his design is the one in this series that properly rides the line between cool and ridiculous and I actually like it.

Others are just acceptable, albeit forgettable, save for Hina Tachibana--nice to see she’s doing well after everyone fucking hated her in Domestic Girlfriend--who goes slightly above and beyond the token gf that need protecc. Her sweet, innocent and girly character is fine enough for a boys’ series, but the moments where she stands up against danger and acts like a bad bitch were surprisingly good.

It’s likely thanks to these characters that Tokyo Revengers doesn’t end up being completely miserable to watch. As eye-rolling as some parts of it may be, little of it was particularly disastrous. Perhaps the key to enjoying this anime fully is embracing Takemitchi, like how people say Black Clover is good because Asta has character development or something. Is that a good comparison? Do y’all like Black Clover? I’m out of touch with this generation, I’ve been too busy listening to obscure music artists like Hideki Naganuma and Lil Nas X like a fucking asshole.

But now we’ve finally come to the Snorlax in the road. Because it’s TIME!!!! to TRAVEL!!!!!!!!!! Into the section where we talk about time travel in this anime. It’s a very straightforward concept: Takemitchi returns twelve years into the past, but can travel forward back to the present day by shaking hands with some dude. What’s interesting is that time moves forward in both timelines simultaneously, but unfortunately there’s not anything done with this concept so far, other than seeing the present day change as a result of what Takemitchi does in the past. Honestly I don’t care too much about the time travel because, at least in this stage of the story, it doesn’t seem like much of a story concept.

Maybe I could be more harsh about that, but the only qualm I have for now is that, like seemingly any time travel series that isn’t actually sci-fi, the TT isn’t used smartly. Since time moves forward in both timelines simultaneously, it would make sense for Takemitchi to be in the past during the day, then check the present day overnight so that he can consistently live both lives. It’s a notable drawback that his life in the timeline he’s not present in is run on autopilot, so maximizing the time between both makes the most amount of sense to me. But like I said, Revengers isn’t really here to impress with any of its high concepts, just to have dudes punch the shit out of each other.

The real Snorlax on the road, or rather, the colossal 800-pound dump it just took, is how Tokyo Revengers is presented. I’m sure some will defend this lovely adaptation by saying “well it looks better than Ex-Arm!” as if we give humans accomplishments for having ten fingers. Bad art and animation can often be summarized with buzzwords like “cheap” and “low-effort” (sorry to you folks at Lidensfilms who probably made like 200 yen off this whole show), and my buzzword for this art style is: lifeless. Dead. Unresponsive. Shots often linger uncomfortably long, a problem that’s exacerbated by an unhealthy amount of still-frames. Body animation is often stiff and awkward, a death knell for an action-heavy series. When characters hit each other, the animation is slow and lacks weight, like moving around a couple of layers in Photoshop, or they just have a still-frame of someone getting hit and then slowly sliding across the screen in one direction. Then, they’re further marred by gross and sometimes excessively-loud noises of flesh splashing. Characters have un-detailed faces that often look deadpan and unemotive, and the designs aren’t much to write home about either. Even the background art lacks any personality when there could be potential for some of the rugged settings of some episodes, such as the junkyard in the Bloody Halloween arc. All of these problems run deep and go beyond what one would normally blame on “budget”. Who really knows what happened, but sometimes, things just suck.

Occasionally the OST has some highlights, but a lot of the best songs are played over, and over, and over again, like there can only exist one song for an emotionally uplifting scene, one for intense action scenes, and so on. Maybe it wasn’t as repetitive as I remember and more of the general style of hard rock-driven orchestration blurred everything together. Who knows. Either way, it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t leave too much of an impression. The OP is okay. The vocals have a nice singalong melody throughout the whole song, but nothing else about the song interests me. I fuck with both the ED’s, though. The first ED is kinda like a smooth mixture of soul and city pop that cools you down like a good ED typically would, but then some amped guitars crank up the energy to get you hyped at the end. It’s hella good. The second ED sounds like Silversun Pickups but if they weren’t fucking shit. I wish the drums and bass, or really just the entire instrumentation lol, was louder because it kinda sounds like a weird moany dude groaning over fuzz. But it’s a cool song anyway.

Anyway, usually I end reviews with some sort of summary but generally speaking I write these things on the spot and have no idea what I’m doing so I don’t know what I just wrote actually. Tokyo Revengers Not Good I guess. Tell you what, I’ll come back and fix this section in twelve years. Now for a joke, what happened to the swastika in the title of the manga? They removed it so that you could not see it.

Story: 4/10
Art: 2/10
Sound: 5/10
Characters: 4/10
Enjoyment: 4/10
Overall: 4/10, ranging anywhere from a light 3 to a strong 4.