Review of Tokyo Revengers

Tokyo revengers is an anime about a guy named Hanagaki Takemichi going back in time to prevent his middle-school girlfriend from being murdered by a gang. Through his journey he joins tokyo manji gang which is a 'gang' of middle school thugs that engage in fights after school and behave like actual criminals. Now the idea of middle schoolers joining criminal gangs and having drama with other gangs is sort of thrust upon because we have to get used to the idea early on since Takamichi needs to get into this internal drama to save Hinata Tachibana his girlfriend back in middle school. Now Ihave to say from the beginning that you have to sort of digest the fact that this is a 20-something yr old man in the body of a 13-14-year-old boy and kissing a 14-year old girl and move on from there. The show plays out with Takamichi observing and speaking and whenever he intervenes he gets beaten up which is a pattern that plays out over and over again. The show basically centers on 3 characters that get the most development: Draken, Takemichi, and Mikey. The problem is that beyond development their personalities and dynamics get very stale very quickly, Takemichi has 'guts' which basically means yelling and getting beaten up, Draken is 'loyal', and Mikey is a relatively kind person despite being a member of a violent gang. The strongest aspect of the show is the intrigue presented by takemichi trying to put together the puzzle of the future from the past and vice-versa unfortunately this gets crowded out by the insistence of the show that we care about the individual fights. The fights in this show are incredibly boring, it's just a bunch of people slugging each other constantly with Mikey and Draken kicking everyone's butts. I feel like the series is trying to make me care about middle school gangs when I don't actually care about middle school gangs, I actually care about Takemichi protecting the future, and maybe the best way for him to do that was to have all of these kids taken into child-protective services and convincing them stop fighting in gangs? These 'gangs' are actually a bad thing and maybe busting them up instead of getting involved with them would have saved Tachibana's life? Also Hinata Tachibana provides the 'stakes' in this show as she's innocent and uninvolved in the bullshit but dies in the timeline somehow, so it would be nice to get some backstory into who she is beyond being hanagaki's girlfriend in Middle school. Overall Tokyo revengers' strongest element is the mystery component and the butterfly-effect of Hanagaki's past actions on the present, it's actually interesting to see him try to decode things and decipher how things affect each other to produce the future that he lived in. In that sense, it is like 'Erased' but unlike Erased which had actual stakes and some intrigue, Tokyo revengers has nothing but middle schoolers beating each-other up.