Review of Tokyo Revengers

Tokyo’s Revenger is an anime.Rezero is also an anime.An Anime that i am not that vocal about on the internet, but if you really want to know my true thoughts overall about that anime just read this review because my thoughts with that and Tokyo’s revengers are very similar.What hooked me with both of those shows is its use of time traveling or redoing stuff. Albeit re zero starts Subaru over from zero while in TR,main character Takemichi goes back and forth 12 years. Honestly, time travel is something that is extremely hard to get right.Luckily the way TR handles time is clumsy, but kept mehooked enough, at first. It still doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than a second. And the way the show introduces time travel makes it feel so tacked on tho.

STORY
The way the show introduces it is Takemichi is like“WOAH i got killed” “WOAH i went back in time” , then Naoto shows up and is like “ WOAH takemichi you got killed and you went back in time, now go save ma sister from being killed” .Then takemichi is like “WOAH i gotta save my girl” then the rest of the plot doesn't even focus on the time traveling powers anymore and dives headfirst into the world of kid gangs, fightings, motorcycles and really boring flashbacks.

Honestly. I had a blast at seeing this story unfold, not because it was oscar worthy or anything but because it was just so goofy and silly lmao.I was enjoying it in the way someone enjoys soap operas as a guilty pleasure.Its the melodrama and the overblown conflict that does it for me. I like watching shit go wrong for Takemichi because I just dont care about him or anyone for that matter.And I laugh at the spectacle that TR is trying to go for where it brands the show as this serious story about gangs and violence. But at the end of the day, these are just dumbass kids who beat each other up and show off their cool bikes to make up for their fragile egos.And it even has those stupid shounen tropes of “lol pervy ecchi misunderstandings” to win over the teenage boy demographic.I just find it all funny.

To keep up the Rezero comparison, TR ,just like Rezero, loves to hype up moments just for it to end in the most unsatisfying way. Unlike Re Zero though,TR never gives you a chance to breathe when it comes to its climatic events.With TR, shit goes wrong in the present, Takemichi goes to the past, deals with things, and then goes back to the present for more shit to go wrong. Rinse and repeat, and that's all of this season in a nutshell.

Also, just like Rezero, TR just loooves flashbacks.So many flashbacks man. These moments are by far some of the weakest parts of the show.The flashbacks were always too long and filled with fluff despite the dire events being set up beforehand. I mean dude, I don't care about where Ryuuguuji got his tattoos or whatever,I wanna see some school kids get beat to death cmoooon. And when it does get to those gang on gang violence moments, is it tense? No. Is it violent?meh, its like shounen tier violence.How is it? I'll tell you. It's so damn goofy man. It's like when you see a stage play and the kids are acting out a fight scene, that's the vibe i got from these moments.The wonky choreography, the numerous grunts coming from the off screen voice actors and the very static scenes of nothing happening despite them being in an all out battle made me achieve high levels of laughter.Bloody Halloween? More like “Bloody Hahahahalloween”. Cmon, don't give me that look, i couldn't help it,it's not like there were characters I cared about or anything,and there wasn't really a sense of tension because despite the characters literally being beaten with bats n shit,they just leave and go home to nonexistent parents who see them bruised and bloody and think nothing of it.

I think there were about three or four moments in the show I thought were genuinely good.Sometimes after all the goofy kid moments,the show just pulls you down to reality for a moment to show the bad effects a gang can have on bystanding society.But it is a shame that the society barely even matters to the plot. The police and the ambulance are the slowest people in fucking existence, and the only time parents do exist is to drive character motivations and get that plot crankin.

ART AND ANIMATION.
Similarly to Rezero, Tokyo’s revenger’s art and animation are a bit stale.But to be honest, TR looks way worse. Honestly,when I first saw this show, I immediately felt turned off by its art style. That's almost the case with anything from studio Lidenfilms, they love to poop out so many anime,but none of them really stand out visually unless its Hanebado.I have seen worse things this year but TR is definitely one of the weakest looking high profile things i have seen recently.

If anime had chip flavors, Tokyo’s Revenger would be “Lightly Salted 50% less sodium Original” flavored.Its bland,cheap, and lifeless.This show’s past events take place in 2005 and ,hell, I have seen anime made in that year look better than TR.There is no style, no artistic direction to anything,no pizzazz, it's like a stock version of an anime.And the character designs are so flat and wonky.Its the faces that do it for me. The square ass eyes, the big ass ears, the protruding duck lips,the noses that look like shark fins protruding from the middle of everyone’s faces,the lack of diverse facial expressions,and the weird ass choreography in fight scenes that make the fights look fake.The manga artstyle compared to this anime’s is literally night and day.Way to go ruining it i guess.Also the backgrounds look super stock as well, but when they would try to animate the environment , it would look ridiculous.For example, there is this windy tree scene that they use constantly, but the blowing tree has like 3 frames of animation and its just fade transition between each other.It drove me mad.I think the show would look better if it took some style inspirations from the opening theme.Speaking of which.

The opening theme is whatever. The song is an earworm,but the visuals despite looking pretty, are basically every anime op stereotype in one.You got MC walking in the rain, MC running and reaching out to save the girl, MC being sad then gets lent a hand by some other guy,the other schmucks standing around and turning their head like they're covergirl models,and last but not least SPOILERS TO SERIOUS EVENTS IN THE SHOW. I love spoilers in the OP dont you?

SOUND
The va’s did good, but goddamn they sound like grown ass men in the body of adolescent boys.So it's funny to think that these kids are just some of the oldest middle school kids to exist.As for the ost, it's pretty epic and uses a lot of effects. The problem I have with it though is the same I had with WEP. It is put in at the most unfitting times. You would hear this roaring guitar and percussions but the scene is just Takemichi in bed checking his phone, or two dudes sitting on the swings talking about stuff. OMG SO EPIC. And weird enough when it does get to the fights, sometimes the music just disappears. I guess they were trying to go for the emotions,but the animation wasn't doing the soundtrack any favors.

CHARAC...TERS
Ready for rezero comparisons?JUST like re zero, my intrigue for TR starts to fall apart when it focuses on the characters more than the time traveling aspects in the latter half.There are a shitton of characters in this show so I’ll have to approach this section differently.

-Takemitchi(the hero)
Our boi, our mc,our crybaby hero. How should I put this? He….sucks. He is just such a loser,man. The thing with him is that he is one of those anime protags who likes to beat himself up for not being stronger, but in the show he does almost nothing half the time and gets his ass handed to him throughout the entire show lol.If you’re worried about how he’s physically weak, then don’t be because he makes up for that by also being stupid.He does have one heroic moment, but that moment couldve easily been prevented if he was just a little smarter.
Most of the tension results in him going back in time and making sure this one person doesn't die, but then he even screws that up, sometimes he just disappears and by the time the dude he needed to protect gets in mortal danger, takemichi shows up and laments over the situation like he couldn't do anything about it.Either that or he tries to use his words to prevent situations from happening, but they usually don't work, or make the situation worse,also he gets beat up for it too.He is one of those characters who only affects others with “willpower” and that's it, so yea.I don't hate him or anything, I just get a kick out of making fun of him, which isn't really the intent they were going for,but there isn't anything else to his personality besides him being a virgin and his girlfriend, who just “exists” as a motivation for him and ….nothing else really.

-The Vice Captains of Toman東京卍會(Manjirou,Ryuuguji, and others)
Most of the drama in the show comes from the sticky situations between these guys, but there isn't much for them for me to actually care about. I guess I kept an eye out for Manjirou because of his personality,his ranking, and his past, but the rest are just random people.They don't have family or problems themselves to deal with to make me care about them, so when they start doing things to screw up the group, i just was lost.Also this anime has a very bad case of “forgiveness syndrome”. One character would do something ridiculous, but instead of facing consequences from a gang of short-tempered authoritarian junior high boys, they are just forgiven because “naw brah, you're a part of the family,dude”.I did really dig the close bonds these dudes had with each other but since they all felt hollow, I was attached to them in a trashy reality tv way.

-The Villains?
There are villains in this show, and more or less, they're just random guys tricked by one big villain. Who is this villain? Some random schmuck with glasses, that's it.lmao. Most of the show is reinforcing how this dude is the enemy who fricks things up, but you never get much about his character or how he thinks in this scenario.Takemichi’s girlfriend got more screen time than this villain,I mean seriously.

-The Others(not in the gang)
Takemichi’s friends were fun to watch,his brotherly love with Atsushi was nice, I just wish the time travel element did not omit so much of his development on why he and others Takemichi were so attached to end up in different situations.And um...I can't think of anyone else.There’s Naoto.Just like his sister, he is just a plot device who disappears almost entirely in the second cour. There was another girl,Emma, but she’s trash.Sorry to offend the Emma stans out there but her being the “promiscuous hoe”character who voluntarily sleeps with other guys just to make her boyfriend pay more attention to her like a fucking egomaniac is writing we do not stan in this house.Her character feels like something a neckbeard virgin would write. Not today, Mr. Satan.

ENJOYMENT.
Hell yea...i’m down for season 2 why not? I had fun. I think this content was done a disservice by being animated so poorly and I think this series is just a tad overrated. Idk man, maybe i’m just getting too old for this shit now.Maybe this show was made to speak to the kids, I mean it is a shounen, there are bikes, battles, boobs, and baseball bats,and also time travel for all the self inserts who fantasize about redoing their lonely isolated dead end lives filled with existential crisis and unhealthy nostalgia for their childhoods,maybe they can relate to Takemichi being the loser despite the hefty responsibility he has. And if that's the case, I hope that demographic has all the fun they want with this show.Who knows, next season, there might be a tournament arc, and then the season after that, Takemitchi gets fukin demolished by a garbage truck and isekai’d to a different realm.But yea… I had fun. Am I gonna remember this season by the time s2 comes out?
No,probably not, but I had fun, that's all that matters.

Overall-6/10