Review of Tokyo Revengers

The plot for this anime was written by a 14 year old. I cannot explain why it's so bad in any other way. Tokyo Revengers has an interesting plotlline: the main character goes back in time to try and stop the murder of his ex-girlfriend (and some other, less important characters') in the present. It's similar to that of Erased, which is why some people have compared the two - but such comparisons are simply insulting to Erased. The most interesting part of such a plotline is how the main character will use the information he obtains in the present to change the past. This show seemsto understand that, as to its credit, it spends a decent amount of time in the present, with the main character and his accomplice in time travel (the younger brother of said murdered ex-girlfriend) looking for information that can help them prevent these murders - which is the most interesting part of this show. They formulate a plan based on that information, and then the main character goes back in time... only to ignore or completely forget said information and act like a total idiot.

No, seriously. Tokyo Revengers is an extremely frustrating watch because of this - events will begin unraveling around the MC in the way that he KNOWS will unfold and lead to said murders, and it's within his power to prevent them. Alas no, all he does in this show is just scream and cry (literally!) until events just kind of magically resolve themselves because someone was impressed with how hard he cried or whatever. There's no sense of progression in the plot as a result, things just kind of happen and the MC is just there for it.

Staying with the plot for a bit, I'll be brutally honest and say that the writer who wrote this just cannot write. I would normally comment on the pacing for instance, but no such thing as "pacing" exists here -- event A doesn't lead to event B and so on. As I mention previously, things just kind of happen, and there's very often no logic why A happened and how that led to B. The plot just wanted B to happen, and the writer couldn't write a scenario that plausibly leads to it, so B just... happens, and it's very jarring to watch.

Now some of this could be explained by the fact that the characters in this show (at least in the past segment, where the majority of events we see take place) are 12-15 years old (the writer's mental age tbh), i.e. children, and children are illogcal creatures. But no, the show is completely inconsistent on that front - these children (who are riding bikes and beating up adults at age 12, lol) are portrayed as deeply mature in one scene, then in the next scene some inexplicable nonsense happens and you're thinking "WTF did I just watch?"

All in all, I really struggled to finish this show, which is uncharacteristic for me. There's usually SOMETHING that's decent about every show I've ever watched, something that I can enjoy about it, but there was no such silver lining to this cloud. The art is mediocre, the animation is atrocious, the music is bad (cool OP, but cool music starts playing out of nowhere while the MC is crying or something asinine happens, lol). This show is a disaster through and through, and I only give it a 4/10 because the time traveling premise was very interesting and I kept hoping it'd be utilized better later on... alas no such luck.

I'd recommend that you stay away from this show unless you're really starved for time travel "mystery" plotlines or you really like the "Japanese delinquent" aesthetic, which was honestly just butchered in this show anyway.