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This show provides good entertainment through the depiction of manipulating the past, but where it can provide entertainment through some elements, it also falls short in so many other ways. Half the characters are introduced then thrown to the sidelines, time travel is such a tired gimmick and the shows use of it is so shamelessly underdeveloped and unoriginal, while the fight scenes are awfully
animated and executed. The soundtrack is pretty great and some of the characters and their dynamics are well explored, but it doesn’t make up for the lack of refinement and originality. Also, in the negatives I won’t really be mentioning the fact that they’re all 15-17ish and their maturity+fighting abilities+character designs are all wildly unrealistic. Everyone, even the largely positive reviews bring this point up and I don’t have much too add, so right here I’ll just say this part was bad and whenever I thought about it, I also thought it was annoyingly distracting.
As for what the show did well, the soundtrack was pretty great at conveying the emotion of a scene while also sounding pretty unique to the show. During moments of melancholy, when when strong emotions aren’t emphasized at all and the show embraces a more meditative atmosphere, it also has a beautiful piano piece to accompany and subtly strengthen the qualities of the atmosphere. The piece drifts aimlessly, conveying a feeling of blissful nostalgia that fits all too well within a time travel show. The songs played during intense moments is well varied while each of them prove to be incredibly useful in strengthening the overall scene. There’s an epic quality to the orchestra, with the choir and string instruments creating a sense of grandeur, while the hard rock and metal mixed in gives it an edge. The pieces all build up as they progress, the climax of these songs is well timed with big events occurring, capitalizing on the power of these scenes and letting metal and hard rock compliment the scene well. The OST is nearly two hours long so there’s way more that can be said, it consistently
accomplishes its job; the scenes absorb the atmospheric qualities of the pieces and any desired emotions become much more potent. Some of the characters are also good. This is mostly the case in the first 12ish episodes, and while I can’t remember these episodes as well as the others, I remember being much more satisfied with the show at this point. Hinata is the reason Takemichi risks his life time and time again, so the believability of their relationship is important. Fortunately, the show takes a varied approach that uses their dialogue and actions to solidify their commitment to one another. The
dialogue between them is snappy and natural while it incorporates a lot of overly cutesy things such as teasing and making promises to each other. In most shows, this would be annoying but it contrasts really well with the rest of the show. Takemichi is surrounded by violent gangs and constantly fails at what he’s trying to do, so to have this jarring sweet moments is more revealing to Takemichi’s personality. In the first half of the show, Takemichi constantly meets with Hinata after fights, speaking to what he values since how seeing her or even thinking of her takes away any doubts of his commitment.
Their personalities are also pretty well designed to go together, each of them are recklessly strong willed, no one in the show has this trait more amped up than them, giving them common ground. It’s still kind of weird that Takemichi is still 26 and she’s 15, plus the gag that Takemichi almost cheats on her twice is more detrimental to the strength of their relationship than funny, but aside from this and the fact that she barely shows up in the second half, it’s a good relationship. Mikey and Draken’s friendship is also well defined in the first half. Since the audience is introduced to their relationship through an outside perspective (being Takemichi) it’s hard to understand their strange interactions initially, but as the show reveals how much these two rely on each other, it speaks to their connection. Kisaki is also a pretty good villain, the show never overemphasizes his presence, but traces of his merciless plans can be seen across the entire show. He doesn’t have much of a personality, but he solidifies himself as a near unreachable threat with his willingness to do horrible things with technical precision and create schemes that work above the thought process or everyone else.
As for the negatives, this show has trouble managing its long list of characters, it tries to build up characters but just zeroing in on 4 of them, to the detriment of 10 others at the time. The show is all about preventing the downfall of the Tokyo Manji Gang, so it seems strange that during these events where the fate of the gang is at stake, half the Gangs Captains don’t contribute. Events don’t feel very
interconnected as a result, the show just picks 4-5 characters out of the 10-15 that it has available and just interconnects their character arcs, while the creator goes out of his way to conveniently ignore the other characters. This wouldn’t bother me nearly as much it does, if the creator didn’t emphasize that these characters were significant. Hinata is the reason Takemichi manipulates the past and she barely shows up for the second half. All the show does is have Takemichi occasionally have flashbacks to Hinata to encourage him. This is also really lazy, the audience and Takemichi already fully understand what’s at stake, so the constant flashbacks take the depth out of Takemichis actions while having
it feel like the shows treating the audience like children.
Takemichis friends also are almost completely ignored in the second half, all 5 of them still haven’t got past the point of just feeling like cliches that are mathematically designed to each fill a role in the group while being quirky (aside from Akkun). As for the Tokyo Manji Gang itself, they were handled pretty well in the first half with the conflict between Mickey and Draken. It was well contained and presented the two most important members of the gang first, so after their arc was finished I thought that the show would spread out to all the other significant members. However, it just does the same thing again but heavily focuses in on 3 new characters. While these characters are given good development and relationships, by doing this is weakens every other previous development from the first half and cuts off the possibility of any development for the rest of the characters. There’s no complexity within these narratives, it couldn’t care less about character management and it effects the entire experience.
Time Travel has been done before, many times. Shows like Steins Gate take the time to clarify all the rules of time travel while presenting a fresh take on it, all while giving each of its characters a round personality and concrete dynamics.
So, when the time travel actually begins it makes as much sense as time travel can while staying incredibly investing due to previous characterization. Shows like Steins Gate prove that time travel can be more than just a gimmick, but shows like Tokyo Revengers present time travel as unimaginatively as possible, depicting it as an old cliche that needs to stop being used. For something as unpredictable as manipulating time, time travel is frustratingly simple and always conveniently gives the main character the opportunities he needs. It always teleports him back 12 years, he’s never punished for going back in time and instead of combining the time travel and characterization (like Steins Gate did)
the two are separated and much too contained within the past and the present. It doesn’t even bring up the possibility of alternate timelines, and it doesn’t consider all the effects changing the past may have on things outside the Manji Gang. I’m not saying Tokyo Revengers had to be Steins Gate, rather I wanted to reflect on how each of Steins Gates elements interweave while being filled with creative
and precise detail. Steins Gate has appeal in so many ways, while Tokyo Revengers can only invest with its emotional beats which, for a time travel show is typically problematic. The problems I have with the time travel and the character management can be summarized in a very similar way. They both
ignore the natural complexities that come with each situation they put themselves in, it keeps on simplifying itself and simplifying itself, but after a certain point it’s so overly simplified that the overall experience is really unsatisfying and unimpressive.
Finally, the animation is passable for the most part. This is a character drama at its core, so the animation does what it needs to, however during fight scenes the limitations that the studio had involving budget, limited staff or even time restraints really begin to show. The fights usually take place between a lot of gang members (between 200-400) so a lot is demanded from the animation team, and their ways of trying to work around it are really obvious and hamper the intensity and emotional investment within the scene. It just turns into a bunch of slow changing still frames that have audio played over it, it happens so much that it can’t really be defended from an artistic standpoint and hurts the chaotic atmosphere it tries to create. Also, during actual fights between gang members usually it cuts away right before something happens, so it doesn’t have to animated it and then cuts back to see what happened. It was also pretty ridiculous how strong characters like Mikey are, fights aren’t very intense since he’s probably stronger than everyone else their combined. Furthermore, there’s a pretty bad back and forth between the two opposing sides, usually gang fights just end up being a compilation of watching the Tokyo Manji Gang leaders beat up people. Even when the show says that they’re losing a battle, this isn’t communicate through the visuals since the Manji Gang leaders are still beating up grunts. There’s only one time I can think of when the Manji leaders looked like they were in trouble, which lasted about a minute. Overall, there’s too much cheap animation tricks and boringly overpowered characters for these fight scenes to be any good at all.
In conclusion, the first half does show promise, however as it went along the negatives became more and more obvious to a point where I couldn’t really enjoy or seriously invest in anything that was happening. The combination of awful character management, a cheap use of time travel and really bad fight scenes made the experience mostly negative.
Enjoyment rating: 6/10
Critical rating: 5/10
Final rating: 5/10
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