Tokyo Vice

Amazingly fluid action set-pieces and an undercurrent of intrigue drive the story along at a solid pace, not feeling rushed or bloated. The runtime is the perfect amount of time in which to execute on all of its core ideas while still having some fun with it. Personally, I recommend grabbing an old VHS copy of this movie if you can, since it's pretty hard to find in any other way.

It's a visually stunning and well written affair with an intensely striking opening sequence and title track. While it might be a bit dated in presentation and simple by today's standards, it's a solid ... animation that flows incredibly well from shot to shot. Both the direction of scenes and the individual blocking of shots were cinematic and appealing. A minor flaw I would point out is that most of the characters feel very one-sided, a bit more like generalized archetypes: The Stalwart Hero, the Reluctant Lancer, the Innocent Sister, the Corrupt Official, etc. Though, in a way, this adds to the overall timeless feeling of the work for me personally. A story of a scientist's proudest invention, designed to help the ones he loves, twisted into a product of war; a product of war that must be dismantled and torn down for the safety of everyone around the heroes.

TL;DR, It's schlocky, its kitschy, and it's 80s as hell, but it wears it proudly on its sleeve. It's not reinventing the wheel or anything, but not everything has to, right?

Tokyo Vice is an astonishingly mediocre OVA and forgettable to the point where surrounding literature and synopsis fails to even point out that its a mech anime. Yes, its a mech anime of the 'real robot' variety, featuring a bipedal non-humanoid military walker design that undoubtedly was influenced by Kojima's original Metal Gear mech on the Famicom.

The mech is clearly the best part of the show; leading to a man with big gun vs robot setup not unlike Armor Hunter Mellowlink. Of course, Mellowlink is a must watch anime while Tokyo Vice isn't. Honestly, this whole OVA just lacks that visceral energy of contemporary 80s ... OVAs.

Pacing and direction issues plagued the vast majority of old school OVAs but they worked because they imbued schlocky direct to video awesomeness with superior quality (for the time) animation intensity that you generally wouldn't see in tv shows of the time (and certainly not in many modern seasonals). Tokyo Vice just lacks all of that: throwaway goons don't explode into showers of red goo, 70% of the budget isn't spent on 10 seconds of hyper realistic mechanical designs, the main character isn't a dude or chick wisecracking about asses and bubblegum and the main villain isn't a digitized consciousness Stalin trying to abolish everyone's Amazon subscriptions to become the ultimate proletarian cyber pirate. (admittedly that last one hasn't happened in anime yet).

It's just too grounded and unambitious with its premise! At least the music really rocks.

NOTE: Another review that I wrote on Letterboxd on 3/6/2022

This is one of those anime films that I remember renting on VHS when I was a kid, over 20 years ago. Tokyo Vice aka The Tokyo Project was first released in Japan in 1988, but it was not released in the United States until 13 years later by Media Blasters. I decided to revisit it because I wanted to see if my opinion on it has changed or not. When I was 10, I thought Tokyo Vice was a decent anime, not the worst thing ever, as some people claim. I can see why so ... many people disliked it now that I've seen it again as an adult. Tokyo Vice is a dull and uninspiring anime. The characters are uninteresting, and the plot is incredibly boring. The writing is filled with bad action movie clichés and clumsy plot devices. I wanted to turn off this anime so badly because I had no interest in what was going on.

Tokyo Vice is a 53-minute film that felt like it took an eternity to finish. The English dub is, in my opinion, one of the worst I've ever seen for an anime. It's not one of those amusing bad dubs found in hentai titles like Bible Black or older OVA titles like Angel Cop. I felt like splinters were coming out of my hands because the English voice acting was so wooden. When it came to dubbing for this anime, it felt like none of the voice actors gave a damn. The only redeeming feature of Tokyo Vice is the animation. They spent more time creating cool mecha designs than they did writing a good script.

Overall, Tokyo Vice is a terrible anime, and there is plenty of better 80s sci-fi anime to watch instead. Don't even watch it for free because it's not worth it. Rating: 1.5/10