MF Ghost

As electric vehicles dominate everyday life in the 2020s, interest in traditional combustion engine cars is maintained through a motorsports series known as the MFG. Hundreds of ambitious drivers, with a staggering 30 million viewers online, fiercely compete for a spot in the Godly Fifteen—the leading 15 racers—and a chance at the grand prize of 100 million yen. Among these individuals aiming for the top is 19-year-old Kanata Rivington.

Having attended a famous racing school in England, Kanata sets his sights on the upcoming MFG tournament and enrolls in the competition under the alias "Kanata Katagiri." In comparison to his opponents' flashy vehicles, Kanata's Toyota 86 GT, passed down from a former MFG contestant, puts him at a considerable disadvantage. Kanata receives guidance from a Godly Fifteen member, but he still treats the MFG as only a stepping stone for his true goal: locating his estranged father. Meanwhile, Kanata's appearance sends shockwaves through the scene as his driving style eerily resembles that of a once legendary racer.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Katagiri, Kanata Main

Uchida, Yuuma Japanese

Saionji, Ren Main

Sakura, Ayane Japanese

Takahashi, Ryousuke Supporting

Koyasu, Takehito Japanese

Takahashi, Keisuke Supporting

Seki, Tomokazu Japanese

Takeuchi, Itsuki Supporting

Iwata, Mitsuo Japanese

Iketani, Kouichirou Supporting

Yao, Kazuki Japanese

Akiyama, Wataru Supporting

Matsumoto, Yasunori Japanese

Kenji Supporting

Takagi, Wataru Japanese

Kogashiwa, Kai Supporting

Canna, Nobutoshi Japanese

Fumihiro, Hiroshi Supporting

Hosoi, Osamu Japanese

Kurosu, Nobuhiko Producer

Suzuki, Yuuji Producer

Naruke, Yoshinori Producer

Kikuchi, Yuuta Producer

Reviews

Dec 17, 2023

Marinate1016

Recommended

I know it’s insane to say as someone who grew up in the 90s and 2000s, but I’ve never seen Initial D. Therefore, I don’t have the emotional and nostalgic connection that many people have with MF Ghost and it didn’t resonate with me.

As someone who hadn’t seen Initial D, I found MF Ghost to be decent on the whole. There’s some really epic racing scenes, hot girls and comedy, but that’s about it. Or never really crossed into the really good territory for me. It was clear that this series plays heavily on nostalgia for a bygone era and a previous series, and ... to really get the full enjoyment out of it you need to have grown up in that era/watched the original.

Since I couldn’t relate to those things, for me, I actually thought that the character interactions and motivations were the best part of this series. Kanata and Ren were fun to watch. While Ren definitely got a little tropey in terms of her affections for Kanata, I thought it was cute and enjoyed seeing her try to plan out things with him. Kanata’s relationship with his racing boss was cool too. They teased a budding rivalry with he and a few other racers that we didn’t see explored in this season, but hopefully in subsequent seasons we will. Kanata’s desire to retrace his parents’ footsteps and learn more about his father was cool too. There’s a decent amount of mystery there that keeps me hooked on the story.

Speaking of racing, there’s only two big races throughout the show, but that makes sense given the story is only at the beginning. The CGI during these two races is phenomenal though. I’ve got to say, I’m not normally a fan of CGI but it’s done well here. The Eurobeat soundtrack doesn’t do much for me as I’m not into Eurobeat at all and again, didn’t grow up with Initial D, but again, you can tell it’s playing heavily into nostalgia and I think longtime fans will be happy.

Other than the characters and those two race scenes, I appreciated the car knowledge that was dropped in this show. I’m a longtime GT and Forza player so seeing some cars in the anime that I’ve used in the game, and learning about new cars from this was pretty cool.

Overall, I’ve been consistent from the start that Overtake!! Is my best racing show of the season. I think that show has everything from characters, to drama to the actual business side of racing and much more. MF Ghost was just flat to me. I liked Ren a lot, enjoyed seeing her swoon like a maiden in love and the couple races we got were solid, but that’s it. I was never really moved emotionally like with Overtake!! My feelings are probably not that common since most people watching this will have seen the original, but that’s just how I came out of this one feeling. Not a bad show, not a particularly great one either. Still, I’ll be around for more if we get it.

MF Ghost gets 7 out of 10.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jul 10, 2024

PanzerIV-J

Mixed Feelings

Caution: MF Ghost is not an Initial D successor.

It's best to judge MF Ghost on its own rather than comparing it to Initial D because it falls far short in comparison. It's passable on its own, but it doesn't have the same essence and soul as the original, which made it such a success.

This show loves referencing the fact that it is even linked to Initial D.
It literally tries to reference it in every spot imaginable; it likes to reference Takumi, but he isn't even in Japan anymore; Ryosuke has only made an appearance on screen; and the only Initial D characters shown in MF ... Ghost are minuscule side characters people only notice after they reference themselves from a race from the Initial D series.

The main problem with this anime is that it has a lot of romance and filler content. To put it bluntly, it's so unenjoyable that I would rather drink the chemicals under my sink than be subjected to the filler content that doesn't add anything to the story.
This “romance” would not be an issue, but it interrupts the race every 3–7 minutes to skip to Ren thinking of Kanata's car podium changes, to then go back to the race, to then be shifted off to the announcers. Or Ogata having a breakdown over stuff he already knows Kanata is capable of, or just the fact he has zero belief in Kanata after he has shown his talents.
I am being honest here; these cuts to Ren, announcers, and Ogata happen randomly in the middle of a race; they actually worsen the race every time they pop up since you are taken out of the race forcefully without any lead up to it.
I'm pretty sure that everyone that came to watch this came for the racing, not getting cut off by the one-sided romance of Ren acting like a fangirl for Kanata, which feels forced onto the viewer. The same with announcers and Ogata's reactions to Kanata in a race.
These interruptions are like getting a cut-scene in a video game when you are trying to do something passively. Then it forces you into a random cutscene that has zero reason to exist, and then you lose whatever items you were trying to get right before the cut-scene happened. This is an exact representation of the annoyance of these random filler content events.
I wish the show would focus more on the races themselves rather than cutting to other characters' opinions. These interruptions take away a lot of the excitement from the races, especially when they happen randomly during intense moments. I'd prefer to watch and form my own opinions. The anime could use the details and inner thoughts of the drivers to explain techniques in a simple and understandable way, all while keeping me engaged in the race, just like Initial D did.

Next gripe: MF Ghost differs a lot from Initial D's focus on street racing. Initial D centered on things like road conditions, driver techniques, and sometimes the mental endurance of driving. MF Ghost lacks these elements to various extents. The main reason for this is that MF Ghost leans more towards professional motorsports, similar to GT automotive races on tracks, unlike Initial D's individual “head-to-head” street races. For instance, Initial D had intense races like the “Gum Tape Death Match,” where Takumi had his hand duct-taped to the wheel for a downhill battle on Akina. This tested his adaptability against an experienced opponent. MF Ghost hasn't presented a test like this yet or anything to show Kanata's ability to handle different stressful situations; he just starts off perfect, with very few flaws. Thus, how would he even grow as a racer if he just constantly had more skills for plot reasons?
Moreover, MF Ghost adopts a hyper-focused professional driving style. The characters are mostly trained motor professionals who deliberately went to driving schools to learn their techniques. This is a significant contrast to Initial D, where most characters had little professional experience before facing Takumi. The result was very different races with street techniques, not track techniques, as shown in MF Ghost so far.

Next is the racing aspect, and honestly, it seems a bit impractical. It's hard to believe that a mostly unmodified Toyota GR86, without a turbo or supercharger, could realistically compete with a Porsche or a Ferrari in this context. Not to be critical, but a base GR86 has 228 horsepower (170 kW). To be on par with these higher-performance cars, it would likely need a turbo, pushing it to around 300–375 horsepower (224–280 kW). Even then, it might only have a fighting chance against a Porsche Cayman, which starts around 300 horsepower. Going up against a Ferrari seems like a stretch.
Perhaps if the entire race were downhill, a base-engine GR86 could have a shot, especially with a skilled driver adept at drifting and managing weight distribution. However, in any other scenario, it seems a bit unrealistic and not quite reflective of the actual capabilities of the car.
Even when suspension changes happen, they are almost more unrealistic. The changes done to the vehicle only assist with the ability to drift; any vehicle with 200–400 more horsepower than the GR86 can 100% pass it on straightaway almost instantaneously. With what is being raced on here, it is more like a track race than a touge, and it is statistically much better to have a vehicle that can grip corners than one that can drift with ease. Quick examples can be time attacks, where vehicles are all-wheel drive, like Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and Nissan GTRs, are extremely popular and will 100% dominate a closed-circuit race.

Another problem is just characters in general. Many are nonsensical and insanely forgettable, and one character actively seeks out 17-year-old schoolgirls because they have a “loli fetish” and I guess cannot fathom dating women that are 18 or older (This is their whole character outside of racing). Not to mention, the show copies aspects of characters from Initial D, like Ogata being just a modern re-imagination of Itsuki; they seem to have 80% of the same identity. Even copying the scene from Initial D where Itsuki is going down Akina with Takumi and freaking out about the speed, MF Ghost copies this almost perfectly with Kanata and Ogata. It does not feel like a “love letter” to Initial D fans, more like a company watering down a product because they couldn't keep the soul of the original series. The season also ends on a cliffhanger too, not fun.

This also ties in with the art style. Remember, this can be subjective, but Initial D's art style is moderately lost here and is replaced with a mediocre job of making the characters look close to the original. I am mainly talking about the eyes. I know they tried their best to get the style of initial D, but it flops big time and looks a bit weird. Not only that, but I would rather it be an entirely different style at that point; then it would look somewhat odd and not do justice to where the show originally came from.
To be honest, I have zero clue why they wouldn't make this anime by the original companies that produced some original Initial D stages, companies that are SynergySP (5th & Final Stage), A.C.G.T. (Extra #2 & Stage 4 + Wangan Midnight), Studio Comet & Galloop (1st Stage), or even SANZIGEN & LIDENFILMS (New Initial D movies). These all could have done a better job at creating an art style that would work well with the series. This series, in general, is pretty popular and profitable, so it shouldn't be an issue to have a previous company do it. I personally would've chosen SANZIGEN & LIDENFILMS since they made an amazing reinterpretation of Initial D's First Stage with their 3-movie set.
Lastly, some characters in MF Ghost say that Kanata is already a much better racer than Takumi. This is not true; Takumi had to learn his own course since he was 14 and was a very talented touge racer since he could go a few millimeters from every guard rail in a race. Kanata was just well instructed in his racing driving school by Takumi. Small rant: “Why would they say this? It wouldn't bug me for them to say that Kanata has been the best driver since Takumi, but they basically claim that he is already much better than him. This show is so bad at alienating OG fans of Initial D that it is almost comical.”


I associate Initial D with street racing and downhill touge battles; that's what made the anime memorable. While MF Ghost is okay in its own right, don't approach it with the expectation that it will mirror the exact experience of Initial D, because you will be disappointed.

I would recommend this to anyone that doesn't get bugged by these issues as a 7/10.
But if you're an Initial D fan, I think you will be very upset at the bare minimum, give it a quick look, but overall I wouldn't recommend it to you: 6/10.

If you think I am being hard on this anime, I am. Of course, if your favorite series had an addition to it that didn't add anything besides complaints, then you would be somewhat upset too.

🗿 (Quick hint: Please watch Initial D instead if you haven't, even with the dated animation, it is still golden.)
(Hint 2: Overtake is also a great anime this season and has a racing themes) 🗿

Hoping for an anime adaptation of GT-giRl, it's a manga blending grand touring, track racing, and CGDCT elements. The fact that there were already two racing anime this season gives me hope that we might see GT-giRl on screen someday!

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 18, 2023

Greekie

Not Recommended

Funny

MF Ghost is the most garbage seasonal anime of Fall 2023 and a disservice to not only the anime that came before it, but racing in general. Here's why:

The worldbuilding is as shallow as it gets. If the narrator didn't tell you that the automotive industry went fully electric and self-driving at episode 1 you wouldn't have guessed it. The author makes no conscious effort to remind you of that fact, and it gets forgotten the moment that it is mentioned. You might as well consider the setting as basically mid-late 2010s Japan because that's basically all there is to it. I find it ... completely hilarious how the MFG race is one of the last bastions of fossil powered racing, but motorsports like Rally and open wheel series like F3 are mentioned and the author makes no conscious effort to say that they are electric powered, hell, you can even see in a flashback that there is in fact an F4 car still powered by a combustion engine, it's a joke.

The MFG race, where most of the racing will come from, is nothing but glorification of a 12 year old inner thoughts of Fast and Furious or the author's glorification of his shitbox 86 taken to the extremes. Rules that are just inane for no reason, all to ham up the MC car against what are essentially supercars, ban against electric and the crippling handicap for hybrid cars, and the fetishization of grid girls with the Angels, and you essentially have what the author thinks is the "good of ol days of racing", and what I can only assume is a hatred for the modern innovations of the automotive industry, a notion all too shared by car enthusiasts with a single braincell. But that's no surprise, given the author hasn't learned a single thing about racing, or how cars work from his time making Initial D, and that he has no one to advise him about it this time.

The characters are the worst offenders, along with the story, if you can hardly call it one. The MC is a total joke and a complete mary sue, but that's to be expected, the author couldn't write a compelling MC to save his life in Initial D (an MC he crippled off-screen, btw), and he couldn't write one now. His main motivations of finding his parents in Japan are instantly forgotten in favor of just getting him to race and wipe the floor off of other drivers in cars that far exceed his in performance. But it's okay because he can drift and therefore he's the fastest driver in the track. Yeah, it's that kind of show. Oh yeah, how could I forget the other colorful cast of characters like:

-Forgettable racers with one personality trait
-Haughty racer with superiority complex meant to be an antagonist but is quickly forgotten by the first race
-Side character that falls in love with the MC for no other reason other than to fall in love with him
-Supportive cast of characters meant to help the MC and nothing else, might be creeps on the side too.
-A racer with a creepy obsession over a grid girl that is a high schooler, while said racer is at his 30s.
-Cameo characters from Initial D that serve nothing to the plot but make the audience go "YOOOOO IS THAT HIM? THAT'S HIM, HE'S THAT ONE GUY!"
-And last, but not least: The rival character that dates underage girls (or as he likes to correct others, dating girls that are age 17)...and then dumps them once they become of age because they become "unlucky" for him.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Credit where it's due though. There are two characters that are siblings that co-ordinate each other's driving, but they're quickly forgotten the moment the MC beats them. This caveat doesn't save the fact from the main takeaway that the author can't write characters at all. They are merely there as either obstacles for the MC, or to help him, and nothing more. They're not compelling, they're not even likeable, and they don't serve any purpose to the story.

I don't wanna lambast the show that much though. The animation and sound department did a good job trying to salvage this broken mess. The CG is phenomenal and as always one of the best when it comes to CG animation as a whole, I'll always praise them for it, and while Eurobeat is an overrated genre of music, it serves the purpose of making the races watchable- I mean, entertaining, well. Does it save the anime? Hell no. But at least it salvages the part where most people who come to watch this show are interested in, even if the races themselves are unrealistic.

The only reason why I think the show got a second season (supposedly releasing some time next year), is the same reason why Morbius got re-released to theaters due to supposedly "high acclaim from viewers", it got memed to hell and high heaven. The community has memed the show and Initial D so much that they deemed this garbage fire of a show applicable enough for a second season.

Never mind the fact that this show is a poorly written excuse of a sequel to an already decent to turned bad (imo) show. Never mind the fact that the author is a hack that copies scenic shots of Japan's mountain roads from Google Street Views and pastes them to his manga panels with no changes whatsoever. And never mind the fact that characters are written to be uncompelling or just downright creepy. No, this show will live and die by the community's meme attitude and poorly conceived notions of drifting.

And to that I say to the racing anime community, however small it may be:

My brother in Christ, why are your standards so low that you'd praise a show like this?

I get it, the racing anime scene is frankly non-existent. Initial D, despite how bad it is, is the only one that managed to hit the mainstream viewership. But for the love of god, don't let MF Ghost turn into that too. Anime like Overtake and Wangan Midnight deserve that attention much more, they're shows that actually care about racing or cars, not this, not this sorry excuse of a sequel of an author trying to cash his last few bucks as he slowly gets to retirement.

We need to have better standards, because we deserve better.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: MF Ghost Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) KANLen09 - Sep 30, 2023	135 replies	by Kaydansnk »» Nov 3, 12:52 PM
	Poll: MF Ghost Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 ) KANLen09 - Dec 17, 2023	72 replies	by HiljainenSipuli »» Jun 5, 7:42 PM
	Poll: MF Ghost Episode 11 Discussion Fortress_Maximus - Dec 10, 2023	38 replies	by HiljainenSipuli »» Jun 5, 7:18 PM
	Poll: MF Ghost Episode 10 Discussion KANLen09 - Dec 3, 2023	44 replies	by HiljainenSipuli »» Jun 5, 4:41 PM
	Poll: MF Ghost Episode 9 Discussion KANLen09 - Nov 26, 2023	41 replies	by HiljainenSipuli »» Jun 5, 4:20 PM