Tenjou Tenge
Tenjho Tenge

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Tenjo Tenge is probably one of the most high quality fighting manga out there that not too many people have read.


Art: Now most of you know or have read Air Gear, so it won't come as a surprise when I describe Tenjo Tenge as "fucking amazing" on the art scale as it is made by the same author. It's got some dedicated scanlators, but if you can read it in paper, the art deserves that.Its not only just that, the art gets better by the volume, to the point where not many people have gone that far in detail in the final volumes.


Anime: Why skip? ... Well partly because the anime adaptation was so mediocre of what the series is. It dons the "like-berserk" title, only going into the rather uneventful high-school arc(which is pretty short in the manga), and what really made the series never getting animated. It falls prey to the same thing Air Gear did, mediocre/boring anime and an ending that was pretty much all filler.


Summary: TT starts out as a kind of highschool brawler, not unlike all the ones you've seen before. The manga(just like Air Gear) has fanservice and a pretty good amount of it too upfront. Then after a few flashbacks to explain the story of the group and their (pretty deep) past, we get to the real stuff. It goes from weapons, to robots, to gods. All with this really cool fighting style and in a very high amount of detail. There isn't a lot of "techniques" either, it's all just over-the-top attacks one after another.

I first started the manga by watching the anime which caught my eye due to its great opening(not always the best way to judge the series...)

It had some good moments, but I just couldn't focus on the plot afterwards due to a bit of fanservice and a huge amount of flashback present throughout the whole thing. I thought that it was mainly because the anime present the story wrong which was why I went to the manga.

Apparently the manga had even more flashbacks and to make matters work, it keeps going back the different periods of the past while pulling the reader by to the ... present which makes the story overall extremely confusing. I assume it was a style the manga artist had, but overall it doesn't help for the audience's focus such as who are the main characters and questioning if the present period even worth focusing on due to so much past events.

There was nothing much to the series as there are are some fight scenes, one notable one that was portray really well in the anime. In my opinion, it was better to have set the story in an earlier period and proceed from there since it kept zooming back to the past.

You can have a simple and fun martial arts action story with tons of nudity and violence with a high school backdrop. Or you can have a darker adult-oriented narrative, where the characters are dealing with great supernatural threats in a constantly deepening plot filled with twists and turns. You can't have it both ways. This is Tenjou Tenge's biggest downfall. It's an impossible mixture of things that just don’t blend.

A lot of the characters that the story fools you into becoming invested in are eventually tossed to the sidelines or reduced to mere spectators until the very end where the series hastily tries to ... give their stories some sort of meaningful conclusion. In Tenjou Tenge's fumbling attempts to expand its scope beyond the simple high school setting, some of these characters end up serving almost no purpose at all - making the reader constantly wonder why the creator originally even made such an effort to introduce them to us.

A series that tries to have an over-arcing plot that extends throughout the entirety of its storyline should have all the central plot elements in place by the half-way point. Not so with Tenjou Tenge. New characters are constantly being introduced to hammer home one or two new ideas that the creator just happened to fancy at the time. And you know it's always a bad sign when the story has to do flashback sequences to make it seem like there's any sort of continuity or logic behind the actions of the characters.

Now, the manga ain't completely without its merits. The art style is very pleasing, bordering on amazing. The series' humor can also sometimes be hilariously self-aware and witty. The fight scenes include some great fist pumping moments (one of the best ones for me was Mitsuomi's brief encounter with Inue Shindayu). Some of the character drama is easy to get into and I want to give the series some bonus points for Mitsuomi's and Maya's tough breakup acting as the central conflict during the earlier parts of the story. Many anime/manga stories deal with characters establishing and maintaining love affairs - not that many stop to deal with the aftermath of a failed one. The tongue-in-cheek attitude of Tenjou Tenge can also be a lot of fun and for me it was this over-all silliness that provided the main spark that made me want to keep on going, even while I felt like the entire plot was crumbling into pieces around me.

I would call Tenjou Tenge "a mixed bag". Its weird style does make it somewhat unique and mildly entertaining, but it would be hard to argue that this weird combination of ideas actually works. The series tries to evolve into something greater than its humble origins and it sadly fails while doing so.