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Bosozoku, also known as biker gangs, is a Japanese youth subculture that usually is circling around customized motorbikes. It appeared around the 1950s and lost it’s previous popularity in the 2000s. These types of biker gangs first appear with the returning of the World War 2 veterans who found it difficult to adjust to the normal everyday life after the wars end and were in search of adrenaline. Usually the bosozoku members are between the ages of 16-20, recognizable by their almost military uniforms, including jumpsuits with slogans and combat boots. They were famous with their strict hierarchy and were often associated with organized crime ... in Japan. Back in the day these gangs were responsible for a large part of the country’s crime activity including vandalism, road traffic, violations, etc. and they even had connections to yakuza.

After we got a bit familiar with the Japanese biker gangs lore, we can now look into Tokyo revengers. This review is based only on the anime and not the manga.

Bosozoku is quite unique topic for this decade and is a perfect platform to create fiction out of it. Who don’t wanna watch an anime about an unhinged group with hierarchy, strict rules, fun clothes, subculture interests and action who constantly is running from the police? It can also make great story with historical elements. However “Tokyo revengers” is rather disappointing. In all of these aspects. We got to see literal kids running gangs, organizing illegal fights and betting on them, beating adults and guys that clearly have the physical advantage in this particular encounters and clearly taking themselves extremely seriously that it even starts to feel comedic. This anime could easily be a parody of both the time traveling trope and the street gangs and it could have made so much sense that way.

The story goes this way: Takemichi Hanagaki is a 26yo loser with no stated education, no “adult” job, no interests, no introduced friends, family or significant other. He plays the role of the mc in the show. A news report announces that his one and only ex-girlfriend from middle school died tragically with her brother because of the currently active Tokyo Manji Gang (which the police somehow can’t get a hold of). A few hours after Takemitchi sees that someone pushes him in front of a train and moments before his life ends he’s flashed back to a moment from his past 12 years ago, particularly the moment that his middle school life started to fail apart. Not much later he encounters his first and only girlfriend for whom he still (surprisingly yay) has feelings and her little brother (to whom Takemichi reveals the truth about his time traveling experience) and somehow returns to his timeline. But something appears that has changed: the brother of his ex is alive, has saved him from the train accident and demands that the mc should go back in time and safe his past girlfriend. For some reason Takemitchi decides to engage with a problem that has nothing to do with him and throughout the whole series he gathers more and more problems for solving that has minimum or almost nothing to do with him in general. This way he encounters the two characters that the fanboys and fangirls are madly obsessed with (Mikey and Draken) that runs the Tokyo Manji gang back in the day when it first is developing. Suddenly they decide he’s their friend for reasons still unknown for me. It’s stated that he were very inspirational in one monologue and a fight and somehow for this they both adopt him in their teen gang.

The first thing I want to look into are the characters. It’s well known that if you don’t have remarkable plot line you should at least compensate with good characters and interactions/relationships between them and the opposite of course. “Tokyo revengers” lack of both characters and plot. All of them feel like cardboard cutouts: they have no clear personality, no interests (except fighting to death with other gangs and with themselves), they’re almost never shown in their everyday life, they have no clear morals, they’re unreasonable and extremely stupid. They’re mostly children that take themselves way too seriously, their age variates between 13 to 15 and they have no background to support whatever personality they claim to have. Parents are not introduced, leaving the angsty teens to do whatever they like whenever they like despite the fact that they’re hardly 15yo. The characters are mostly unlikable; there is nothing to make the watcher care about them. For example the mc don’t show much interest for his previous friends and as soon as Draken and Mikey are introduced, they’re thrown in the basement; there are no shown characteristics about them except their appearance, the story don’t look into them despite being the closest people to Takemichi from his teen years. As much as Draken and Mikey, being the leaders of their gang, are in the front, they lack personalities and usually appear on screen only to make unreasonable decisions and fight with other people. They are extremely unrealistic for a non-fantasy anime and are uninteresting. Usually the hype they have mostly comes from their unrealistic fighting abilities that don’t quite add up keeping in mind their age (14) and the setting of the world they live in. What is most showed in the plotline is the lack of growth the characters have throughout the series. We can see that the mc is still stuck in his 14yo mindset despite the fact that he should be behaving as a grown man. The show starts with him being a good-for-nothing crybaby and ends with no difference to that. He didn’t even go through an arc of becoming physically stronger while having the ambition to take over the whole toman gang. There were scenes where he showed some “mental” strength that appeared to inspire some other characters and I still can’t understand how: his monologues weren’t motivational - just childish, basic and unnecessary. They weren’t mature. The mc just straight up jumped into action without a single thought about how these actions will affect the future he so desperately tries to change.

I can’t quite understand the whole death situation. There were so meaningless deaths and suicides that honestly made me laugh at some point. Characters killing themselves because they’re scared of someone who will kill them; characters killing themselves to prove a point; characters killing other characters, because someone else told them to do so. At the end the character, that everyone were so scared of killed two folks in completely unusual way. The main “villain” were portrayed so badly and didn’t create an atmosphere to really feel like the bad guy. The mental issues here were awfully represented. In the “tragic” backstories of the only two characters in the show that had backstories at all, were poorly constructed and almost no important parts were shown of them. Nothing to create an impression at all.

The whole thing felt like an watpad story written by a 13yo. No solid plot at all, no reasoning, poorly written characters. Even the time travel trope looked like a complete joke about the science behind this said “phenomenon”. I still can’t understand how the side characters picked up so easily with the mechanics of the time travel and even believing in its existence in the first place. It’s a non-fantastic world after all.

Aside from storytelling and plot Tokyo revengers disappoints also in its animation. Compared to other shows from 2021, this one feels like it’s created by an extremely unexperienced studio using powerpoint to create it’s animes. Most of the characters are drawn awfully and don’t look like their age. The fights are not animated properly and whatever the studio was trying to do with that art style (maybe trying to make it unique and more resembling the manga) it didn’t turn out well. Also the almost 3 minute recap that almost all of the episodes have. Is that even needed? We are not watching an hour long episodes to easily lose the track of what happened previous especially when it wasn’t much to begin with.

In conclusion this show was an absolute mess in the worst way possible, having no remarkable story, no plot, awful style and animation, no reasoning, etc.

Still there are some things that I will never understand and if someone have the answers, I’ll be really grateful to explain them to me. Spoilers ahead:


What was the point of Mikey being the head of Valhala in the first place? And why lethally wounded characters can still fight in that condition and even recite a monologue while they clearly can be saved?