Anime: Tenjou Tenge

NOTICE: This review covers both the series, the extra OVAs, as well as the manga version, which I needed to include as means to prove what A FAKIN PIECE OF SHIT this show is.

THE STAFF
- Animated by studio Madhouse, the king of animated series. This is definitely one of their lesser works though.
- Directed by some nobody who never did something good, so moving along…
- Based on the manga by Oogure Ito, the guy who also made Air Gear. Well, he is not someone big but he has a big fanbased of shonentards to consider himself successful up to a point.

SCRIPT & CAST
Tenjho Tenge was one of the first fighting series I watched after I became a hardcore viewer and I must say I was thrilled with it at first. The story looked very promising, there was a lot of brutal fighting as well as fan service, and the characters had a crazy side to them, turning the whole show to a very dark and erotic psychological thriller at times. Being still fresh out of my teens and not that fond of fighting shonens with their over-idealistic characters and lack of brutal action, I was quickly attracted to its raw nature. “Hey this is a hardcore fighting series for a change” is what I was saying.

Why wouldn’t the initial episodes be amazing? You have these two delinquents busting into their new school and threatening to be the top badasses, beating the crap out of everyone who disagrees. One of them is a black guy simply called Bob, with Rasta hair and a super hot babe to score with every night (if you happen to read the manga). The other guy is… Oh who cares about him; he is the typical shonen blockhead; let’s just focus on Bob and his super hot chick. So, on the first episode alone they create havoc in their school and they get to meet some chick who transforms to a loli as means to save power. And a nice ecchi bath scene. And sculls busting, teeth falling, noses needing a surgeon. And some shady super powerful man who can kill an ox with a punch standing in their way to the top. Yeah baby; this is the stuff of brilliance!

And then… well… something went wrong. After a few episodes the story moves to a long flashback arc as means to explain the backdrop stories of everybody BESIDES Bob and that other guy I don’t care about. Hey, what kind of a switch of focus is this? Anyways, I was willing to accept it since it offered a nice immersion to the adversaries and the hot super chick turning loli. It was nice to see them getting fleshed out and offering the setting some nice background. The amount of comedy and violence though was lowered significantly and turned to a mostly social drama with overblown dramatization, which is far from the initial feeling of the show. And no Bob scoring with his chick either, so no fun.

And then the final episodes arrive and the flashback is over. Back to the present where the duo gets ready to take on the big badass ox-killer. And since he is now fleshed out more THAN THE LEAD DUO he is even more interesting to see how he deals with Bob and that other guy I don’t care about. So here I am getting ready to see an amazing non-stop battle for two episodes in a row… I get nothing… and it ends… WTF!!!

Seriously, it was just another case of an incomplete manga adaptation and it even stopped in the most inconvenient point. I was so hyped, I rushed to read the manga from the start (in case they changed something). Well, apart from censoring a lot of sex and brutal violence the story was identical up to the point the series ended. After that, the story continues with that blunt blondy I don’t care about training with a bunch of weird martial arts masters as means to learn some super technique to beat the GAR villain. WTH, Bob turned to a stunt and the story now turned to a Naruto training arc??? Hardly any fun with the action and the violence and the fan service all being dull. To hell with this crap…

So the animators decided to continue with the story after the training arc is over and the two of them enter a fighting tournament where the main bad guy takes part in too. FACEPALM they used to play dirty and there was yakuza organizations doing all sorts of illegal activities and now THEY PLAY BY THE RULES??? This is going against the very thing I loved in the show; no tournaments, no laws, no fair play, lots of ecchi and brutal beating. And now they have a referee telling them how to play??? FU!

The second season was also a complete waste of time as it was not a series but just two OVAs that skip most of the training and make no sense as they feel completely rushed and vague. And again end as the match begins! WTH, this is totally infuriating!

So I keep following the manga afterwards as means to see the final battle there. AND I AGAIN GET SHIT! The story is again going into another flashback arc, this time going centuries back to the feudal era and showing the creation of the illegal organization and the roots of the weird superpowers everybody is using. Although that again offered even more immersion and fleshing out to the setting, it completely left aside its main attractions; Bob and the ox-killer; and went ahead at introducing lots of people doing lots of overblown drama things, that by the time of the shows’ present are either dead or old grampas nobody cares about.

And that was the last straw; I dropped the series entirely. You stupid mangaka, you don’t flesh out the setting by completely forgetting its main characters for a hundred chapters. You offer it piece by piece and not all at once. I was in for Bob and the GAR villain and not for the stupid explanations of how Japan was isolated from the rest of the world 400 years ago. I DON’T CARE ABOUT THAT; I WANT TO SEE BRAWLING!!! And so does everybody else who begins this series. If we wanted a history lesson, we would be watching History Channel. And if we wanted good samurai drama, we would definitely not look it in a show which begins with school delinquents smacking people in modern Japan. SO WHY ARE YOU BETRAYING YOUR OWN FANS LIKE THIS???

LEGACY
The show lacks direction and consistency. It begins as something and abruptly changes to something else, then returns to the first idea and then switches back to the other. This is not only confusing, it is also like going out of character, off topic, and into the recycle bin. BAD! BAD DIRECTING!

Bottom line, the show is very exciting for a few episodes with the brutal fighting and the ecchi but then the mangaka doesn’t know how to develop his original idea and trashes the premise with long and boring flashbacks, instead of offering them bit by bit as the story moves on and the characters are not neglected in favor of infodump. The production values are ok for such a show BTW, I have nothing against them other than censoring all the juicy parts of the manga and not being SUPER AWESOME in terms of detail and animation. And Bob is such a cool dude to look at. Too bad the mangaka is a racist and dumped him so he can focus on that other blockhead blondy, who is a Naruto look-alike. SCREW YOU!

So no, I do not recommend this anime. It will give you a candy and then it will punch you in the guts and pull it out of your mouth before giving you a boring history book and demanding from you to read it. TO HELL WITH IT!

WORST MISTAKE IN MY LIFE

Yea too simple n straight forward even for my normal reviews so ill go in a lil more detail.

MADHOUSE productions is an AWESOME studio, however its NOT their fault for doing an amazing job in the animation, n making the chicks wit big tits n nice ass hot (too fake however, bleh), but ending up animating a shitty series. Only reason why i gave enjoyment 3 MORE points than it earns is becuz the first 2 episodes i enjoyed but tricked me into watching the whole damn series believing the myth that it will get better like the first 2 episodes.

WRONG

do urself a favor and NOT watch this series. In fact delete it from all ur friends hard drives, burn their dvds and roundhouse kick them in the face if they have a wallpaper of one of the characters on their desktop. If u wanna see hot chicks wit perfect bodies go download porn. More healthy than this series.

this anime had great potential but... it sucked,
ill tell you guys this off the bat.

Anime summary: The story is basically about these "street fighters(Nagi Souichirou and Makihara Bob) that go to a school and fight everyone, finally they find two girls and a guy. The street fighters get really hurt by the one guy and both girls eventually fall in love with one of the street fighters (Nagi Souichirou) and after this they have some fights against some bad guys, and from here the series which could be so great like 7.5/10 becomes a low 3. What i mean by that is this series becomes a huge flash back from ep 10 if I'm not mistaken to 23 or 1/2 way through 24,

My comments: i have nothing wrong with flash backs but it was horrible. I feel as if though i was wasting my time watching this series if i could stop myself from watching it i would. If you want to see this anime badly i would watch the first two eps. and quit while "your ahead". : )

Pros:The animation was great , the music was was really original it reminds me of Japaneses rap and DDR (even if you don't like rap -this coming from someone who despises it-, but this series had good music for the most part.) The characters was great. I was surprised the (good)character's each had their own individual looks and each was different in their own way. Now the (evil) characters were not animated bad but just unfitting for the most part of the theme, they looked as if they were mixed with some buffed out aliens and an assortment of bleach characters
(their are a few people who do look some what similar) I thought the Japanese dubbed was good most of the voices fit into their roles.

Neutral: The story is similar to most fighting animes, the hero or protagonist is horrible at first but gets monstrously strong in a small amount of time being able to defeat everyone. I think most fighting stories are like this but a lot of them have a special something to pull it off. What Tenjou Tenge tried to do was make the series so different that it sucked.

Cons: All i can say here since i do not want to get redundant is that the flash back was the downfall of this series. It had so much potential but in the end the creators did not use this to their advantage.

Yet another failed manga adaption where you can't help but to wonder why did they make it only 24 episodes. Did they actually think it was possible to fit everything into 24x23 minutes (including the OP/ED) and get good results? Not only was the result bad, this whole anime is just a big mistake! Don't get me wrong, it's watchable, just that the way it was showed to us was wrong and I blame the producers.
Tenjou Tenge is basically a story inside a story, it was maliciously cut in half and the 2 parts aren't even that much connected to each other.
One part is what should be the real story and the other is a flashback. Now every fanboy knows the annoying flashbacks in, for example Naruto, which sometimes drag on for 2-4 episodes. Tenjou Tenge outclasses every anime in this field, featuring 11 episodes of flashback and it doesn't even go straight from the start to the finish, they show some pointless scenes in-between.

The characters you see being introduced in the opening sequence aren't really the leading cast, some of them get less screen time than the supposedly support characters. Speaking of the opening sequence, the OP song - "Bomb A Head! V" by m.c.A•T failed in my eyes (actually I somewhat liked the dancing displayed on the video), or rather, in my ears and the same goes for the ED song - "Aishitene Motto" by Kayou Aiko, which is unusual considering avex mode was responsible for music production; I usually like the stuff Avex Trax artists deliver. As far as the instrumental BG goes, I have no real complaints - fast paced music for scenes with intensive activity, violin music for emotional scenes.
They hired an all-star list of seiyuus for Tenjou Tenge, so if I were to say the voice acting was bad, I would be lying. Then again I only care about voice acting when it hurts my ears.

Guess who did the animation for this one - yes, it’s really MADHOUSE. Every fighting anime has gore to some extent and MADHOUSE has been drawing gore for years now, from Cyber City Oedo 808 to Vampire Hunter D – Bloodlust just to bring a few examples. The studio maintains their high standards: sharp lines, distinctive contrasts, vivid colors and the fighting scene visuals had nice effects implemented in, not the crappy old-school speedlines behind a character kind of effects (although I consider them as one of the trademarks for anime). As far as character design goes… well, men were manly and women had big boing boobs.

I think the ecchi side of the anime deserves a special mention. I mean this ain’t no Ikkitousen but it sure had its share of fanservice in the face of pantsushots, cleavage and otherwise naked skin and the women looked mighty fine if I may add. Many people will probably say things like: “How can she move like that with those things bulging out of her, this ain’t real at all, yo!”. Well if you want realism then you probably shouldn’t be watching something that has school kids fighting and killing each other on the schoolyard with teacher doing nothing about it. This ain’t no Divergence EVE either, by the way.

Overall the anime has high production values, just that the adaption from the manga was done rather poorly and ending was cut short.

Now when talking about characters, the series has a short spunky blonde punk who dresses rather similarly to Neo from The Matrix (he thinks the look is manly, at least in the manga version), a tall black man with dreadlocks inserted for comic relief, the wise and powerful chick and her scatterbrained younger sister, the serious and self-knowing villain (at least in one part of the story). That would be the case with the first and last episodes of the series. Once the flashback starts, the main character changes from the blonde punk to the brother of the two voluptuous sisters (the younger one gets almost no screen time during the flashback episodes) and well, the villain of the present time becomes part of the good cast. I have to add that it's rather hard to identify the characters as good or evil as is common in extreme fighting animes, characters that start out with a wish to just kick the shit out of other students end up on the victim side and start training for a somewhat just cause, anti-heroes switch to being heroes and vice versa.
I must say that they should’ve just limited the anime only with the flashback story, skipping all the silliness surrounding Nagi Souichirou who’s the aforementioned blonde punk (who obviously has an interesting past himself, just that they hardly get into larger details about it). The characters and the story of the flashback chapter have more depth and excitement/feel of angst than the timeline of the supposedly lead character and is actually the main reason to watch this anime. Simply because it has a good amount of romance, drama and fighting, the other part has only fighting, fanservice and the black dude breakdancing (which are nice but not enough).

To be fair, the non-flashback episodes do have some degree of romance (I don’t really consider the obsessed state in which the younger sister, Natsume Aya, is over Souichirou romance, more like a stupid plot element, although this would be the first time where a girl falls in love with the guy who sees her naked instead of punching him towards the stars) and some degree of drama derived from the happenings in the past. When talking about plot elements, the main one is still the typical and overused I-wanna-be-stronger-dammit as opposed to the plot of the flashback where the big brother of the two boing-sisters, Natsume Shin, already is the strongest and coolest guy in the neighbourhood (I feel bad for him to share a close resemblance in name with Asuka Shinn - the anime character that should’ve never existed), just that he sometimes goes completely mental and starts his random killing sprees, which causes opposition from his own group and some old guys develop political agendas… yeah, it’s complicated.

Then there’s the ending of the TV series; in short, it goes totally DBZ, just that the fight of the century takes less than an episode as opposed to 26+, honestly give me a Berserk-ending anytime, not this rushed garbage. There is a sequel in the face of an OVA called Tenjou Tenge: Ultimate Fight, which naturally doesn’t give any closure to the anime and that “ultimate fight” is just as short if not shorter than the end of the TV series, although I must say that Souichirou looks rather cool with black non-spiky hair.

For the final word, Tenjou Tenge is a mess with good and bad parts, to categorize it, I’d put it into watch-once-and-forget-about-it folder, or maybe just remember the boobs and try to imitate the dance the black dude does in the OP.

The animation in this series is excellent. The story has a lot of depth, but I fel that the story didn't focus enough on the main character, because it spent more than half of the episodes on the backstory. I loved the characters, even though they were a little stereotypical. The music wasn't anything spectacular, but it wasn't bad either. Overall, the series is pretty decent, and although it didn't make a lasting impession on me, it was definitely enjoyable. I recommend watching this series if you have the time, but don't let it keep you from your regular series'.

After watching the first episode I thought: this is going to be one hell of a series. After finishing the series I said to my poor self: Forgive me!. This shall never happen again.

Explanation: The first episode carried an enormous amount of potential storylines. I really thought Masataka to be the main hero of the series. Changing this to Souchiro did not bother me at all if they have worked more on the later's character. There are so many weak points in the story that simply annoyed me. And here are the details:

The Animation: This was the best thing the anime introduced. The level of details along with character designs were really good. The ecchi scenes were awesome. Changing the background during the fight scenes contributed somehow in decreasing the overall quality of the series. Still, animation-wise: the series was very good.

The sound: Voice casting was good. And the actors did their jobs nice though in many times I sensed decrement in the quality, but not to the degree that could alter the story. The soundtrack passed me unnoticed. I did not like neither the opening nor the ending themes but I am sure a lot of people would disagree with me on this.

The Story : I would like to say that the story was great but I couldn't. Well simply because it was not. At the same time it was not bad. The story somehow seemed twisted in the wrong way directly after the first episode. After that it continued a good course until the tenth episode where it encountered another major twist that simply "broke" the story. the flashback seemed endless and upon reaching the 20th episode I was sucked dead from boredom. A lot of conflictions occured, for example, In the first encounter for Masataka with Aya, Masataka falls for Aya , he even dreams about protecting her, then the story between those two finishes just there. Why? I hope somebody can tell me. Also, I cant seem to find the right word for describing the last episode. Maybe ripped off might be suitable. the ending simply was "the straw that broke the story".

The Characters: Souchiro: I really would like to ask : was he a bad guy? In a lot of situations " when he finished fighting the wrestler for example" they made him good, while he normally should have killed him. This type of flaws really killed the potential for that character. I could've really loved souchiro much more without their effort making him good , because simply it is not him. He is supposed to be dark guy who had a rough childhood and in a normal day would say to Bob: Lets go to school to kill some guys. Masataka: I really loved this character. And one of the reasons that decreased the quality of this series was ignoring him. The story between him and his brother was vague and incomplete. His feelings for Aya were ignored. And the story really did good in killing every potential this character had. As for Maya and Aya, I am sure that they could've been better. But compared to other characters, their development along the sotry was good.

Value: For me, I will not re watch this anime. And i dont think anybody will except for maybe the ecchi scenes.

Enjoyment: Some episodes were very enjoyable, while others were really boring.