Tenjou Tenge

To make a long story short, this anime showed incredible promise in the begining, but ultimatly fell way short of expectations. The first few episodes start down a cliched but engaging story setup but by the middle of the the series, it starts to drown in a pool of it's own complexity. The story is way too weighted down by the backstory of people who aren't the story's heroes. And don't even get me started on the fact this series is incomplete; it has no resolution whatsoever! The story Failed. Art was good enough. Sound was forgetable. Characters were interesting but had little to nogrowth. The fighting and humor was enjoyable but not always. Overall, I was left wanting...

Tenjou Tenge a typical shounen anime that takes all the concepts that worked well in other shounen anime and puts it into a High School setting. Tenjo Tenge is basically about two delinquent boys; Souichiro and Bob who enter a school hoping to take it over, like their previous schools but problems occur and then the story turns into a quest to become stronger. Even though this plot (to become stronger) is not the least bit original, the story does become very interesting when it reaches the extremely long flashback, revealing a lot about certain characters. However soon after this flashback arc the story finishes,leaving a lot of questions unanswered and half the story untold. This isn't the only downfall of this anime. The animation quality is okay for the most part although for an anime with plenty of fighting, the quality of the fights is sub-standard. Instead of transforming the intense fights from the manga into fluid animation, all that's produced are static images of impact that just looked like a page straight out from the manga, which is definitely below the level of animation of it's time. If more effort was put into the numerous fight scenes then I would have given it a much better score. The music ranges between really bad and sublime. There are times when the music is so great, with string instrumentals making the average fight seem more intense. Then there are moments when the music is just plain awful, like the deafening ending theme song "Ashite ne moto". Overall this anime did a great job in adapting the superb manga story however it only told half the story, leaving major plot changes and character developments untold. The way it chose to end was poor, with an extremely stupid finale which followed a sad and exciting episode… bad idea. If only this anime does the same thing as others like Full Metal Panic, and make a sequel that looks 10x better than the original. Well at least with the story it has, it was able to portray Action, Drama and Comedy well. So if that's what you're looking for then this is the show for you. ^_^

Note: I saw all 24 episodes including the 2 episode (OAV). I feel I must redeem this anime from its horrible reviews. First off, I did not read the manga, so I can't comment on that, but for the most part this anime was really good. The story to me was relatively coherent and intriguing. The authors did a great job in intertwining all the main characters into the main plot giving each character a pretty good background story. The first episode in my opinion is just what I needed to really get me fired up. It was exciting and the fight scenes were well done.The art was exaggerated but who cares they weren’t to the point of being hentai and it brought some uniqueness to the series. And I don’t think the anime would have worked well without the exaggerated breasts and curvy waist lines it made the fight scenes that much more fun, not because I'm a guy, but because its not the types of character models you see everyday in this particular genre. The intro song was a little corny at first but some how I got really into it after the first couple of episodes and it grew on me. I actually ended up downloading it, it was well worth it. The ending song was quite good also, while the BGM was just okay. There is quite a bit of character development throughout the series while the storyline progresses. Each and every character comes to some sort of epiphany throughout the series whether it be simply finding a reason to fight or to find a way to maintain ones family ties, or accepting ones fate. For this anime's respective length and genre it was very enjoyable. However, one major flaw was the ending it was to open ended while nothing was really resolved. Frustrating enough it had me believing there would be a 2nd season of course there wasn't. Overall, I would rate this anime at least a B because for being an anime that I myself must admit was not to interested in at first, but I was pleasantly surprised. A similar anime series to this was Kenichi which received a higher score but seemed to long to grab my interest. If I ever get around to watching it I'll be sure to write another review.

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