Kinda weird that there are two motorsports and one Soda Masahito series this season, and his isn’t one of them.
MF Ghost – 01
First off, I know basically nothing about Initial D, which MF Ghost is seemingly an indirect sequel to. So for me this is basically an original series. It focuses on a near future where internal combustion cars are extinct on the road, and survive only in a kind of snow globe world of exotic car racing.
I have a couple of observations about this premiere, which was basically OK (TBH the best thing about it was Miki Shinichirou as the narrator) but weird. First off, the character designs looked really ugly to me – retro (on purpose I suppose) but not in a good way. Second, holy product placement, Batman. Sukiya clearly wrote the biggest check but it was loaded. That bit about Sukiya being a classic Japanese meal was pretty LOL, I admit (hey, it is the best of the big three).
Mostly, though, the “old-fashioned” attitudes here were pretty striking. The way the girls acted was hilariously 1970s, and those “Angel” uniforms – I mean, a 16 year-old acting as a mascot literally wearing panties? That extends to the “wow, Japan is so great” stuff. That got so over the top that I started to wonder if it was self-parody. “Wow, Japanese food is amazing. Wow, Japanese is so hard, I can’t believe an ignorant hafu can speak it. Naturally, Japan has the racing circuit the whole world is obsessed with and their cars are the best.”
All that was a lot to take, but on the whole the episode itself wasn’t bad. It did make me LOL a few times, intentionally or not. The racing side has potential to be modestly interesting. I don’t see much chance I blog this show (I have higher hopes for Overtake!) but I’ll give it another week or two.
Megumi no Daigo: Kyuukoku no Orange – 01
I’m a big fan of Soda Masahito’s Capeta, which I consider to be among the ten best sports manga (and anime, probably) ever. So I had a certain amount of hope for this sequel to his 1995 manga, which also got an anime adaptation back in the day. But to be honest, the premiere left me pretty cold.
Megami no Daigo shares the big name narrator trait with MF Ghost (this time it’s Tsuda Kenjirou). But let’s be honest, “firefighters are really brave and heroic” is pretty low-hanging fruit. And that’s all I really got out of this – a lot of fawning over how great these guys (and the occasional girls) are. That’s fine, but not especially entertaining. If there’s more to it (and I don’t have any exposure to the original series to compare it against) I didn’t get it out of the first episode. The leash here is going to be a very short one.
Ragna Crimson – 01
TBH I only got about five minutes (generously) in before I bailed. Ragna Crimson screams “generic modern fantasy” from every atom, and Leo was incredibly insufferable literally from the first minute. Nope, not the target audience for this one.
Dominus
October 2, 2023 at 8:54 pmMf ghost only really begins when the eurobeat music is in and the races start(then its pure magic) the rest doesn´t matter
SeijiSensei
October 3, 2023 at 12:39 amI was also fairly unmoved by the fire-fighting anime. I don’t find trainers abusing their recruits especially appealing or dramatic. They need more characterization of the leads and more drama that is not just saving people from burning buildings, or this one is going on the drop list.
Nicc
October 3, 2023 at 8:20 amIt’s just the first weekend of the Fall season and it’s already jam-packed with new shows. I still need to get around to finishing the two remaining episodes of “Sousou no Frieren” and then I’ve got some Monday shows that I’d like to check out.
In the meantime, I can give some impressions here. As you already noted, we’ve got a double-bill of automobile racing shows with “MF Ghost” and “Overtake!”. Then, we have a VRMMO double-bill with “Shangri-la Frontier” and “Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki”. Always two there are; no more, no less.
“MF Ghost” is the only one in this grouping that I watched. When I first saw the title, I was wondering what “MF” stood for when I first looked at the title. The eleven year-old in me immediately shouted, “M##### F###### GHOST!”. That’s… probably not it. I decided to meet him halfway and so I’m going to call it as “MFing Ghost” for the time being. I too am not familiar with “Initial D” except for the Eurobeat and the numerous memes that have spawned from that series.
Like you said, it’s a future where vehicles with internal combustion engines are all but extinct and the handful which have are for a specific racing series. It makes me wonder how underground racing looks like in this setting. We only got some snippets of racing and it looks like that’ll be saved for the next episode when our protagonist, Kanata Livington, finally takes the wheel. Otherwise, it was pretty much a set-up episode to introduce the main cast and to show why Kanata is in Japan. There’s product placement, race queens (One of them being the female MC) and the signature Eurobeat. I’ll give it at least one episode just to see how the racing is like.
By the way, Enzo, I’m not sure if you checked out, “Boushoku no Berserk”. There’s not much there, but maybe that’s because I got distracted because one of the characters was named Roxy Hart (The name on everybody’s lips is gonna be Roxy. The lady raking in the chips is gonna be Roxy). That got me expecting that the series in set in a city named Sh’Kago and I got disappointed when there weren’t any musical numbers.
Guardian Enzo
October 3, 2023 at 8:49 amRoxie Hart? ROFL. Miura must have been a “Chicago” fan.
Litho
October 7, 2023 at 12:52 amDon’t worry, you’ll get a spoiled German shitting all over the Japan-is-Great stuff real soon.
Character design is accurate to the manga art, except for the eyebrows – in the manga they resemble caterpillars, while here in the anime they look more like leeches.
It’s one of those “so daft it’s actually somewhat entertaining” kinds of manga (like Fire Punch). You know you’re reading crap but for some reason you refuse to remove it from your reading list.
Funniest character is the GT-R driver. All the other drivers have insipid monologues about car types, history, handling characteristics, etc (basically author copy-pasting auto magazine reviews), but the GT-R guy is single-minded and just goes “Number 7, Number 7, Number 7” all the way. You can’t help but love him.