Meiji Tokyo Renka Episode 1 Review
I feel like we’ve seen this all before. Meet a girl in the modern world, contrive some reason, or no reason, and suddenly poof she’s in a historical setting with a vaguely supernatural twist. Okay, I’m getting a distinct Sengoku Night Blood kind of vibe from this one and that isn’t necessarily a favourable comparison.
However, rather than comparing it to another show that has a similar premise and is also based on a game, let’s look at the first episode of Meiji Tokyo Renka.
We meet Mei, our heroine, in the modern world and quickly establish she’s a loner because she can see ghosts and as a kid she didn’t realise other people couldn’t and she got a reputation as a weirdo. It is a generic enough back story but surprisingly quickly established and the heroine seems to actually have a reasonably positive outlook despite her loner status.
Soon she meets a magician who puts her in a box and poof she’s transported into the past. This is where the anime kind of lost me a bit (though I’ll admit I wasn’t really buying in even from the start). Straight away she meets two of the pretty boys from the opening and we establish that her memory is a little messed up. While she remembers things like her headphones and names of certain historical figures, she needed to be told her own name by what I assume was the fox spirit.
What little personality heroine may have had quickly evaporates into the usual look at everything a bit blankly and answer yes to a lot of stuff. Oh right, I forgot our heroine likes roast beef. Does that count as a personality trait?
I didn’t actually hate this one, but past experience with this set up has convinced me not to have particularly high hopes. I’ll keep watching because even when these sorts of stories play out exactly as expected they are watchable but again, I don’t have much in the way of an expectation that this will be anything more than brightly coloured filler.
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DANCE IN THE LIGHT (MEIJI TOKYO RENKA – YUMIHARI NO SERENADE THEME SONG)
- Episode 1: Alert! Time Travelling Heroine Surrounded by Pretty Boys!
- Episodes 1 – 4: Friendly Talks With Arthifis
- Episodes 5 – 9: Friendly Talks With Arthifis
- Episodes 10 – 12: Friendly Talks with Arthifis
- Meiji Tokyo Renka Series Review
- Images from: Meiji Tokyo Renka. Dir. A Daichi. TMS Entertainment. 2019.
OK, but does it also have clans of werewolves and vampires?
Not yet. Just ghosts.
And let’s be honest, the vampires and werewolves didn’t end up doing anything of note in Sengoku Night Blood so I’m still wondering why they included them (other than they wanted to see what boys with wolf ears would look like).
Fair point.