Tokyo Majin Season 1 Series Review: It’s Like Someone Gave the Scooby Gang Super Powers But Forgot About Fun

Overview:

During senior year an apparently mysterious new student transfers in to some academy. And then a groups of kids get superpowers. Seriously, that’s all I got out of this though I guess there was some destiny/fate thing going on as well if I’d been able to pay more attention toward the end.

Review:

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet because to be honest, by about episode 8 the only thing keeping me watching was that I refuse to review a series I don’t finish, and having sat through eight episodes of this train wreck, I very much wanted to have something to show for it. Pretty much, avoid. Sure there are zombies, demons, cackling villains, superpowered teens, and a mish mash of religious and spiritual references tossed about in a way that should actually appeal to me on every level, and yet this is a horrendous chore to watch.

Starting with the characters, the group of five from the school have zero chemistry. Admittedly, at the start they aren’t a group and the new kid and the bad boy aren’t too bad together, and the other three aren’t so bad as a group, it is just when they put all five together or start trying to do intersecting relationships the whole thing falls flat fast. In some fight sequences I’m sure the writers even forgot certain characters were in particular scenes because they would literally just stand and do nothing (not even call encouragement) until there was no one else left standing and then maybe they’d get involved.

The bad boy is the bad boy because he speaks frankly to his teacher, walks out of class (like straight out the window), and gets into fights on school grounds because why not. This is really incredibly lazy characterisation and we have the same issues with each of the other characters. New kid has no personality. Zip. Unless he’s standing with someone, you could almost just pretend he wasn’t in the scene. Which given he’s apparently important you might want to give him some personality trait. The good girl is only seen as such because everyone else refers to her that way. We seldom see her do anything that would actually make us think she’s a goody two-shoes. The other two characters have their school club related personality traits and their friendship/attraction to the other one or the good girl and basically that’s their entire personality. There’s almost no growth for these characters in the early episodes and by the time you see some positive changes, it is a little bit too late to make you care.

The story is a mess that heavily relies on throw a random monster/villain into the city and go crazy for a bit. Have the teens sniff out the issue. Some sort of fight sequence where they are royally smacked down. Go regroup and have a pep-talk training session. Give up with the planning and have someone in the group go off to face whatever it is. Everyone else will then decide they have to go too. Some other fight sequence where they may or may not actually win. Occasionally remember that there actually has been some severe collateral damage (read many many victims in the city). Honestly, there is no way anyone still lives in that town after all those incidents. They packed up and moved on.

Then we have our cackling villains and occasional other superpowered individual. They delightfully add nothing to the story of note except an occasional fight or bit of less than witty banter. Possibly these characters could have been more interesting, but they receive about as much attention as the main cast do, which is very little.

There’s apparently another season of this. I won’t be starting it. I’d love to know your thoughts on this series if you’ve watched it. Maybe someone has a better opinion of it?

Thanks for reading.

If you enjoyed this post and like the blog, consider becoming a patron to support further growth and future content.

Thanks,

Karandi James.