There is a certain style of anime that I like… call it a guilty pleasure. Outside of slice-of-life, romance, and good old-fashioned fantasy, I like a nice, gritty, urban story. One set in a big city with street gangs, etc. Shows that I’ve really enjoyed like that are Banana Fish, Black Lagoon, Durarara, Baccano, K, Jormungand, etc. This season, we get a show in that same atmosphere called Ikebukuro West Gate Park. After watching the first episode, does it stack up to other shows I’ve watched?
Let’s Go!
First Episode Synopsis
Ikebukuro is a town where everyone smiles, follows the rules and minds their own business. For those who don’t, they must contend with the G-Boys, a gang-like faction that serves as the city’s gatekeepers. Among them, is their leader King, also known as Takashi. Takashi has a good friend named Makoto who isn’t part of the G-Boys but he does turn to him for help. This is important because both Takashi and Makoto are chasing down a junkie who is tearing through the city in a high-speed chase. They finally corner him and that’s when Takashi takes him out and steals the glory from Makoto.
Later, we meet a 12-year-old girl named Mion whose mother was hospitalized after being struck by the junkie’s car. That junkie ended up getting his drugs from a place called the North Gate Smoke Tower. Mion tried to set the tower on fire and ended up getting stopped by the G-Boys. After hearing her story, Takashi orders Makoto to find a way to make the drug trafficking disappear. The rest of the episode is spent doing just that… investigating the tower, finding out who was running the whole operation… and setting up a deal with the police to get them to bust in and arrest their leader. Makoto uses various resources ranging from the police itself to some super hacker named Zero One.
In the end, the drug trafficking gets shut down, Mion and her now recovered mother thank him, and Mion kind of hints that she wants Makoto to get with her mother so he could be her dad! Yeah! What a weird thing to say!
Worth Watching?
MAYBE – So, I can definitely say that I enjoyed the first episode but there are some things about it that made me a little leery about putting the YES vote down on this one. The first thing is that this series looked to be episodic. While that’s not a bad thing, usually episodic series is hit and miss. They need to have a main overarching story to tie everything together in order to pull in that interest and while there were plenty of seeds planted here in the first episode to indicate that there will be a big story propping this up, we didn’t get to see enough of it to really know what that story is.
Right now, we just know Makoto has a history with Takashi. They’re friends but Makoto isn’t part of the G-Boys. The G-Boys are seemingly law-abiding and aren’t bothered by the police but yet… they’re a gang? That was a little weird but I guess there can be some chaotic lawful gangs out there so it is a nice little twist compared to other series like this. Makoto also seems to have a history with the police as well which makes things a little too convenient as we saw in this first episode when he talked to one detective named Yoshimura.
Yoshimura said “I can’t hand over investigative information… and then does so… by flat out telling him who the leader of the drug cartel is.
If the police knew this information, then how in the hell could they not handle this on their own!? That made absolutely no sense and it just came off as a cheap plot device to put the spotlight on the main character! That means the police in Ikebukuro are completely incompetent at their jobs if they have to rely on a single person who is stuck in the middle of working for the police and working for a gang to solve their problems for them. On top of that, his day job is a fruit vendor…
Yes… a fruit vendor took down a drug cartel using incredible resources only available to him.
That seems a little too convenient without much explanation. It is only the first episode and these are the seeds that I mentioned. We’ll see if this grows to explain any of this but with this show only having 12 episodes, that’s going to be a big if. Usually series like this take shortcuts just to get to the end so I fear that all of what we saw in the first episode as far as plot devices go will be the norm throughout the series. If so, this won’t be a memorable series but I am hoping to be proven wrong.
P.S. The opening is a banger!
