As I’ve quipped in previous posts, Tokyo ESP, in a nutshell, is the superhero experience we never got from NBC’s Heroes, and the ESP we never got from Railgun. But compared to the manga, the first season is rough around the edges. It delivers the first arc of the story well, but wiggles out on some details I believe should have been there while putting in things that should not.
But hey, this is what compare and contrast is for.
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Yeah, it’s been awhile since I posted. This season hasn’t done much for me, but really it’s been the summer days, the hot don’t-want-to-go-outside days, combined with work, Firefall, and being generally lazy. Add the start of the new Doctor Who season and it’s a recipe for disaster. But we’ll try to forge ahead here in the closing weeks.
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Watching the last two episodes of Tokyo ESP earlier, I started to think about all of the similarities this show shares with known comic book and television properties focusing on humans with superpowers. While it isn’t a new concept to anime, having done probably hundreds of shows over the past three decades or more, superpowered humans tends to stick within the confines of comic books and video games in the US. Marvel and DC have almost everything you want locked up in print, television, movies, and games. They all almost work along similar storylines. Humans gain powers, humans realize they have to co-exist with normal humans, and normal humans fear what they do not understand and attack them. Racial undertones permeate the subject matter so much so that one could imply that it is a vehicle for pushing a social agenda to the viewer.
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I thought about waiting another week to do sort of the halfway point, but I somehow imagine everything we’re seeing now from this season will be the same next week. With such a strong opening week or two, this season has kind of been a let down, predictably falling off after the second episode into a mushy paste. I suppose the summer can be one of the worst seasons for anime, like anything else summer, when it is too hot to want to bother. It also doesn’t help that I’ve been playing Firefall or entertaining the wife, so I suppose I am not paying attention as much.
Anyway, let’s try to slog our way through, ranked in order.
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