Tokyo Revengers Review

The hook is very good. A twenty six year old who has failed at everything learns that his middle school girlfriend has just been murdered, and that shaking her brother's hand sends him exactly twelve years back with everything he knows intact. The first two volumes run that engine hard. A man who is a coward in the present gets to be the only adult in a room full of violent fourteen year olds, and Wakui stages the hierarchy of the Tokyo Manji Gang with enough texture that the jackets genuinely seem to matter.

Then the loop becomes the format. Go back, fix one thing, return to a present that is worse, cry, go back again. Bloody Halloween is the peak and it is genuinely good, because the stakes stay small enough to hold in one hand and Draken is the only character Wakui writes with any restraint at all. After that the series buys time with gangs. New faction, new tattooed lieutenant, new reason Takemichi has to be beaten close to death before delivering the same speech about not giving up. Kisaki works exactly once, as a reveal, and is then asked to carry the causal load of the entire series, which he cannot.

The art is the honest kind of limited. Gang designs and crowd scenes are strong and the character silhouettes are instantly readable, but anatomy in motion is not, and fights resolve in impact panels because the exchange itself is beyond the pen. What finally sinks it is the ending, which takes the one thing the premise had, that changing the past costs something, and hands out a clean slate instead. Thirty one volumes to arrive at a reset button. Mikey deserved better and so did the hook.