“Tokyo Revengers” opens with its hero face-down in the dirt of his own life. Takemichi Hanagaki is a 26-year-old freeter — a part-timer drifting through a gloomy existence — when he learns that Hinata Tachibana, the only girlfriend he ever had, was killed by the Tokyo Manji Gang. The next day, waiting on a station platform, he gets pushed onto the tracks by a herd of people. He closes his eyes expecting to die. He opens them twelve years earlier, in 2005, in the middle of his own middle school years.
That is the engine of the series, and it is a good one. Ken Wakui’s manga ran in Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine from March 2017 to November 2022, collected in 31 tankōbon volumes. Liden Films adapted it for television. The series comprises one season of 51 episodes, first aired 2021-04-11 and last aired 2023-12-27 on MBS and TBS. Those episodes reached viewers in three broadcast runs: April to September 2021, January to April 2023, and October to December 2023. It holds a TMDB audience score of 8.4/10 across 1,345 votes.
Trailer, via Crunchyroll.
Takemichi Hanagaki and the 12-Year Jump
The time travel is not a puzzle box. It is a lever. Every trip back to 2005 gives Takemichi a chance to change the present, and every return shows him what his meddling actually did. The show establishes this fast: in the past he finds his friends coerced into underground fights run by Kiyomasa, a Tokyo Manji Gang member. His growing friendship with Mikey alters the present and keeps his friend Akkun out of prison — until Akkun takes his own life out of fear anyway.
That beat is the series in miniature. Takemichi wins a round, and the win curdles. The Tokyo Manji Gang is never just a gang of cartoon villains; it is a machine that keeps producing the same deaths from new angles.
Mikey, Draken, and the War on Moebius
The gang’s internal politics carry more weight than the brawls, and the show knows it. The Tokyo Manji Gang declares war on the rival Moebius group to avenge Pah-chin’s friend. Takemichi learns that Draken, Mikey’s second-in-command, will be killed, and that the threat of that death leads to Mikey’s descent into brutality. He reconciles their conflict. Then Moebius ambushes the gang anyway, led by Shūji Hanma of Valhalla.
The ambush turns on Peh-yan, who was angered over Pah-chin’s arrest. Kiyomasa stabs Draken for humiliating him. The Tokyo Manji Gang still wins, Draken survives, and Takemichi beats Kiyomasa. It is a satisfying sequence, and it is also a trap, because the present he returns to is worse than the one he left: Hinata and his friends are still dead, and Tetta Kisaki has turned the gang into a violent syndicate.
Kisaki, Baji, and the Cost of Going Back
The second half of the story is where the series stops being a revenge fantasy and becomes something sadder. Back in 2005, Kisaki exploits Pah-chin’s absence to become a division captain. Mikey promises to expel Kisaki if Takemichi retrieves Baji, who faked his defection to investigate Kisaki. Takemichi joins the gang under Takashi Mitsuya and uncovers Mikey’s unresolved hatred for Kazutora, who killed Mikey’s brother, Shinichiro, years earlier.
The voice cast sells this material. Yuuki Shin plays Takemichi, Azumi Waki plays Hinata, Ryota Osaka plays her brother Naoto, Yuu Hayashi plays Manjiro “Mikey” Sano, and Tatsuhisa Suzuki plays Ken “Doraken” Ryuguji. The supporting roster is deep:
- Takuma Terashima as Atsushi Sendo
- Yuya Hirose as Takuya Yamamoto
- Shunsuke Takeuchi as Makoto Suzuki
- Shota Hayama as Kazushi Yamagishi
- Satoshi Hino as Masataka Koyomizu
- Masaaki Mizunaka as Keisuke Baji
- Subaru Kimura as Haruki Hayashida
Why the Time Travel Works
Most time-loop stories treat the mechanic as a riddle to solve. “Tokyo Revengers” treats it as a moral bill that comes due. Takemichi is not clever and not strong. The show keeps its hero ordinary and keeps its stakes personal, which is the harder trick. His only real asset is that he keeps showing up.
He closes his eyes thinking he’s about to die, but when he opens his eyes back up, he somehow had gone back in time 12 years.
The genre label on the series reads Animation, Action & Adventure, Crime, Drama, and that last word is doing the heavy lifting. The fights are staged well enough, but the violence that matters is the violence that happens offscreen, in the years Takemichi skips over. He never sees Akkun’s last day. He only sees the aftermath, and the aftermath is always a body.
What the Show Gets Wrong
The pacing sags. Fifty-one episodes is a lot of runway, and the middle stretch is where the show feels its length most. Kisaki is a strong antagonist because he is patient and petty in equal measure, but the series leans on him hard enough that the tension starts to thin.
The time-travel rules also stay loose in ways that feel less like mystery and more like convenience. The series is not interested in building a system, and that is a legitimate choice, but it means the tension has to come entirely from the characters. When the plot stalls, nothing underneath catches it.
Where the Series Lands
“Tokyo Revengers” is a revenge story that keeps discovering revenge is not the point. Its best idea is that saving one person in 2005 does not save them in 2017, and that the distance between those two dates is where all the real damage lives. The manga’s reputation is earned — by June 2024 it had over 80 million copies in circulation, and in 2020 it won the 44th Kodansha Manga Award for the shōnen category — and in this paper’s view the anime mostly lives up to that reputation.
Where it falls short is in the telling, not the premise. The show is longer than its ideas, and it mistakes repetition for escalation more than once. But when it lands — Draken bleeding out, Mikey’s face going cold, Takemichi realizing he has made everything worse by trying to make it better — it earns the melodrama. A live-action film adaptation was released in Japan in July 2021, with its two-part sequel released in April and June 2023. A fourth season is set to premiere in October 2026, which means the story is not finished asking whether any of this can be undone.
It probably can’t. That is what makes it worth watching.
8.4/10 from TMDB, 1,345 votes.
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