Anime: Tokkou

If the anime wasn't this average, the lame ending would've been far more annoying.

This series starts off decently, but due to the plotholes as big as the hole in the ground near the apartment complex in the anime, the lousy animation and the blatantly bad dialogues, this series doesn't reach its potential at all. Somehow, that still saves the show, because the ending is so unthinkable silly and forced that it would have ticked me off seriously if it wasn't such a mediocre show.

Animation: Definitely below par.

Characters who make really odd movements, enemies which are getting ripped apart before the weapons even hit them, unrealistic fights and whatever you can think – in the end the sloppy animation is to blame for ruining the mood of the series completely. I have seen bad, I have seen worse, but with above examples this is one of the most seriously depressing animation I have seen in the past two years or so – on a level like Green Green OVA, or St. Luminous Mission Highschool for Girls.

Sound: The most horrible OP/ED combination in years.

The voiceactors were sometimes doing a decent job, and sometimes not a decent job at all. For instance, the superior for Ranmaru is one guy I thought had a very fitting voice for his role and he did his voice well. But especially the major characters often screamed like they didn't want to scream. And if you have characters who scream as if someone bumped into them whenever they get slammed into walls or whatever, then I think you're not a good voiceactor. Otherwise you can actually convey your feelings into such screams. And I can back up that fact with tons of other anime where it is done better.

OP/ED
I don't think I have sit through any of them completely, but I just couldn't get myself to do so. The terrible songs are what made me sit in front of the PC with my finger on the ‘skip’ button to not hear a single note of it. The voice is annoying, that's one thing which made the song bad. The music is … well, annoying too, although I have to agree that the voice was worse. But the worst thing of all is how the English lyrics are also completely making no sense, and then even repeating them over and over.

BGM
I thought the BGM was only average, really, but when my girlfriend was playing Civilization Rome on the other side of the room and I heard the music of that, I realized that the BGM from that game fit my anime better than its own BGM. It's kind of pathetic when a game which has absolutely nothing to do with this anime has better fitting music than the anime itself.

Story: Average story with potential, which was cut short by the lame ending.

Really, this series had potential. Lots of potential and most of the time it was a pretty enjoyable action-series. Despite the huge plotholes, the awkward voiceacting and the lousy animation, the story was what kept things up. They introduce a shitload of info of which half you can use and half of it you believe it will be explained – but they never do so. But hell, plotholes are bad, yet they don't ruin an action-series.
That is, until they introduced another character near the end of the series who was quite not up to par with the rest. But I can stomach some bad characters, too, really. But honestly, when they came to the last episode, they seemed to have forgotten they could only make 13 episodes of it and they decided to rush things and get it over with.
If you have seen Mai-Hime and thought the ending was absolutely wrecking the entire series, believe me – this one does a better job at completely kicking the story off. Not only is it completely unbelievable, but they also left out the explanations for whatever happened between the last thing we saw and the epilogue, introducing a lot of other things and then putting the screen to black. In a meager 20 seconds, they managed to ruin even more of the series than the animation, voiceacting and the plotholes have done in the entire series.
And if that would be the end … but that lame ending also makes the entire series open again. So unless they planned a sequel to this, the ending doesn't make sense at all, because it would be like you leave a cliffhanger at the end.

Characters: I got seriously distracted by the girl who wears only a jacket over her bare breasts.

Kureha is the one character who really distracted me throughout the entire series. She walks in leather pants and a leather jacket and it is crystal clear that she doesn't wear anything underneath; you can see the breasts under her jacket and the only thing not showing are her nipples. Not that it matters much –you will see her nipples whenever she takes a shower, or changes clothes- but it is distracting.

Ranmaru is not the best male lead I have seen, but he tries hard and for a main character in this series he does a good job. If only the dialogues and the events weren't so silly, he could've become a good characters. Unfortunately he mutters lame responses while thinking he's cool and so does the rest of the crew. The same goes for many of the reactions they show; whatever happens, they often happen to not take the most realistic response of the human mind.

But again the dialogues often kill much of the atmosphere and it is seriously annoying when the characters can slice up enemies whenever they do not even apply force to their weapons and sometimes the enemies already die before the characters hit them. Add to that the absence of emotion on their faces during such scenes and despite the characters being at least decent, the animation ruins them as well.

Value: Nice for an action-series, but such a lousy ending.

I can understand that one would watch this, but the ending is so seriously lame that I'd guess you better skip the part whenever the credits come up and save your imagination.

Enjoyment: Easily accessible.

Tokkou is a nice action-series which suffers from a lot of things. Yet, despite all flaws pointed out above, it still is a nice action/horror series and I really enjoyed parts of it. The major problem is that I really only enjoyed parts of it, as there are so many things wrong with this anime that is's impossible to be able to enjoy it as a whole.

Grrrowwwll, slash, slash, splatter, yaaargh. Whoooo, scaary.

Tokkou is a cheap show. It is so cheaply made, I love it.

It starts out with a cheap opener: "sunny day... get up, get up" - a funky tune which unfortunately has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the show, nor does it set the mood for slicing and dicing ugly monsters in any way. Perhaps they got the music - well, cheap, and they simply used it. This is no problem though: soon as you get accustomed, the annoyance turns into unintentional comedy, and you begin to like it, ready for whatever comes next.

The animation appears to be mostly sketchy, at times like it was done by an apprentice, when you notice the proportions and facial expressions vary from scene to scene, arguably depending on who did them. However, when it gets sketchy, the animation sometimes - sometimes - touches the realms of stylishness and made me think of The Big O or Gilgamesh. I liked this. Overall, the visuals have a manga appeal, drawn quick and - yes, cheap. I rather call it reduced and stripped down: animated manga, without much CG, which I feel is often being used to deviate you from a weak story. But not in this show.

The set of characters is quite the usual one: the hero, starting out as a childish person and going through severe changes, some support characters to advance the story, some of them dispensable, some being dispensed, and a bunch of filler sidekicks. Various styles of onna to suit your taste, some nice villains - even the devil Himself! Last not least, considerable ecchi is being provided. Throughout the whole story, I felt every single character and his/her actions and reactions to be realistic and reasonable, well, as much as they can be in a setting like this. At least, the characters never acted in an unmotivated fashion, I never had a major WTF! experience. In my opinion, this is a part of good storywriting.

The story itself - "a secret group of fighters with super powers battle demons who try to take over the world and plunge it into eternal darkness" - is not very inventive, but consistently told and steadily building up towards the climax in episode 13. The authors did not use any twists and tricks, instead they just let the characters act out their roles. Even the fact that many possess super powers - which could easily be used to make literally *anything* happen - is never misused though it might have been tempting to do so. But as I said above, not the slightest effort is made to conceal anything.

You might ask yourself like I did, what´s so good about this show, despite all criticism, and why I liked it. Perhaps, sometimes what you really need is a well made honest burger instead of an elaborate candlelight dinner. And Tokkou is really honest. It never lies about itself, cheats on you or lets you down. It never pretends to be what it is not. Cheap and honest to the bone, Tokkou delivers very good entertainment.

I found Tokkou to be a very watchable show. I honestly love and recommend it.

Tokko tells the story of Shindou Ranmaru, a police officer. One day, gruesome murders happen and when Tokki, the squad Ranmaru is in, gets to the scene, a mysterious group of people who are part of a special task force called Tokko are already there. Suddenly, Monsters appear and attack the squad. It turns out that bullets are useless against them, but with the help of the sword-wielding members of Tokko the squad is able to defeat the monsters. However, it seems there's a secret around Shindou that attracted them...

Tokko is a show which main focus is the battle between good and evil. Unfortunately, the fights are extremely bad animated. In almost all cases the "fight" consists of a screen with the character in front, jumping between the monsters, and then the monsters breaking up, spraying red, badly animated blood over the screen. Overall, the animation was utter garbage for the most of the time. Very little actual animation, usually only panning shots over still frames, characters often drawn more like stick figures than humans and no impressive backgrounds. I found this especially baffling, seeing that this series was pre-licensed by Manga Entertainment, so there should've been some additional money at hand.
What also bugged me was the absolute unnecessary fan service. One female member of Tokko does only wear a leather jacket with nothing below. The ending animation also shows another protagonist with bare breasts for no apparent reason. During the course of the series, every female member of Tokko gets their fare share of showering scenes, too. I usually don't mind drawn nudity, but here it's just a steamroller tactic to lure in the wanking crowd.

The music makes excessive use of distorted noises that sound like somebody was torturing a PC speaker. In general, the background music was some electronic sound mash up that sounded not exactly impressive, and reminded me of 8-bit Amiga music on crack. It was fitting for the fight scenes though. The opening song Nothing, some engRish Rap-type piece, left exactly that impression on me: None. I found the ending theme much more worth listening to. I can't really say much about the voice acting, but nothing struck me as especially bad or miscast.

Tokko is an action based anime and 13 episodes at that, so it's clear that one can't expect some epic world with deep characters. Surprisingly, in the first half of the series, there was a rather strong focus on character development, usually achieved through the massive use of flashbacks. However, most of the focus was on Shindou Ranmaru, the hero, so the other characters faded somehow. Additionally, due to this, the main story kind of got lost. In my opinion the main story starts when the protagonist joins Tokko, and that doesn't happen till halfway through the series. The fact that the ending is totally rushed and stays extremely open doesn't help here either. But it was expectable that this series would have an open ending, seeing that the heroes would have to kill around 120 "boss" monsters to achieve their main goal. At this point, no second season has been announced, so it's unclear if there will ever be a resolve. "Read the manga", I guess.

To sum it up, I found this series rather uninspired. A generic "Humans play god, unleash deus ex machina, demons try to take over the world" plot coupled with halfways interesting characters. However, due to the extremely low production values, my focus while watching was more on the question if this was drawn by performing monkeys, and not on the plot. I don't exactly see a rewatch value in it, unless they polish up the animation for a DVD release. But even then, the rushed story and the open end don't exactly make strong points. It an OK watch if you enjoy the genre though. At least I wasn't terribly bored, and there were some cliff-hangers during the course of the series.


The series features quite some violence in every episode in form of sliced, hacked and otherwise mutilated monsters. And there's the aforementioned fan service, so I doubt this series is appropriate for children. I'd rate it 15+.