Tokyo Underground

Unbeknownst to the general populace, deep beneath the streets of Tokyo exists a sealed city, unimaginatively entitled Tokyo Underground. Home to numerous controversial experiments, and “power controllers’ who can harness various elemental forces, the Underground is kept under control by the powerful and equally blandly named Company. Key to the Company’s plans is Ruri Sarasa, the so-called Maiden of Life, a girl who possesses unique powers of “spiritual summoning’, but whose only desire is to leave the Underground and see the world above. Moved by her charge’s wish, it is Ruri’s bodyguard Chelsea who sets things in motion, defying the Company to take Ruri on an unsanctioned field trip to the surface.

Meanwhile, in the more conventional Tokyo, Rumina Asagi is a reasonably typical teenager who longs to find a girlfriend and enjoy a “rosy high school life’- if only he could stop getting into fights. His life is soon turned upside-down, however, when Chelsea and Ruri show up at his house- followed by a Company agent sent to retrieve them! After discovering his own elemental powers, Rumina joins Chelsea in her quest to protect Ruri, marking the beginning of a journey that will take him from the surface to the depths of Tokyo Underground.

The concept of a city buried deep beneath Tokyo may sound like the basis of a sci-fi or cyberpunk series, but if there’s one thing that should be made clear at the outset, it’s that Tokyo Underground is neither of these things. Instead, the series is every inch a generic shounen action series whose main aim seems to be to shoehorn in as many clichés as possible, whilst lacking the sense of irony and self-derision that could transform it from formulaic into amusing.

To be fair, the series doesn’t start out too badly; the humour and plot “twists’ are all entirely predictable from the outset, but for the earlier episodes they remain inoffensive in their mediocrity. Unfortunately, matters soon take a turn for the worse, with the writers seemingly caring less and less about maintaining any kind of coherent or consistent plot as the series progresses. By the final episodes, the story is plagued by abrupt changes in focus- one minute our heroes are making their way through the Underground to rescue Ruri, the next they’ve dropped into the slums and are participating in a tournament, before finally that arc is outright abandoned in favour of a showdown with the Company bosses. With every such plot shift accompanied by some hastily thrown together back story, it isn’t long before the inconsistencies start piling up, although thankfully there are no outright contradictions.

Given the problems with the storyline, it isn’t surprising that characterisation is equally clichéd. Rumina is a typical main character, easily able to “power up’ and defeat opponents regardless of their superior skill and training, whilst the supporting cast hold equally few surprises- from comic relief sidekick Ginnosuke to hot-headed female lead Chelsea, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. Worse yet, instead of investing any development in the leads, the series chooses to introduce ever increasing numbers of supporting characters, each as bland and insipid as the last. Often these introductions are followed by a few minutes of flashbacks designed to retroactively flesh out the characters- a move which utterly fails to do anything other than highlight how generic they really are.

There are more than a few actions which try to compensate for their shortcomings with a bit of visual pizzazz, but unfortunately, Tokyo Underground isn’t one of them. The animation is clearly on a tight budget, and every trick in the book has been employed to stretch the pennies; panning over stills, static shots placed over greyed out backgrounds and looped animation, to name the most obvious. The character designs themselves nonetheless manage to be clean and bright, if not especially complex, but the action scenes in particular suffer from the low budget, with full on battles replaced by a mix of static poses, basic motions and some simplistic CG effects. The background music is similarly uninspired, consisting of a number of repetitive synthesised tracks that are all too reminiscent of retro video games.

In Summary

A series that wouldn’t look out of place in a Saturday morning line-up alongside Beyblade and Yu-Gi-Oh, Tokyo Underground proves to be a clichéd and low budget slice of shounen action that is too mediocre to even be good for a laugh. Whilst younger viewers will no doubt enjoy the adventures of Rumina and friends, mature audiences would do better to stick with something a little more sophisticated.