If you’re reading this review, and especially if you’re an anime fan who was running in the 90s (that is the closest I can get to gracefully incorporating that phrase—I’m sorry, I tried my best), there’s a pretty good chance you remember the iconic racing anime (with an equally iconic soundtrack), Initial D. And looking at MF Ghost, you’re not having deja vu—there’s a very good reason why it looks, at a glance, so much like that series. Another work by Shūichi Shigeno, MF Ghost is something of a sequel to Initial D. Or more specifically, it’s a series that takes place in the same universe, but now it’s several years later and focusing on a completely new protagonist.
Right off the bat, I’m sure plenty of you are wondering: do you have to watch/read Initial D to watch MF Ghost? No, you don’t. There are plenty of nods and references to Initial D, but MF Ghost is self-contained enough that you won’t be lost if you’re unfamiliar with the original. That being said, I know inevitably another thing that many of you’re surely wondering about is how MF Ghost stacks up to Initial D. And the short answer is that in every measurable way, MF Ghost pales in comparison. And the long answer calls for examining MF Ghost outside of Initial D‘s long, Eurobeat-loving shadow.
There’s a lot going on in the disjointed story of MF Ghost. Our protagonist, Kanata Rivington, just arrived in Japan from England. Ostensibly, he’s there to look for his father, who’s Japanese. But also, he’s a very talented racer, so he’s participating in MFG races. Do these races have anything to do with his search? Hints are dropped, but MF Ghost is coy about addressing this. Simultaneously, the daughter of Kanata’s host family, Ren, leads a double life as an MFG Angel (this anime’s version of a grid girl) and falls in love with Kanata—who not only doesn’t recognize Ren when she’s in her MFG Angel uniform, but also befriends someone who’s in love with Ren while she’s in MFG Angel-mode. (This friend doesn’t know who she is outside of the MF Angels—he doesn’t, for example, even know her real name.)
If that makes it sound like the story often feels more complicated than it needs to be, it’s because it is. I think this wouldn’t be as noticeable a problem if any of these storylines had any connective tissue. But even at the end of this first season we’re still not 100% sure what, exactly (if anything!), Kanata’s racing has to do with his search for his father. They feel like two entirely different storylines, one not particularly in need of the other. And as for Ren’s storyline? Again: doesn’t feel like it has much of anything tying it to anything else. And Ren and Kanata have so little chemistry with one another that the potential romance between the two often comes off as forced, or just being there for the sake of having a romantic element.
Making the possible romance between Ren and Kanata feel even more pointless and out-of-place is that neither of them are particularly interesting characters. Kanata has no discernible personality whatsoever, and similarly, Ren is incredibly generic—seemingly existing only to be pretty, fall in love, and be fallen in love with. This is especially disappointing—wasteful, even—in the case of Ren. One would think that her Hannah Montana-esque life would make for an easy way of giving both her and the show overall some much needed flavor, but nope. Despite the wealth of story/writing opportunities this could easily provide, MF Ghost says no thank you.
The saving grace of MF Ghost is, predictably, the racing segments. Accompanied by a Eurobeat soundtrack, the racing segments have all the high-octane excitement you’d expect from a work of Shigeno’s. That being said, although I tried my best while watching MF Ghost to avoid comparing it to Initial D as much as possible, this is where that was the hardest. Because many of the over-the-top elements (the strategies/challenges that they can only do because they’re street racing, the reactions, etc.) that make the races in Initial D so fun to watch are largely absent, or at least muted, from MF Ghost, it makes the whole thing feel like a watered down version of Initial D.
To be honest, this sentiment kind of sums up the whole experience of watching this first season of MF Ghost. On its own merits, it’s (no pun intended) pretty middle of the road—exciting race scenes, which are weighed down by just about everything else. Overall, I wouldn’t readily call it a particularly good or bad anime. But, it’s the Initial D you have at home: it may also be a racing anime set to a Eurobeat soundtrack, but it lacks the over-the-top fun of Initial D.
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