MF GHOST

I haven’t written a review for an anime in quite some time, but how badly MF Ghost butchers the original spirit of the Initial D series has pushed me to vent my gripes with this trash heap. For context I got into Initial D quite late, around 2019. I had only just entered adulthood at the time, and the series pushed me into viewing cars as more than just transportation. I now own a Nissan 370z I love driving infinitely more than my shitbox base model Ford Fiesta that whipped me into a guardrail one winter. Fun times. That aside, Initial D had some ups and downs with its seasons, but I felt the low points never became a slog to sit through. The writing was just a bit silly and disjointed at times. Even the filler episodes focused on the main characters doing things that in some way related to the main attraction of the series: racing. Things like Takumi getting to know his opponent or stumbling through broken love developed tension for how it might affect his or his opponent’s ability in their next race. There was consistently a great balance between keeping the action going while developing characters as humans with their own lives.

That original charm and balance between “filler” and racing is completely absent in MF Ghost.

Initial D opens with a very simple premise and slowly introduces the main characters without much filler. Characters like Takumi and his friends come from humble backgrounds with the simple interest in cars and racing as a passion. The introduction of Takumi into street racing felt natural and seeing him begin to apply his knowledge in a competitive environment was captivating as a story element. However MF Ghost introduces every competitior in the story as a forced shotgun blast of information before any of the characters are introduced naturally, and therefore nobody could possibly care about who or what those characters do. It would be like if initial D introduced every significant racer for every togue road in Japan in episode 2 of the first season. Nobody is going to retain that information and nobody is going to develop a sense of suspense for when the main character faces the future opponents. During this shotgun blast of hollow information, the main character and the forced love interest is introduced. The writing is so bad that I find it hard to organize my thoughts into focusing on writing about one aspect at a time, because multiple aspects like this are being pushed along at the same time in the anime. The main character's background consists of being a rich kid from England who had rich parents who could put him into racing school, and is now introduced into formal racing in Japan, but apparently these rich parents aren’t rich enough to fund his actual professional racing in any capacity. It's a decent enough of a premise, but there's no effort put into developing a proper background and motivation for racing. For all we know, he's just doing it to do it, like a nine-to-five job. He has the plot armor-tier skillset of Takumi in Initial D, but the only way he could've possibly learned any of it can only be chalked down to "he went to racing school". You don't learn the high-end skills of a field by studying it. Takumi learned his skillset by hand spending years of his life from a young age doing deliveries to businesses through togue roads and challenging himself to be faster. It's an equally simple premise, but it develops the background of a character so much better and lets the viewer envision a sense of depth for what the main character does on a day-to-day basis. I don't know what the main character of MF Ghost was doing before racing school, I don't know anything about his upbringing, I don't know why he wants to participate in races, and his unusually developed skillset means nothing to me as a viewer. It is such unenthusiastic character writing that I’m dumbfounded how any of this could’ve been written by the author of Initial D himself. MF Ghost truly feels like nothing more than the cheapest copy of Initial D possible.

We are simultaneously shown the forced love interest. Initial D's love story aspects were fairly grounded in reality and successfully built tension, but more importantly, they were kept BRIEF. Nobody is watching Initial D or MF Ghost for a half-assed slice of life romance with no relation to the rest of the story. The main character doesn't even have an initial attraction to his forced love interest: the daughter of the family he is living under who also works as a model for the racing association. He literally could not be forced any further into being close to this girl unless he was stitched to her like a human centipede. This girl convinces the main character into going on dates with her, and these dates consist of nothing more than the two participating in stereotypical anime dating activities, like walking on a beach and visiting a shrine. They do not even have any conversation relevant to the story during these dates. They really are nothing more than forcing the two into a love story. These scenes feel longer and more frequent than the actual racing itself, which I will touch on next.

What do you envision in your head when you think of Initial D? Even if you haven’t watched a single episode of the series, you still think of the same thing as anyone who has watched every episode of the series: the classic Toyota AE-86 in its panda color scheme with the iconic logo across the side drifting around a tight corner while battling a flashier sports car at night. The darkness emphasizing the headlights and taillights while classic eurobeat almost drowns out the roaring engines and squealing tires. What do we get in MF Ghost? A few minutes every other episode of the main character driving down a straight or through a gentle bend on his own while his racing partner commentates over every simple movement he performs. There are currently four episodes available, and the last two minutes of this fourth episode have only just begun to show the main character in a proper race, and yet again, every movement is being commentated by others, and we do not get any real insight as to what’s going through his mind during the race like Initial D did with Takumi’s thoughts. All the while, the most generic and unenthusiastic eurobeat sometimes plays in the background, muted by the blaring pointless commentary and thrum of stock engines with muted exhaust notes. There are no street racing teams and flashy sports cars adorned with carbon fiber and logo stickers. There are only stock vehicles piloted by random individuals, many of which are luxury vehicles not known for their significance in street racing. Even the more iconic vehicles such as the R35 GT-R are straight from the factory, with muted exhaust notes and factory bodywork. It’s soulless, like the introductory races in racing games where you’re typically pitted against stock, slow vehicles driven by nobodies. It is not only an insult to the spirit of Initial D, but an insult to street racing enthusiast culture as a whole.

In terms of aesthetics, there’s not much going for MF Ghost either. The cars are fairly detailed and accurate to their real-world counterparts, which means nothing today, as manufacturers can often directly provide accurate 3D models for commercial usage. The sense of speed feels off somehow, and generally feels like there was no more attention put into the racing scenes compared to any other character dialogue scene. The first season of Initial D often gets clowned on for being very simplistic, but it at least had a charm to it. Despite the limitations of early 3D modeling, the sense of speed was captured perfectly, if not a bit emphasized if anything. More importantly, the courses being raced on were interesting, with tight bends and significant points of interest for competitors, such as the gutter run, the kansei drift technique, and the Irohazaka jump. These elements developed worldbuilding, and established varying degrees of skill and knowledge of routes. For those who could call these areas their home turf, these risky and flashy maneuvers could be performed flawlessly, while some were too risky and unknown even to Takumi at times. It’s these elements that are completely absent from MF Ghost – compounded with the issues of cheap writing – make for a completely hollow and soulless experience. Once again, we are four episodes in. Of these four episodes, there are only two “significant” areas that were driven. A straight where cars can often reach their top speed, and a bend right afterwards, where the main character did a bit of a drift, much to the amazement and incessant commentary of everyone watching.

So, what do I see going forward with MF Ghost? Despite my gripes with what I’ve seen so far, I’m starving for more of what made Initial D so special. I’m watching on 4x speed and only really focusing on when there’s actually a scene with a car on the road. It’s been established that there will never be a character worth paying attention to, so I’m hoping there will at least be a couple decent racing scenes on more significant togue roads. Would I recommend anyone else waste their time doing the same? Absolutely not. If you’re looking for more of what made Initial D special, I’d recommend watching Wangan Midnight instead. It focuses on high-speed Japanese highway racing of the same era. It falls off a bit on the later episodes, which has made it difficult me to finish watching it, but the earlier episodes have a very similar vibe and balance of the early Intial D episodes. But more importantly, THEY SPEND MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES EVERY FEW EPISODES ACTUALLY SHOWING RACING. Seriously, I get that these are the early episodes of MF Ghost, but if you showed me these episodes not establishing that the series is related to Initial D or supposed to be a racing anime, I’d truly believe this was more of a drama or slice of life anime from a really low budget studio that just churns out everything as fast as possible. Genuinely one of the worst stories I’ve had the displeasure of watching.

Furthermore, the travesty of MF Ghost has spurred me to recapture the fun I had in watching Initial D. I've started playing Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift 2, which I would highly recommend for any Initial D fan. It is very clunky in terms of gameplay and UI design by modern standards, but it has a lot of soul to it. The handling of vehicles, in my opinion, sits somewhere between Forza Horizon and Assetto Corsa, with a degree of pure arcade-type handling for crashes and other types of impacts. Aside from that, also began to rewatch Initial D itself, which further cemented my belief that the writing of MF Ghost is an absolute insult to its legacy. Initial D opens in the first few seconds with the classic 86 drifting around togue roads with eurobeat blasting in the background. The episode flawlessly introduces the viewer to the life of Takumi, his romance, his friends, his family, and the world in terms of street racing. MF Ghost does all this, if you prompted it to write such an episode in Chat GPT in a generic anime style. What I noticed most of all is the romance storyline, where Takumi's love interest in Initial D is written to be a somewhat ditzy high school girl that can't really comprehend how the world works, and develops throughout the storyline. There is a backstory establishing why there is a relationship at all between Takumi and herself, which is hinted only enough to establish it in the first episode. This alone does so much more than anything in MF Ghost. All we get now, is a generic anime girl who immediately turns into a stereotype when she forces the main character into a date, during which nothing is progressed story-wise. Whereas in Initial D's first episode, during a date with Takumi and the love interest, Natsuki, there is a date focusing on her request for Takumi to go on a driving date with her, as he "just got his driving license", establishing the racing life and nonchalant attitude towards racing Takumi holds. Writing a direct synopsis of the scene perhaps does not do the quality of it much justice, but the point I'm trying to make is that Initial D has thought put into the writing of its story and character establishment, whereas MF Ghost does not attempt such whatsoever.

Is this review an excuse for a long-winded rant? Absolutely. Did you skip to the end here for a TL;DR? I don't blame you. Here it is: watch Initial D instead. Already watched it? Re-watch it, play a togue racing game from the era, or watch Wangan Midnight. All you'll get from MF Ghost is disappointment and further frustration at the state of modern car enthusiast and anime culture/industry.