The Fall 2020 Preview Guide

Ikebukuro West Gate Park

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Crime-ridden Ikebukuro is a haven for violent gangs, the Yakuza, and home to Makoto Majima. To protect his friends, this charismatic troubleshooter mediates disputes among the warring factions—even fixing problems the police can't.

But when a rising tide of violence results in Makoto losing a loved one, can he ride out the storm, or will he drown in all the spilled blood that floods his streets?

Ikebukuro West Gate Park is based on Ira Ishida's novel series and streams on Funimation at 8:00 AM ET on Tuesdays.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

This is not Ikebukuro West Gate Park's first rodeo. Based on a series of six novels that were published between 1998 and 2009, the series has also had a drama adaptation and several manga versions, one of which was released in English by DMP, which explains why this show sounded vaguely familiar to me. Since the novels aren't available in English translation, I can't say how this adaptation stacks up compared to the others, but as a first episode, this feels pretty middle of the road – while it introduces an interesting world, it also relies on too much exposition and gives us far too many named characters to completely pull of an engaging half-hour.

What's most interesting to me is the set up of the story's version of Ikebukuro. It appears to have a three-layer system, with the obvious bad guys (criminals and drug s) at the bottom, the official police at the top, and a gang known as the G-Boys floating around in the middle, neither fully bad nor entirely good. It seems that the police rely on the G-Boys to a degree, feeding them information through protagonist Makoto. He's a close friend of the leader of the G-Boys, Takashi (who goes by King), but not a member himself, which makes him a safe third party to relay information between the two groups who really can't be seen interacting with each other in an official way. Whether Makoto has deliberately not ed Takashi in the G-Boys so as to play this role isn't yet certain, because “official” stuff aside, he really is in with the G-Boys up to his eyeballs. Of course, his other best childhood friend, Reiichiro, is the chief of the Ikebukuro police department, which makes all of this seem like a very deliberate decision that the three young men came up with in order to facilitate their patrol of the city.

In this episode, that policing takes the form of taking down a drug vendor who is using his herb shops as a cover for his more…potent herb sales. While it was clear that getting rid of this guy was always a primary goal for Makoto and Takashi, they're moved to action sooner by a twelve-year-old girl named Mion, who was trying to burn down a building to get rid of the drug vendor's shop after her mom was hit by a car driven by a junkie. Mion is easily the best part of the episode – neither her age nor her gender stop her from not only taking action on her own, but also being included in Makoto and Takashi's plans. In fact, Makoto factors her into his decisions over the course of the episode, possibly realizing that if they don't let her participate, she's got enough chutzpah to just take matters into her own hands again. She does listen to him, but she also takes action when she needs to in order to help, making her a particularly good character. Sadly, I think she may only have been in the show for this episode.

Mion aside, the rest of the episode is pretty cut and dry. Bad guys exist, good-and-mediocre guys take them down by working together, action scenes happen but are outnumbered by exposition. There's some potential here, but unless