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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James Beckett
Rating:

Ikebukuro West Gate Park is a well-produced and well-intentioned caper that follows a gang of youths who call themselves the G-Boys, and the ironically upbeat narration makes it clear that, though the city of Ikebukuro might present itself as welcoming and prosperous metropolis, it has a seedy underbelly that needs dealing with. Takashi, the “King” of the G-Boys, discovers that a young girl named Mion attempted to burn down the building that serves as a local drug dealing hotspot, the so-called “Smoke Tower”, after her mother was hospitalized in a hit-and-run perpetrated by a junkie. Takashi enlists his friend Makoto to take care of the girl and take down the Smoke Tower drug ring by any means necessary. When you take this solid premise and factor in Doga Kobo's capable production values, you have the blueprints for what should have been a fun and entertaining addition to the fall lineup.

Unfortunately, IWGP's handling of the subject matter is, frankly, dumb as hell, so much so that I just couldn't bring myself to take the premiere very seriously at all. I know that a story about a bunch of ethically-upstanding gang waging what is basically a one-man war on drugs is a fantasy scenario anyways, but IWGP also fails to make its fantasy exciting or interesting in any way. Instead, our main man Makoto just takes this unaccompanied twelve-year old girl, walks right into the ridiculously conspicuous Smoke Tower, and whatever plan he might have had is immediately brushed aside when Mion throws a jar of “herbs” at the wall and spooks the drug dealers. This forces Makoto and Mion into the tepid chase scene that ends with them just meeting up with a cop who, despite saying that he can't just let them in on a police investigation, gives them the name of the number one suspect in the whole Smoke Tower case. Makoto finds the guys place, steals some of the drugs that are being hidden there, plants the evidence back in the tower, and boom: The cops can now arrest everyone. Consider the drugs to be solved.

Did I also mention that the big scary drug that is being sold out of Smoke Tower as some kind of incense is a vaguely-defined narcotic that freaking dissolves its s' brains? Don't even get me started with how Ohkoshi the Drug Man's apartment is lit with ominous, otherworldly green light, so the show can communicate the absolute terror to be found in an apartment filled with…marijuana, I guess? Also, apparently it is impossible for local law enforcement to bust an entire sky-scraper filled with drug dealers, including at least one bozo who has converted an entire apartment into a grow house for illegal substances, because it would take half-a-year to analyze some impure narcotics to separate powered vitamins from the brain melting super drug…but you get one guy from a Ramen shop to plant some evidence that he stole from a crime scene that the police were already investigating, and you're golden? I get that Japanese society still has a very weird relationship with the legality of drugs in this day and age, and maybe there's an unfair level of bias coming from me on of living in part of the US where literally everyone and their grandmother smokes marijuana, and the real drug crisis is coming from over-prescribed narcotics straight out of doctor's offices. Not, you know, scary buildings filled with evil junkies peddling their devilish herbs straight out of Stan's own spice jars. And maybe all of this silliness is based in real ripped-from-the-headlines stories that I'm just too ignorant to be aware of.

It still didn't work for me very much at all. Still, I'd like to think that not every single episode of Ikebukuro West Gate Park is going to be as goofy as this premiere was, and maybe it'll be easier to like the characters and their stories when I'm not suppressing an endless wave of eye-rolls. If you want something that feels a smidge more down-to-earth than an epic fantasy or horror action show, then maybe IWGP will be for you. Just keep those expectations in check, is all I'm saying.

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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 policing 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 Ikebukuro West Gate Park starts showing more than it tells us, it risks squandering its appeal.