Hiya!

I’m usually very tenacious when it comes to watching anime. When I start watching a show, I generally watch it until the end. Sure, I may forget to watch the next season but I would never just stop cold right in the middle of one. I would even force myself to watch it even though I’m slowly losing interest in the show. I mean, I actually watched the Endless Eight episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya even though I could’ve skipped them at any time!

Unfortunately, that just wasn’t the case for one of the more recent animes I tried watching. It was even a series I was looking forward to as it was a sequel to one of my favorite animes. I’m talking about the Initial D‘s spiritual continuation racing anime, MF Ghost.

On paper, MF Ghost should have been a shoo-in for being one of my latest anime obsessions. I’ve already mentioned it continues the story of Initial D but I didn’t mention how much I enjoyed Initial D, especially the earlier seasons, as I would jump to the next season immediately after completing the previous one. I will say the later seasons lacked the fun of the initial couple of seasons of Initial D but, nevertheless, I did complete it with a fair amount of gusto. With MF Ghost, I stopped in the middle of the 4th episode of the 2nd season. That’s unheard of for me!

Let’s give a little background of both animes before I dive into why I just stopped watching MF Ghost. Initial D follows Takumi Fujiwara, an unassuming teen who uses his father‘s old Totoya AE86 Trueno to deliver tofu to the local hotel. It turns out his father, a former street racer, has been secretly educating Takumi in the finer arts of street racing by forcing him to deliver the tofu in the AE86 every night ever since he was just 13! By the time Initial D starts, Takumi has become a full-blown prodigy as, one night, he overtakes Keisuke Takahashi, one of the best street racers in all of Japan, after one of his delivery runs. This begins Takumi foray into the world of underground racing and him being one of the fiercest drivers in the country.

MF Ghost takes places a couple of decades after the last season of Initial D. Kanata Rivington arrives from Europe and tries out for the most prestigious race tour of the world: the MFG. In between this time and the end of Initial D, internal combustion engines have fallen out of fashion in favor of more eco-friendly vehicle types and the MFG is one of the rare racing organizations that still favors the more powerful engines of the past. Kanata Rivington easily passes the qualifying round, despite driving an underpowered Toyota 86 GT. It turns out Kanata is also a driving prodigy as he is able to memorize a course after watching videos of the chase cars made for promotional videos and was actually trained by Takumi Fujiwara, the protagonist of Initial D. However, his real goal isn’t to win the MFG but, in an obscure way, try to use the race’s worldwide appeal to find his long-lost father.

Right from the outset, I have an issue with the new main character, Kanata Rivington, or Kanata Katagiri, which is the name he uses in the MFG as that’s his biological father’s last name. He is one of the most boring main leads I’ve seen in an anime! For one, he’s just too nice! He’s super polite and never seems to get angry at anything. He doesn’t use his winnings or sponsorship money for himself as he gives the money away. He actually makes a living working part-time at a cafe where he gets a lot of female customers because he’s super good looking, apparently. His only real quirks are he would say some English words and he really, really, really likes Japanese food. That’s super lame and not nearly enough to build a strong character.

The boring characters don’t stop with Kanata as it bleeds into the rest of the supporting cast. Kanata’s main love interest is Ren Saionji, a high schooler who has a part-time job as the newest members of the MFG Angels, who are kind of like the mascots of the racing tour. She likes Kanata a lot and… that’s basically it. Oh, there’s the layer where she doesn’t like to express it openly but she is incredibly friendly towards him. Once again, boring!

There’s also Ogata, the guy who actually owns the Toyota 86 GT Kanata drives for the MFG and I guess he’s supposed to be the Itsuki analogue as he sometimes plays the comedy relief but it doesn’t work as he never really goes over-the-top like Itsuki does. Honestly, the best character I’ve seen in MF Ghost is Shun, a veteran of the MFG and forms a friendship with Kanata from the very start. I say he’s the best character only because he actually has a personality trait as he likes girls, especially Ren but he doesn’t know who she really is. Still, he’s relatively boring as there’s just no passion in the guy.

By the way, there are many more characters who were introduced throughout the 1st season and the middle of the 2nd season but that’s part of the problem! MF Ghost introduces too many characters in a short span of time! For example, there are the other racers in the MFG and, by my last count, there are 15 of them! Am I supposed to care about all of these 15 racers when we’re just getting to know the main characters? Are they actually worthy rivals? The show does try to give them different looks and they’re even given character introductions so I guess I have to know who they are? Then again, who has time for that!

Not only do the characters lack any sense of personality, the same can be said for the cars they drive. I can’t help but go back to Initial D but, at least in the early seasons, the drivers and the cars had some sense of character as if the car mirrors the driver. Keisuke’s more aggressive driving style matches well with his larger looking Mazda RX-7 FD while Ryosuke‘s more technical and precise skills can be seen in the plain white looking Mazda RX-7 Infinity FC he drives. Sure, this mirroring of the character’s personalities in their cars start to fade away in the later seasons but at least there was an effort at the start.

I can’t say the same with MF Ghost because I can’t match the driver to the car for the life of me! They mention the driver and they mention what supercar they drive… and then I quickly forget who’s driving what because they don’t give any time to let any of this information sink in! I guess it’s because the other racers just think about their cars as vehicles they drive to win a race and not an extension of themselves like the way the racers of Initial D treat their cars. However, that becomes an issue when you have 15 vehicles barreling down a street and you have no idea who’s in the lead because you have no idea who’s driving what!

I guess, taken as a whole, the biggest problem I have with MF Ghost is I just don’t care about anyone in it because it just feels so lifeless. I don’t care about the races because I don’t really care about any of the racers because I don’t know any of them. I don’t care about Kanata’s quest to find his father because he’s just a bland character. I don’t care about Ren swooning over Kanata and the stress of being an MFG Angel because there’s really nothing more to her than just being a lovestruck teen.

So, as of right now, I’m going to take a long pit stop from MF Ghost. There may be a time when I come back to it but, with so many good animes out right now, there’s nothing really urgently tugging at me to see what happens next in the show. I guess I’ll be seeing MF Ghost in my Continue Watching list for at least a good number of months from now on. Sigh.

Byee!

What do you think of MF Ghost? Better question: was there any TV series or anime you just stopped watching? Let me know in the comments section below!