Tough/Shootfighter Tekken

[ParaParaJMo]

color=navy]Shootfighter Tekken
(aka )[/color]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rQ9aQoaXyWo

Story and Characters

More than 10 years ago, Iron Kiba, the undisputed champion of pro wrestling, and Miyazawa Seiko, the 14th successor of the Nanshin Shadow style fought in an undisclosed fight to the death. Due to the nature of the desired conditions of this bout, they couldn’t get it officially sanctioned or let it be known public so they fought in concealment like in Bloodsport. They fought to every last ounce of breath and Iron Kiba lost his eye. Years have passed and Iron Kiba despite the loss of his eye still continues to dominate the world of professional wrestling and vows to get his rematch with Seiko. Seiko in the mean time has settled down and is now training his teenage son, Kiichi, to be the next in line to inherit the Nanshin Shadow Style.

Iron Kiba is now back in the Miyazawa’s lives and is sending many of his goons to get his rematch. However, Kiichi, nicknamed Kiibo, is now getting himself involved and represents his father in these bouts against wrestlers and other martial artists sent by Kiba to further progress Kiibo as a fighter and to build up the rematch between Kiba and Seiko.

I thought this story was ok. Nothing special and just a generic martial arts story of the son being trained by his father, the previous master to not only become a successor to the Nanshin shadow style, but to surpass his father. So expect some bizarre cheesiness to some extent with this whole proof of what is the best fighting style or who is the strongest fighter. Even though it’s cliché for its genre, it takes place in a modern day setting, which makes it more fresh in my view. But it’s still a descent coming of age story.

The characters are also stereotypical if you follow anime like History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi or Grappler Baki. They’re all about improving themselves and the build up to the fights and developing them. Not saying it’s a bad thing, just saying don’t expect this to be anything totally oscar worthy in terms of story and characters. At least there’s movement and development to the characters but happens in ways you can expect it to happen. It doesn’t really ruin the suspense since the suspense doesn’t really emphasize on story and character development, but more on the fights, which I will get into now, so I leave the story and characters of this anime, a 7/10.

Art and Animation

I’ll talk about the fights before I get into the actual character design itself. I really like how the fights are technical and it’s none of this fireball or matrix over the topness you see in a lot of action animes nowadays. The fights emphasize on all realistic aspects of hand-to-hand combat: Striking, submission, and ground fighting. Since pro wrestling is a style and a factor in this anime, so for over the topness, at most, expect it in a pro wrestling kind of manner with the slamming and some of the holds. So you can say the fights at most, don’t defy gravity like how pro wrestling doesn’t. I’m a fan and a practioner of Mixed Martial Arts and a fan of wrestling, so I really appreciate the style of this anime in this regard.

But even though I do find the action enjoyable for my personal taste, it does have its flaws. Like in the 2nd episode, one of Kiichi’s initial opponents gets stabbed and still continues to fight despite having a knife in him and pushes the knife his with own muscle mass. So it gets ridiculous on the level of Takamura from Hajime no Ippo knocking out a bear with his own hands or how Onizuka can take so much pain himself.

The character design isn’t something people will like. When it comes to the adult characters like Kiichi’s father and Iron Kiba, it’s not the muscle mass they have that bothers me, it’s just how ridiculously small their eyes are in comparison to their heads. It’s just that the proportions of the characters really sort of have no standardized consistency to the original manga artist’s overall style. But other than that, it’s what you can expect from any martial arts anime. You either have the small guy, or the buff guy, and the old man who can also kick ass. So in a design point of view, it’s nothing that really stands out. So at most I’ll give the art and animation an 8/10.

Music and Voice Acting

To get this out of the way, I’ll talk about the dub first. It’s not that good. None of the actors come across as fighters. Although Mike Tyson when you hear him talk doesn’t come across as one, but when he goes on a cussing tirade, at least he can. It’s just the people in this anime belong in a business meeting and really can’t make them sound intimidating at all. And the setting of this anime is in Osaka, so thank god they weren’t given stupid southern accents like how they give to other Osaka originated characters in other dubs. I overall felt the delivery and style was outdated and just couldn’t cut it. So that’s it for the dub, and it’s time for me to talk about the Japanese cast.

Iwata Mitsuo, who also played Kaneda in Akira and Itsuki in Initial D does a great job as Kiibo. Kiibo does have some personality traits that remind me of both characters so I thought Iwata did great as him. Wakamoto Norio, most famous as Cell in DBZ is dead on as Iron Kiba. He has the warrior’s voice and that intimidation factor and has presence as an actual pro wrestler if he had to talk on a mic or cut a shoot interview. And Seiko, Kiibo’s father, is played by Funaki Masakatsu, who is a pioneer of mixed martial arts in Japan by being one of the founders of the Pancrase organization which produced other legend of MMA like Ken Shamrock and Bas Rutten. So I felt they had a cast for the characters and for the nature of this show.

The music isn’t anything too much I can compliment or complain much about. It’s not like I wanted to go out and find the soundtrack after I heard it. But I felt it was good enough to fit the extreme and high octane atmosphere of this oav series. So, I’ll leave the music and voice acting at an 8/10.

Overall

I felt because of my passion for mixed martial arts and wrestling, I’m able to enjoy this anime. But this is only a 3 episode oav series that represents a 50+ volume manga series so this is only a small representation of what Tough really is. I believe it’s now released by VIZ. If I can’t find it, there’s always emule for the raws. But moving on, I thought it was messed up that pro wrestling was considered a serious style in this. Then again, Josh Barnett, a top heavyweight in MMA is showing that wrestling is a legitimate martial art. But it’s not exactly pro wrestling, but catch wrestling that’s the true martial art behind it. And the era of style vs style is now gone and I felt the anime was outdated in that aspect. Then again, this manga debuted in 1993 and couldn’t find info of when this anime specifically came out so that’s how the sport was at the time so I can’t be hard on that since the nature of this anime was also the nature of mixed martial arts at the time as well. So if you like Grappler Baki, Hajime no Ippo, and History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi, I recommend you try this one out and thank you for watching and this anime which gets an overall 7.5/10.