Initial D

Yeah, I'm finally reviewing Initial D, and with so many "stages" this is going to be lengthy, beforehand I did not watch any of the battle stages or special stages or the live action movie, so they aren't included in this review.

Takumi Fujiwara is 18 years old and helps his dad with the family tofu shop, his father, Bunta being extremely skillful being the wheel of a car has Takumi run deliveries on the Akina mountain pass where he unwittingly learns how to drive really well. His friend Itsuki is a big racing fan and talks about cars like every day, eventually everyone learns that Takumi has a gift when it comes to driving (where as before they thought he didn't know anything because he had no clue his dad's Sprinter Tureno was called an AE86). Anyways, they get him to race and he slowly changes from being sleepy eyed and absent minded to being nearly fully committed to street racing.

Two people I know were constantly talking about Initial D back when i was nearly exclusively into muscle cars and it used to drive me nuts, when i started watching this I still wasn't all that into Japanese cars, but after sitting through 4 stages I've sort of opened my mind a little more when it comes to cars. If you are like me and you were trying to find and watch the dub first, Don't because i saw a little bit of an episode and despite liking the voice actor for Itsuki ( who was the guy that voiced Michelangelo in the three live action TMNT movies), no one else seemed to fit, even Steven Blum seemed out of place and I fucking love that guy rofl. Not only that though, they messed around with the car battles and added these stupid screen effects that ruin the entire feel, they also replaced all the music, and truthfully untill i watched this series I didn't even know what euro beat was, and there are a lot of good songs throughout all the stages.

The first stage:

The first stage was good, it starts off a little slow, the cars are CGI which looks kind of odd and the characters look a lot different compared on how they will later on. Itsuki is really really annoying in the first stage, like REALLY annoying! In the later stages he's not nearly as bad. This stage does set the feeling for the series and has some great music to boot, it introduces most of the characters and the relationships. There is one main reason I'm giving it a 10 though, the car battles were fierce and really exiting, out of I think all of the stages these battles seemed to have an edge to them that some of the others we rent able to keep up.

10/10

The second stage:

At first this stage didn't really grasp me, after a few episodes it was back in its groove. I don't know if it's just me but a few of the battles aren't nearly as good as the 1st, I could be wrong but i think this is when either the CGI got ALOT better for the cars or if its hand drawn, I'm not really sure but the cars looked so much better on this one. The character designs are a little better also, most of this stage is character development and a few relationships, noticeably the one with Itsuki (Oh and Itsuki is far more tolerable in this stage). This stage is only 13 episodes long, but it seems a lot longer, Takumi and the AE86 both go through a transformation and since most of this is character development it's still an important part of the series. In the end I think it falls just a little short of stage 1.

9/10

The third stage:

This stage is actually a movie, and to me it was one of my favorites. Even more relationships and character development, but something about the art style really had me hooked on this, i don't know, the whole feeling of it and the parts in the snow... It's hard for me to even explain why i like this so much, sorry if this article makes no sense, let alone how high the score is.

10/10

The fourth stage:

This is the last stage I'm reviewing as it's the last i saw. This is the start of Project D, an elite racing team made up of Takumi, Keisuke and Ryousuke. This was a solid season, with awesome music, even better art, everything was just all around awesome. It's nice to see Takumi pushing his car to the absolute limit and many of the car battles were very nice. This gets another 10.

10/10

I'm still sort of bad with scoring stuff, but reviews are all based off of opinions so i guess it doesnt matter, this is the impact it had on me.

The series as a whole I would also give a 10 or at least a 9.5.