Tokyo 24th Ward

Episode 11

One thing I haven't yet made space to mention much regarding Tokyo 24th Ward is how the whole storyline actually feels very video game-y. Specifically it has a lot of the earmarks of the kinds of visual novels Vio Shimokura has experience writing for at Nitroplus. You could see the expositional conversations across the long time-frame of the story being punctuated with more immediate choice-based 'gameplay' in the Asumi-call/Trolley-problem segments, probably facilitated with some gameplay mechanics based off allocating the stats of the RGB boys' specifically-heightened abilities. And this whole stupid thing might have worked better in such a format. Games, after all, have more parameters of action to be judged on than simply digesting the narrative of a story we're getting from the one telling it. Persona 5 ended up having some rather misguided musings on the nature of societal rebellion and the justice system, but it still worked as a video game because it was great fun to play. But alas, Tokyo 24th Ward is not a game like Persona 5, it's an anime like PERSONA 5 the Animation, meaning we're stuck simply having to watch it and judge its story without any interactive flourishes to distract us.

Still, I have to bring such a potentially-mechanical consideration up as this (hopefully) penultimate episode gears up for the story's ending by handing Shu one last plot device and explicitly describing to him the parameters for whatever ending he's trying to reach on this run. Speaking of Shin Megami Tensei spin-offs, I started reviewing this series by wryly referring to Koki and Ran's ends of the story's political spectrum as the 'Law' and 'Chaos' factions, but seeing this fork specifically described to Shu like he's hovering over the final selection button in a game's narrative really drives it home. Except it feels like one of those poorly-considered final decisions foisted on a player for the sake of feeling like an impactful culmination of everything that led them here.

The personal component of Shu's consideration feels like a six-of-one/half-dozen-of-another situation, with the confirmation that Asumi is irrevocably brain-dead and he's just to make the call of putting her consciousness into an everlasting coma, or destroying her existence completely. But even that comes off as seismic in the face of the societal side-effects Shu is supposedly reckoning with in what each choice will mean for the KANAE system. I think this is primarily an issue of how laughably lopsided Tokyo 24th Ward's attempts at 'both sides'-ing this narrative continue to be. It's been repeatedly confirmed that Hazard Cast and the KANAE system are pretty well useless at the job they're supposed to do. But then the unmonitored 'anarchy' of the citizens DoRed has whipped up is presented as an undesirable opposite extreme (which the show, just this episode, hilariously has a faction of 'pro-safety' citizens rise up in counter-protest to). Once again though the series is asking us to ignore that the issues driving the problems of these darn uppity poors was specifically initiated by a manipulative, agenda-driven government and the corporate elites who financed them, with them being the ones with the most vested interest in keeping the KANAE system still going. The best the show can do is continue to throw around the justification that Mayor Gori 'believes' he's doing the right thing, but that point of the narrative has been tainted pretty much from the word go.

So it might actually be for the best that the ideological components of the plot actually seem to have mostly faded with the show reaching this point. That's why the setup with Asumi's consciousness is even present, really, so that Shu has some sort of consideration apart from having to decide how much police-state surveillance is too much. This does upend the plot in other unintentionally-hilarious ways: Chikuwa dramatically reveals to Shu that the formative school fire wasn't arson at all, but was rather the result of an electrical short. This prompts a minutes-long flashback from Shu where he remembers he actually spotted the wire-chewing rats who likely sparked that, resulting in the traumatic realization that if he had…stopped the rats somehow, none of this might have happened! And yes, it's extremely amusing to imagine that Shu was one Tom & Jerry sketch away from putting this whole exercise on a completely different course, but his reflection on the issue winds up glossing over the point that Mayor Gori, you know, fabricated a crime in order to institute his oppressive public surveillance system.

But as has been the case for Tokyo 24th Ward's storytelling, this emphasis on singular, self-focused choices over any reflection on the societal factors that powers them persists. Shu, Koki, and Ran are brought together again by the end of this one to finally hash out their differences for one las RGB team-up, and it ends up being less of a debate on their particular political ideologies, and more of a violent, circular argument where they all profess how sad and stressed out they are to each other. The one part I can appreciate here is both Ran and Koki directly calling Shu out for his wishy-washy, uninformed centrism, but even that gives way to the supposition that since all of them are hesitating in the face of such a big decision, it must mean they're actually 'the same'.

Their resultant decision to work together feels perfunctory even by this show's standards, specifically with some of the mechanics at hand. Koki's access to the KANAE system and Ran's possession of the Di-VA program that can get them in to have a conversation with Asumi in the Digiverse aren't borne out of the inherent skills they'd previously cultivated in their teamwork, they're just plot devices they got handed before the story shoved them over here (in Ran's case, he gets given the Di-VA drive only minutes before heading to the meeting, like the plot itself suddenly realized it had forgotten to set up such an important component). For an even funnier observation, there's the point that those plot devices, plus the CMD given to Shu so he can activate the Endingtron 3000, were all previously held by the trio of adult characters who were instrumental to this current systemic setup. It means that the grown-ups in this story in fact had the components needed to solve this problem themselves, and didn't, instead simply passing things down to the younger generation to take care of it for them. You can almost see the thematic implication the story is going for there, except in this case it makes no sense for the actual plot at hand. It leaves the exercise with that wholly mechanical feeling of picking up items and recollecting the player characters for the final stretch of a video game, except if I was actually playing it, then at least I might be able to pick out some more amusing dialogue options to keep myself entertained.

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Tokyo 24th Ward is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Chris is a freelance writer who appreciates anime, action figures, and additional ancillary artistry. He can be found staying up way too late posting screencaps on his Twitter.