Tokyo Kettou Kanjousen
Tokyo Duel

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Tokyo Duel, is a manga written and illustrated by Yamada Toshiyaki, that started publishing in late 2020 and seems to try and ride off all the hype Record of Ragnarok had at the time. Apart from the obvious inspiration regarding the format of the story, it also pays really heavy "homage" with it's cover arts and straight up has a Record of Ragnarok volume in the manga's in-universe Akihabara. I put homage in quotes because it's less paying homage and more just straight up ripping it off. But if it's anywhere near Record of Ragnarok's level I think it would get a pass so let's ... see how it fares up.

Quick disclaimer that I've only read up until chapter 117 since that's where the unofficial scans of the manga end. So if any scanlation group decides to pick this series back up, some of the things I say may be subject to change, though I heavily doubt it with how the first 117 chapters were formatted.

Tokyo Duel's story is mainly a catalyst for us to watch high-octane battles with even higher stakes. It does that by explaining that after WW2 Tokyo basically regressed back into a more primitive and battle centric style of living. In order to combat that Tokyo put people that are referred to as "Guardians" that are spread throughout all the train stations in Tokyo, so every single train station has one of these guardians. Their main purpose is to resolve disputes between the people of the train stations that they're guardians of, be it money or contracts. The main conflict of the story revolves around a tournament where the grand prize is a gazillion yen. The only catch to said tournament is that any station that loses has to pay another gazillion to the station they lost to.
As you can see the story takes heavy inspiration both from Record of Ragnarok and Kengan Ashura. Not that any of the money/power at stake is going to play any political role in the story like Kengan, nor is the morality of the fact that the well-being of a whole neighborhood is on the shoulders of one single man that most of the time genuinely doesn't give a fuck about the people that he's representing going to be questioned at any time of the story like Record of Ragnarok does with it's tournament.

I'm not the biggest fan of judging a story before actually sitting down and reading it, but I'm pretty sure that most people that go into this don't really expect some grandiose plot, we're here to see cool characters with interesting motives duke it out in a high stakes, emotional battle. So it at least does that.. right?

Most of the characters and the back stories that are tied to them are pretty shallow, or are so bizarre that they make no sense at all, like a military general being a k-pop stan and schooling one of the station generals on what it means to be a stan properly. But it would be a lie to say that all of them are like that, there are SOME cases where a character's backstory makes sense and explains the behaviors of our characters in a more mature manner and again we have some fights where there are some pretty well done clashes of ideals and there are also fights where the two guardians fighting are both trying to reach the perfect "murdergasm", even though their reasons for doing so are different. (Both ideal clashes were good I'm just putting out the spectrum of said clashes out there)

Alright so. The story isn't any good, nor do the things happening in the world and in these stations play any significant role in how anything moves. The characters for the most part are pretty one dimensional and uninspired, both aesthetically and in the way they act. But at the end of the day this is a tournament battle manga, I mean it's literally called Tokyo Duel, so the battles and art must be pretty interesting, right?

Well the art and battles are for sure definitely the strongest part of the whole series, though that statement doesn't really hold much weight right now. Either way let's see how good the art really is.
Just as the characters themselves, the way they look is also pretty uninspired for the most part, but there really are a bunch of cases where they do look interesting, be it bizarre like a guy that wants to be panda, or genuinely cool looking like a brolic guy with face-paint that fights using a tombstone with his enemy's name engraved on it.
The fights themselves are, just like the characters at the two ends of a really confused looking spectrum. From one of the sides there are these really uninspired slug-fests, or one character getting brutally beat on until he gets a revelation on how to win against his opponent and from the other end of the spectrum, there are these really experimental fights, experimental in both the ways the contestants fight and the whole choreography overall. Just like up until now when a fight isn't at the ends of the spectrum, it manages to reach a really nice golden middle ground, where the fight does something different, not just a slugfest, at the same time it tries something different with it's artwork, choreography and techniques, but not to such a far end that it's impossible to follow what the hell's going on in the battle itself. Unfortunately those fights are very far and few between.


So yeah, for the most part the manga seems pretty uninspired on all levels especially the story. Though it does show some flashes from time to time, be it a cool double-page spread here and there, that shows us that the author can really make some interesting art if he really tried to, or a genuine character moment, where the battle that a character is in helps him defeat some demons from the past and ultimately come full-circle. Despite how rough I was on the manga, I hope it gets fully translated one day in the hopes of the flashes that it's shown so far are going to become more of a mainstay rather than once in a blue moon occurrence.
So right now, I can't fully recommend it, if you want to read JUST a tournament battle manga, that has nothing else really going for it and you've consumed everything else that's out there, go for it, otherwise I can't really recommend it as it is right now.

Kris's Final Rating: 3.50/10