Wangan Midnight

From dusk until dawn, street racers gather on a Tokyo highway—the Wangan Route—in search of only one thing: speed. Among them, a newcomer attracts the attention of the route's veterans after he purchases a Nissan Fairlady Z, a car infamously nicknamed The Devil Z. The newcomer ignores the warnings of Eriko Asakura, who lost her brother, Akio, in an accident involving the same vehicle. The Devil Z's new owner, who coincidentally shares the exact same name as Eriko's brother, becomes bewitched by the car's mysterious power—even after crashing twice.

Now a high school dropout who works to pay for his car repairs, Akio befriends regular street racers of the area: the legendary owner of the Porsche 911 Turbo, a car known on the streets as "Blackbird;" the genius surgeon Tatsuya Shima; and Reina Akikawa, who works as a model by day and displays unparalleled skill in her Nissan Skyline GT-R by night. Thanks to these connections, Akio manages to find the retired designer of The Devil Z's engine, a solitary man named Jun Kitami. Following his meeting with Akio, Jun resumes building overpowered yet dangerous engines. Meanwhile, the racers of the Wangan Route are caught in a desperate race against The Devil Z with no clear end in sight.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Asakura, Akio Main

Oguri, Shun Japanese

Shima, Tatsuya Main

Miki, Shinichiro Japanese

Akikawa, Reina Main

Suhou, Reiko Japanese

Kitami, Jun ing

Miyake, Kenta Japanese

Ota, Rikako ing

Tanaka, Rie Japanese

Kuroki, Takayuki ing

Takase, Akimitsu Japanese

Asakura, Eriko ing

Noto, Mamiko Japanese

Kijima, Kouichi ing

Horikawa, Jin Japanese

Ishida, Yoshiaki ing

Suwabe, Junichi Japanese

Hiramoto, Koichi ing

Namikawa, Daisuke Japanese

Tominaga, Tsuneo Director

Mima, Masafumi Sound Director

Tokumoto, Yoshinobu Episode Director

Kimura, Hiroshi Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Nov 1, 2023

DonQuigeek

Recommended

Wangan Midnight chronicles the lives of people whose ion for speed, street racing, and tuning is reignited by the return of a legendary car on the wangan, which is the part of the highway that runs alongside the coastline outside of Tokyo. And nothing else, really. The ion for race cars is palpable throughout the anime and as far as the protagonists are concerned, every scene is related to that ion and to the impact that legendary car had on them, as well as the life-altering choices they make or not after that.

I insist on the fact that it is more a chronicle than a ... story: the protagonists tuning their cars to beat that legendary car on the wangan, examining their motivations for doing so, and struggling to reconcile their youth ion and the shackles of getting older and further in their adult life is the entire plot, with the legendary car and its young, new driver at the center of it.

Like some of you perhaps, I came to Wangan Midnight after having watched Initial D. And though there are similarities, the two happen to be quite different from each other. Initial D is more thrilling and shounen and it offers some sort of a storyline nonetheless, whereas Wangan Midnight has an initimate vibe, a slower pace, and leans definitely more on the seinen side without any real plot. That being said, Wangan Midgnight does not fall into melodrama or pathos and remains mature and appropriate to its characters, which is great. No eurobeat either, but a sparsely-used score that fit the atmosphere and action very well, including a few mystical touches of Enigma-like music.

All in all, it is an excellent anime but one that can ben quite difficult to binge-watch because this is roughly 26 episodes of more of the same. But if you fancy its theme and its cocooned atmosphere, if you get hooked on those adult characters that get together as a friendly community of people united by the same ion, then it becomes an odd delight to watch.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Mar 21, 2025

Venom_waz

Mixed Feelings

Meh, this show a mixed bag. Probably wouldn't want to watch it again.

If you're watching it now and are hoping that it gets better, it doesn't. You can stop watching around episode 11 since it's the same thing on repeat since that point.

It had some really good moments here and there, which was the main reason why I ended up watching it until the end. Hoping it was actually going to amount to something. But it just ended up disappointing me.

Of course, if you're planning to watch this show it's 99% likely that you're coming here from Initial D. Just so you know the ... "races" in this show are just guys riding in a straight line to see who has the faster car. So don't be surprised. It's more of a car tuning show anyway.

Every 4-5 episodes the same exact arc repeats itself. A new racer with a JDM car shows up. They race against the MC and lose. They decide to forsake their personal life in order to upgrade their car. That takes about 3 episodes. They race the MC again and fucking lose AGAIN (lmao). Then they decide that racing is for losers and quit the racing scene so that they can focus on their actual life instead of wasting all their money on cars like a fucking dumbass. The new racer never appear in the show afterwards.

Now repeat that 6-7 times and that's the whole show. Not even kidding.

Now, the first time this kind of arc happened it was actually well done, and pretty touching.
But then it just happens again and again. I thought it was doing that to subvert expectations and finally do something meaningful one of these times, but nope.

The characters... Well they sure are some of the characters of all time.
Everybody besides the mechanic with a scar is the same boring nice-guy racer, or nice-guy tuner, that acts exactly in the same way in every situation. The only thing that differentiates them is that some of them treat their cars like machines and some have this weird
sort of partner relationship(?!?!). I know it sounds weird but that's like the main dilemma for the characters in this show.

The whole fucking plot point of the MC's car being haunted or some shit goes absolutely nowhere, the same with his teacher and many other things that just end up unresolved. Leaving the feeling that the show runners just forgot what they were making.

The fact that the ending is just some random race that abruptly cuts doesn't help either. In fact it might be the main reason why I got frustrated after finishing the show, I'd be hard pressed to find a worse ending in anything ever. But it was probably due to budget or whatever so I guess you can use that excuse.

The 3D animation is pretty nice, pretty boring camera angles but whatever. The 2D animation is... Really uneexpressive and unimpressive, to be curt.

One of the few redeeming qualities is that you can actually learn a thing or two about tuning cars from this show (I think? They do throw around a lot of buzzwords).

Anyways, as always people are probably going to tell me that I just didn't get it or some shit like that. Just keep in mind that for many people this show is going to be really boring for like 80% of the time.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Apr 18, 2025

BurrZurrCarr

Not Recommended

Wangan Midnight is a very interesting anime, but not a very exciting one. 4/10,

Before I even begin with this review, I would like to say that while I'm MASSIVELY into Initial D to the point where I scraped together my paychecks to buy and modify a 90s JDM shitbox for the touge, I have a love for all things car related and if anything my bias towards Wangan Midnight was working IN its favor rather than against it. If the show's message and story was told though the lens of anything other than high performance sports cars I would have tuned out a long ... time ago and wouldn't have forced myself to finish this anime, as I was burnt out of it long before the halfway mark but powered through because as a car guy I felt like I kinda NEEDED to see this one through till the end. While it wasn't a total waste of my time, I certainly wouldn't recommend for anyone else to go through with this show unless you're a diehard car enthusiast, but I'll try to lead with the positives because hating is easy and being nuanced is hard, plus I usually don't comment on media unless I have more good things to say then bad.

Story ?/10: First, the good. Wangan Midnight's strongest attribute by far is it's central premise that it never properly executes on, but basically this Nissan Fairlady Z is a bad omen to all that drive it, being something of a deal with the devil that grants it's drivers unrivaled speed and power at the cost of their lives when they, inevitably, push the car to hard and fly to close to the sun. Without fail, every single time the car gets totaled and another life is claimed behind it's wheel, it's never off the roads and without a driver for long before someone revives that 'Devil Z' to be next in line for its power, fully aware of their impending prophetic demise but fully consumed by the power of the machine and unable to stop chasing that dragon. 11/10 premise, and the way the show is able to warp basically every person in the story to acting almost hypnotized into chasing the taillights of that Z without making it seem like a forced rivalry is 100% the show's strongest accomplishment, and the respect and maturity they treat the very real dangers of racing without them being constantly in your face and just simply acknowledged as risks of the ride is done in such a perfectly nuanced way that all the big picture stuff having to do with how the characters treat their relationships to the road, their cars, and their proximity to dying is all 100% accurate to how every single car enthusiast I've ever seen that can actually back themselves up with a car strong enough to send them to an early grave carries themselves. All in all what I'm trying to say is where most people would tell you that street racing is bad and dangerous with no middle ground, and most media surrounding cars would tell you that street racing is amazing and awesome with no middle ground, Wangan Midnight is a very nuanced middle ground that acknowledges both sides of the coin and doesn't spoon-feed you with giving you a right or a wrong on whether or not the extreme sacrifices the drivers make in their lives in order to feel alive on the Wangan every night is worth it or ultimately a destructive fool's errand to everyone involved. I like that we aren't given a clear answer, and I think this style of presentation is something that is slowly becoming extinct as creators more and more want to either push a certain idea or just don't believe their audience has the capacity to insert their own interpretations into multi layered issues that don't have easy black and whites; ALL the praise here.

Now for the bad. Wangan Midnight poses a very interesting open-ended question the audience, being "how much is too much to sacrifice for one moment of happiness" and doesn't give any payoff for the characters in the show achieving that goal momentarily, doesn't give any sense of stakes for what happens if they were to fail, and doesn't give any sense of the characters being real people with lives away from their cars that they'd be losing if they were to crash and die. More on this later in the character section. As for the conclusion to the story, everything kinda just ends pretty abruptly; I understand that the manga is generally considered to be the better of the two pieces of media + they cut a lot out when they put it into the anime, but it's pretty rough around the edges in the anime and it barely feels like any progression or development has taken place in the story between the first few and the last few episodes. Really what the story suffers from more than anything else isn't that it ended suddenly, it's that it never really planned for one or set one up to begin with, and at no point in the story did we ever feel like we were working towards a central goal or even that our main characters had some sort of short term or long term endgame in mind. The wheels kinda just kept spinning for 20 something episodes, and then it was kinda just over.

Art 8/10: Really good CG graphics even by today's standards but this shit must've looked like the absolute pinnacle of technological achievement when it first aired. Backgrounds to pretty much everything not on the Wangan that didn't have 4 wheels was stock standard anime landscape pictures; nothing to really write home about. Super impressive mating between 3d and 2d graphics though, most anime struggle to pull this off and the entire industry has a bit of a mixed bag with 3d animation even though it's improved leaps and bounds in the last two decades, but it's kinda funny to see modern big budget shows not really matching the level of graphical polish we got all the way back in 2007.

Sound 7/10: Really pleasant surprise but the classical stuff here actually works perfectly for the kinds of racing they're doing, and as much as I love the stuff, I'm really glad they vetoed Eurobeat from ending up on here and ruining the shows more serious identity. Same track gets overplayed like crazy, but I still never really got tired of it.

Characters 2/10: This is where everything positive I have to say about the show goes to die: In a show like Wangan Midnight that wants to be taken more seriously than an Initial D because it's trying to have an actual conversation with the audience about what it TRULY means to chase the dragon, you cannot reduce your characters you use to represent that conversation to one dimensional speed junkies. Having everyone be one beat like that in Initial D is fine because it's just a fun dumb show about racing, not a show about what it MEANS to race or the deeper ramifications of chasing that high day in and day out like Wangan Midnight is. Every single character has a job that exists purely to fund their racing machines, every single conversation they have with any other character in the show is about their cars or tuning or engine performance, every thought they have is dedicated to going faster on the Wangan, and if they can't measure something in kilometers per hour or brake horsepower it never even crosses their mind to begin with.

Now I can already hear you saying "but Burr, it's a racing anime. Of COURSE they're going to only talk about things having to do with cars" and to that I say no silly, Initial D is a racing anime and Wangan Midnight is, again, about the ramifications of racing and the complex relationship drivers have between their cars, the road, and their lives. It's impossible to have these deep 'is it worth it' thoughts if there's no worth to these people's lives the anime gives us to work with outside of their cars. A few times it seems like they TRY to do it, for example there's a subplot with a mechanic that fell out of the culture and gets sucked back into the street life because the Devil Z is almost calling him to return to his old ways and try to beat it, so he drops his savings on a brand new GTR to chase down the devil and reenter the nightlife, but it causes his pregnant wife to leave him when she realizes she can't rely on him to come home safely every night and provide for her now that he's risking his life every night. GREAT push and pull setup that proves the show is capable of executing on its setup, and the arc lasts for like 2 episodes before it resolves and we never see that guy again. It's not even a GOOD arc in particular; it's just something you can point at and be like "this right here is how they should've tried to get their point across for everyone else as well." Not that they all needed pregnant wives waiting on them specifically. They attempt to give a similar push and pull with some of the other characters having friends genuinely worry about them and the antics they get up to at night, but for the vast majority of the cast they're allowed to roam the highways at night completely unchecked with no real ability of their lives being owed to anything in particular other than going fast.

The main character in particular I don't have much to comment on, he is just the embodiment of every major issue I've already stated and I don't wanna tread the same ground again, it's just disappointing because you would think he's the one person the writers would desperately try to SAVE from being a nothingburger of a blank template like everyone else is. No one has any chemistry with each other, no relationships develop at all (friendly romantic or otherwise), and everyone acts like they're zoned out on a party mix of Ambien and Xanex 24/7. There's a difference between being chill, and being absent, and the entire cast is absent for the full runtime of the show.

Enjoyment 3/10: I had to force this anime down like broccoli because of how much I love cars, and all the highway driving was really pleasant to watch but there was pretty much nothing going on to keep me invested in the races or what the outcome was. I actually almost fell asleep a few times when I was grinding out the last few episodes just so I could say I completed the show.

Overall 4/10: Wangan Midnight presents some really deep and interesting questions about what it means to seek extreme activities for extreme highs but doesn't DO anything to back up anything meaningful it tries to say. I adore all things car culture, am generally a pretty positive and forgiving guy when it comes to rating these shows, and stuck this one out to the end because I reeeeally wanted to love it. Avoid this unless you fill your cereal with high octane every morning, and even then, proceed with caution.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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