Japanese high school fighting + Shakespear = Tenjho Tenge

Written by Masasume on April 19, 2011 at 7:19 PM

Tenjho Tenge is not your typical high school fighting anime, although that is what it appears to be at the start.

You start off with two of the main characters, Suichiro Nagi and Bob Makihara, a couple of street thugs who call themselves the knuckle bombs. They enter a school called Todo Academy, which is basically the only surviving martial arts high school in the world. They go there with the idea that they will quickly rule the school, and find out soon enough that this schools students are anything but weak and ordinary.

As the story continues, these two team up with one of the schools clubs called the Juken Club, in order to become stronger and protect themselves and each other from the student council who is out to silence them.. The characters all start to develop drastically in both fighting skill and personality. No static characters here.

Throughout the story you see many awesome fight scenes, many of which are the best I've seen in any anime.

Part way through the anime, you get to a long flash back sequence that is completely necessary for the story. It lasts for about half the anime, however it is by far the most excellent bit of story telling you'll see in the series (The manga continues on far beyond the anime and continues that kind of storytelling)

The story begins to resemble many Shakespearean plays with many of the common elements such as suicide, murder, betrayal of friends, and lovers dying at the hand of lovers. It is done in such a beautiful and almost poetic way which really helps you understand what the characters went through in their past and why they are doing the things they are doing now.

On the surface this animes story may appear simple, however it is not. Definitely worth a try for those that love high school fighting animes and/or Shakespear.