MF GHOST

The Ghosts of Asphalt

I didn't expect to get invested in the death of the internal combustion engine. (I drive a practical hybrid and stay out of the fast lane). But *MF Ghost*, Tomohito Naka's 2023 anime adaptation of Shuichi Shigeno's manga, mourns gas-powered cars like it's saying goodbye to a lost dynasty. In the 2020s, Japan has handed the roads over to self-driving electric vehicles, and the manual clutch has become a museum piece. The last refuge for piston roar is MFG, a legal street-racing circuit where the old gods of the asphalt get one more chance to scream. It's a nostalgic setup by design. It also has to live with the obvious weight of being the spiritual successor to *Initial D*.



When the cars are in motion, the show comes alive. Naka splits the visuals cleverly: the people stay in familiar 2D, while the cars arrive as dense, gleaming 3D models. In weaker hands that kind of contrast can look bargain-bin cheap. Here, it gives the vehicles an odd, almost intimidating heft against the painted scenery. Midway through the first season, Kanata Rivington, our half-British prodigy, flings his badly outmatched Toyota 86 down a foggy volcanic mountain road. The camera stops admiring from afar and wedges itself right behind the wheel. We see the digital RPM gauge climb. We hear that guttural engine scream as it fights gravity, synced perfectly to a Eurobeat track that absolutely knows what it's doing. You can almost catch the smell of hot brakes. The speed feels absurd, but it also feels tangible.



The problem is that, sooner or later, the race ends. Once the drivers climb out of the cockpit, the tension drains away almost instantly. Yuma Uchida gives Kanata a detached, careful stoicism that edges into something nearly robotic. Uchida usually plays characters with a live wire hidden under the surface, but here Kanata comes off like a beautiful alien politely searching for his missing father. His shoulders barely tighten; his voice hardly shifts. That makes him a wonderfully exact driver and a deeply flat protagonist once he gets home. Worse, the show drops him into a genuinely awkward romantic subplot with 17-year-old Ren Saionji (Ayane Sakura), who secretly works as an "MFG Angel" race queen. The script wastes an agonizing amount of time acting like Kanata couldn't possibly recognize her in a cheap wig. It's dead weight hanging off the real attraction.



Whether that imbalance kills the show for you mostly comes down to how much patience you have for anime tropes. The critical consensus has been harsh for good reason. Reviewing the first season for *Death's Door Prods*, one critic accurately diagnosed it as a "bizarre failure of media that never comes together into something legitimately engaging, but through a perplexing Venn-diagram of issues, succeeds in not completely crashing and burning either." I can't really fight that. The worldbuilding is paper-thin. The side characters feel like placeholders waiting for their turn at the wheel.

Still, I keep coming back to the way those tires bite into wet pavement on the final lap. Shigeno and Naka know motorsport isn't only about speed. It's about the tiny strip of space where human error keeps colliding with mechanical perfection. *MF Ghost* fumbles its way through the human stuff, but the second the starting lights flare and the bass kicks in, it knows exactly what it wants to be. A messy, imperfect machine. But a very fast one.