Anime in Focus: Air Gear episode 1

This anime is available for free on Funimation's website HERE

Alright, this is the story of Itsuki Minami and his journey riding around on FREAKING ROCKET SKATES!

Episode starts out with an introduction to the technology on how these freaking rocket skates, further refered to as “Air Treks” work, and how fast they can go. Personally I think their an accident waiting to happen, followed by a bajillion lawsuits, but that would make for a very boring anime.

Anyway, despite possessing this wonderful technology, VCR’s are still in use. This episode starts with our main character having a flashback about getting his ass kicked by an air trek gang. This leads to him being scolded by the group of women he lives with for whatever reason, who enjoy torturing him. We are given little reason as to why this guy is living with them, but we can gather from context clues that they are probably not relatives.

Anyway, Itsuki finds out that the girls he’s living with are also part of an air trekking team, and winds up stealing some of their skates to go practice with. He attempts to do some stunt he saw this one girl doing, but anybody with a working brain could tell you a new person attempting to perform such a stunt would wind up as a pile of red goo on the sidewalk. Fortunately, Ituski’s a main character, so he doesn’t have to worry too much about the logical consequences of attempting a grind at 80 MPH before learning how to skate regularly.

Anyway, after coming out just fine, Itsuki decides to take his freshly stolen skates to a party in a seedy part of town, where gangs of Air Trekkers are hanging around. Along with them is that girl that he watched doing some insane stuff earlier in the episode. Realizing his opportunity to screw around with her, he ends up provoking a skate off with the gang that he got in trouble with at the beginning of the episode.

Pretty solid first episode, although it doesn’t take too many risks. Like the idea, but the genericness of the rest of the first episode bothers me greatly.  I will definitely be giving the second episode a shot later.

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