Two Car

Two Car. The show about cute girls in motorcycles that nobody asked for.
*SPOILOR FREE*
TLDR: not worth watching

Story: 4
Nothing new or interesting. 2 girls with no control over their emotions race in side car motorcycles and overcome all kinds of relationship problems... sort of... actually they almost never overcome anything.
Story is totally cliche and uninteresting. The main girls basically love the same man (their coach) and also they sometimes race. That's it. It's completely riddled with unnecessary and annoying drama. On top of that most of the problems that arise in the show are never resolved and it feels very unsatisfying to watch.

Art: 6
It isn't terrible ... nor is it ugly, but it is unoriginal and uninspired.
Character designs are OK. Generally no characters stand out or are at all note worthy. The settings/ backgrounds are also OK. Nothing very pretty or worth talking about. At least the show isn't an eyesore.

Sound: 4
OP and ED are both mediocre and are unmemorable. Background sound is exactly the same. The hype song that plays when they race adds to the ambiance a little bit but not much. I don't even remember what any of the other background songs sound like.

Character: Somewhere between 2 and 5
Not all the characters are as annoying and insufferable as the 2 main characters. But yes the main characters are awful.
Basically the two main characters are exactly the same person but they look different. This is kind of an ongoing gag in the show where everyone says "You two are so similar!" and of course they deny it because they hate each other. Yes the main characters who are childhood "friends" hate each other. Mostly because they love the same man. The main characters are best described as loud, irritating and immature.
Again not all characters are terrible and some of the side characters are actually pretty nice or funny, despite having little screen time.
There is a lesbian racing pair who is always very funny to watch, which is perhaps the only reason I didn't drop this show.
There is also another pair who has a rather good (though short) arc about friendship and trust. As cliche as that may sound... it was kind of nice.

Enjoyment: 4
Not worth watching. This show is a whole lot of needless drama and not a lot of sidecar racing. Main characters ruin this already bad show. An unsatisfying watch through and through.

Overall: 5
I don't know why I give it a 5 and not a 4. Maybe because 2/12 episodes were actually quite nice and well thought out?
Well anyways unless you are in love with motorcycles and anime girls do not waste your time on this series.

Let's get this quickly out of the way first: Two Car is far from being the best anime of this season. It's far from being original, and it's far from being an actual quality show. Still, it has something that even some shows with better ideas, production-values and fanbase don't: Despite it's numerous mistakes, it's still fun to watch.

The story is set on the island of Miyakejima, where does the local Sidecar race called Miyakejima TT take place. Seven teams, each consinsting of two people: driver and passenger , from different High Schools around the area have come to compete. The winner of this event ... will be able to start at one of the most prestigious Sidecar races on the planet, the Man of Isle TT in London.

Our main duo: Yuri and Megumi, have their own reasons for wanting to participate in London. Their ex-coach, who originally tought them how to ride the sidecar, decided to pursue his own racing carrer and left them some time ago. Strangely enough, both our main girls are deeply in love with him. Hence they want to go and confess their feelings to him in London TT, where he'll be participating. Sounds pretty weird and cliché, and that's exactly the case. It doesn't really play a role early on, but picks up on importance as the show goes on. And with that, you start to take the show less and less seriously.

But of course, there are other teams who would like to win the race and our duo definetly won't have it easy. Don't expect any rivality between the teams themselves tho. Since the sidecar racing is not really popular, and the community is rather small, the teams get along very well together. They help each other, they live in the same inn and they act casually, more like friends than opponents in the race.

When there are no problems between the teams, there must be some in them tho. And there are. While introducing the teams and riders, it already becomes clear that not everything is that nice. Some team-mates have their issues with each other, which result in argues and a worse performance in training. During these "fights", we are able to get a glimpses of personality of some characters, or their reasons for racing. Even though these problems come from very childish reasons majority of time, they're fun to watch and the slight addition of drama is positive in my eyes.

The characters themselves are however lackluster in every single way. There is just way too many of them for such a short anime, and they're not unique or special in anything. They have some different personalities, but we never get to understand why for example driver A acts mean to driver B, hence their behaving becomes irrelevant as it goes. Atleast some of the duo's work well as a comedy makers, and some of the gags were pretty damn funny to be honest.

The racing itself isn't that much of a thing. The character introducing takes a lot of time and the real race comes just in the very last episode. And it's not that great. It lacks any kind of intense entertainment, which is a needed aspect, especially when the race itself is supposed to be the climax of the whole anime. Also the ending was just something you expected from minute 1 and they found a way to fuck it up even more anyway.

Overall, I think the Slice of Life tag would fit Two Car more than the Racing tag, and the show thinks that too. The relationships of characters are more important and better presented than the race itself, which was a decent-enough decision, atleast in my opinion.

The art of it is.. what you could expect from a low budget show. It's lackluster in a lot of areas, but this being a calm show where nothing much's happening, you won't really notice how much are the scenes lacking. The character desings are also kinda saving it here. Not original, but they still look decent and fit well with my style.

Opening of the show is pretty damn good, ending at about average. The soundtrack was almost non-existant during most of it, but there were some good tracks here and there. Atleast with so many characters, a lot of begineer actors can start their carrer.

Despite it's numerous mistakes and quality shortages, Two Car still has a fair ammount of entertainment in itself. The show is maybe average or poor in every category, but still works kinda well together. Atleast to the point when I actually wasn't struggeling while watching it. Which is a main indicator of a bad anime for me. The setup isn't that bad, atleast for a sports anime and meanwhile the characters are as bland as they could be, the show does it's best at putting them into interesting situations and relations.

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Should you watch Two Car? I honestly don't know. I didn't mind watching it every saturday evening, but god knows what would happen if I would want to marathon it. If you want to take a break from all of the action or shounen's, I guess you could give it a try. But if you're expecting a good sports experience, you're gonna be disappointed. Since the racing parts are actually the show's biggest weakness.

Two Car is about Side Car Racing...........................right?

LA was going into Two Car thinking this, rather Two Car is the different relationships that we see just taken to the highs and lows, for the better or worse of them with the Side Car racing taken to to it's most metaphoric form of storytelling between the six other relationships and rivals in Two Car.

Two Car's main duo are Yuri Miyata voiced by Aoi Koga and Megumi Meguro voiced by Aimi Tanaka as they want to win their hometown's TT in order for them to truly show their feelings to their coach. So essentially friends turned love ... interests to a coach that has no idea of any of this. The majority of their screentime however is focused mainly on them helping their rivals or bickering...and bickering and bickering over irrelevant stuff. They are both ways the strength and weakness to the entire anime and that's saying something considering they are the main focuses of this anime.

That comes into play when we look at the six other rivals. Like Chiyuki Shiohara and Misaki Nagai discourse over how Misaki was recruited and bringing in their dynamic friendship of rich vs. poor into play to Izumi Murata and Nagisa Suzuki's S&M friendship and how that is played with to the Shishido's twins and their essential identity crisis in similar respects to Yuri and Megumi's situation but has more to do with their identity and how that affects both their relationship and romantic situation they were placed in to Mao Katakura and Hitomi Iseki's all-loving and all-knowing (not really) comedic routines. The rest of the rivals....are NOT given this kind of treatment and are treated more as commentators...on speaking of which, Nene Itagaki and Ai Makita being the commentators of the TT also get their own "how they became friend focused episodes all to themselves as well). So all these relationship study development to the characters are all well and good, seeing their trials and tribulations (Izumi and Nagisa being the most interesting while the Shishido Twins' identity crisis was interesting but downplayed due to the twins scthick played rather straight for the most part) but the main focus are Yuri and Megumi and we kinda know who's gonna win let alone what the main focus of this entire anime is so looking at these characters though interesting becomes a practice in patience to actually get to the meat of the anime.

In terms of animation by Studio Sliver Link, the animation isn't that bad, from the sparingly used CGI on the side cars to the moeness character designs to be typical in this female-centric anime. There however besides that, there isn't much to say about the animation, it's just "meh" just like the plot format of this anime.

Now the voice cast is decent enough, LA just wished alot of the anime wasn't focused on the many many many bickering of the characters, most notably Aimi Tanaka and Aoi Koga are prime offenders. LA was surprised at least by Ayaka Nanase voicing Izumi Murase (who voiced Yoshino Koharu from Sakura Quest) now voicing the sadistic no-holds bar character. The ONLY voice actor LA geniuely liked and brought the spunk to this anime would be.....Sora Tokui as the energetic commentator of the TT, just hearing that "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING MIYAKAJIMA" brings a smile to LA's faces every time..so yeah Sora Tokui was MVP in this voice cast and LA thoroughly liked Ai Makita's backstory as to how she got into commentating.

Now that ending...god damn it Two Car!, you could have done something different but typical of a love triangle romance like the characters at the ending kinda said, they go back to square one by the end of it. LA liked the symbolism it did before all this showing us that Yuri and Megumi's friendship wouldn't break so easily even on the tracks but that ending could have cemented it, instead NOPE...status quo is god...-sigh- this was an original work from Sliver Link, they didn't need to do this, making being invested in Yuri and Megumi's trials and tribulations almost worthless!!!...ALMOST.

Two Car is by the end of it all, a look into the various relationships one can have through and through and how even these relationship can function through trials and tribulations shown by side car racing. For those motor heads, LA would say that you would be annoyed by the character focused narrative and wanting to see more of the racing and those who wanted to see Yuri and Megumi's friendship last would get quickly annoyed by their bickerings that you wouldn't care and would like to focus on another of their rivals instead....however even then the rival's screentime becomes moot due to Yuri and Megumi being main characters and being kinda the focus of this anime. So LA really doesn't know who this anime is trying to appeal to?. Two Car is a narrative mess of trying to appeal it's common demographic (be it the subtext yuri fanservice that duped LA into getting into this anime or side car racing also LA getting duped as LA wanted to see another Bakuon!) and not focusing...on it's main focus of Yuri and Megumi's battered friendship over a dumb romance, worst yet bailing and staying on the safe side by the finale of it all and that really grinded LA's gears...

By all means LA doesn't see Two Car as the worst anime of Fall 2017 let alone for 2017, but this anime has it's problems and it like Yuri and Megumi loves to run away from it's problems and that isn't helping anyone...

Two Car needs an a "plot intervention" is what it needed...