Jan 26, 2026
If you're coming in to watch another Initial D, then I'll have to disappoint you. It's very different in focus despite both being about racing. While Initial D focuses on the races almost exclusively, WM (Wangan Midnight) focuses a lot more on the characters, tunning, improving your car and making it as fast as possible. There are still races, mind you. But in WM they seem to be way more about who has the better car than about driving skills or drifting. At first, the races are very short and you barely see anything before the race is over. But after about 1/3rd of the
...
way through, the races started being longer and have captivated me despite them feeling simpler than in ID.
The story is fairly simple. It's about Akio, Tatsuya and various characters racing for the title of the fastest on the Wangan. Every few episodes focus on improving a different aspect of their car(s) to make them perform better or be faster. I'm not a car enthusiast, so I can't say how accurate all of those bits were, but they were interesting and kept them going forward. Usually WM explained decently well why changing certain parts of the car helped improve the car's performance and in what way, but sometimes the anime didn't explain enough for me to understand that.
The characters were pretty simple. The main characters the show focuses were somewhat developed, letting us see a bit into their motivations and why they are doing this or what they do besides car racing. But other characters usually suddenly appear in the show, only to leave in 2-3 episodes without much character development happening or them being interesting in any way. They are pretty forgettable and not interesting.
The visuals were nice, but also had nothing special to them. You could see the races just fine, but they didn't make them more interesting with interesting angles or shots. Sometimes the composition outside of the races was quite nice, e.g. when showing the characters and their cars.
One of the main ups of the anime for me is the music. It was quite good and energetic and made watching the races more fun. There was one track that was a little overplayed, because it played almost every other episode. But even then, I quite enjoyed it and there was a decent amount of variety besides that.
Overall, the show itself is nothing flashy, but it still is a nice watch that can captivate your attention.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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