Wind Breaker Season 2

Episode 21

At the risk of sounding like a simpleton, I am happy to have the fights back in Wind Breaker. These frenetic, face-breaking displays were what hooked me back when I first checked out the manga years ago—these blistering brawls where dudes go flying and I pump my fists going "Hell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah." As the confrontations escalate on Keisei Street, the team behind the anime is clearly excited to be expressing that energy again, and they also obviously understand the assignment.

The defining feature of the enemy team being taken on here, eventually named as the deliciously gritty GRAVEL, is that they just have bunches and bunches of dudes to throw at our heroes. They're sourced from an entire district of for-hire thugs, and while there is an allusion in the writing to the economic factors that inform such delinquency, interrogating that isn't the order of the day. Rather, these guys now simply exist to have wave after wave of them deployed in fights that thus take on the "100 men vs 1 gorilla" approach, if the gorilla was a suit-clad undergrad with sick martial arts training. It's all mostly in service of the Bofurin boys, and the audience, getting to really see the new Roppo Ichiza guys show their stuff.

And what stuff it is. I praised the combat choreography in the previous episode, but I should have known escalations were coming. This is Wind Breaker, it's had an obligation to top itself ever since the kids were doing Rider Kicks to save some shops way back in the premiere. It's also got to put over Kanji and his crew like any proper booking, so the anime busts out the ambitious artistic angles for the action. There's a side-view-framed slugfest for a moment just to drive home the beat-em-up video game nature of all this. There's Kanji doing an insane leapfrog maneuver off of Sakura to lead into a ridiculous contiguous simulated tracking shot. I don't know why these GRAVEL guys ever thought they could win—when the anime's making the characters look this cool, the fodder they're fighting never stands a chance.

As noted in-situ by the characters and necessitated this deep in the series, this orgy of violence is for a good cause, of course. The first half of the episode leading into this engagement has all the kids down at the club, confirming what any of them fights for. There are good meals served by Tsubaki, who discusses being validated by getting to perform pole-dancing there. And overall there's an entertaining lack of judgement on the people who come and go in this entertainment district just trying to get hammered and have a good time. There is much pain in the world, but not in this room, and it's the job of Roppo Ichiza to keep it that way.

At the center of that is Shizuka, the too-pure-for-this-gritty-world songbird whom the enemy gangs are evidently after for reasons that are…not especially clear right now. Don't get me wrong, Shizuka's song in this episode is pretty, and I appreciate the sweeping intentional shift in the cinematography as she performs. It brings a warmth, contrasting with the aforementioned violence lurking just outside on Keisei Street, and driving home how this is a haven that the suited smackdown specialists of Roppo Ichiza will put their name and reputation on the line to protect. But Shizuka herself comes off as little more than a plot device at this point, a symbolic prize being fought over by the boys who get to discuss their own emotional interiority and developments.

It is still early in a storyline that could prove to be long, so I'll carve out some benefit of the doubt that Shizuka will get her due at some point. And what audiences are given for the boys is a solid continuation of the idea of gradual growth that has brought them to this moment. They're being specifically looked to as the future by the suited studs of Roppo Ichiza who, it turns out, aren't even that much older than them. And in witnessing Roppo Ichiza's devotion to Keisei Street, Sakura and the others see the level of dedication they might have to rise to by the time they've grown themselves. It intersects on a personal level with Suo's advice to Nirei, and is even inversely reflected in the GRAVEL guys who come from a place where their future has ostensibly been stolen from them. So how can I not positively look to the potential future of this plot when that's the whole theme of this arc? Plus, again, the generally sick fights that take up the back half of this episode. This is what Wind Breaker is all about.

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Wind Breaker is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Chris brawls his way through the mean streets of anime reviews, with a close-knit crew of co-writers he knows he can count on. You can check out his stomping grounds over on his BlueSky or see some of the tags he's thrown up on his blog.