Anime Initial D: Fourth Stage

[Hittokiri Zero]

^_^!!! This is exactly what i've been wanting or atleast hopinh for :rolleyes: more Initial D street racing goodness! For those of you who don't know Initial D esentially follows young Takumi Fujiwara and his exploits in the world of street racing while he starts out racing not because he enjoys it because he [i]needs[/i] to; Takumi soon begins to realize how much he loves racing and after a while excepts his role on the "Akina Speedstars" (racing team). Basically the anime follows a simple story where Takumi racing in his underpowered AE86 Toyota Trueno races against harder and harder opponents in better and better cars. Now while most people would expect this formula to get pretty darn boring, but it actually doesn't as there are a fair share of plot twists thrown in here and there and all the races are explained in such a way that whether your a car enthusiast or not you'll understand what's going on and be encaputred by the sweet EuroTrance music that goes along with the series. While the first 3 stages (1st and 2nd stage were esentially Initial D T.V. seasons 3rd stage was a movie, battle stage was a recap of all the "battles" (races) in the series along with new scenes here and there, and the Initial D Extra Stage was an OVA focusing around the drivers of the racing team Impact Blue) were criticized harshly for their bad CG racing graphics and the unorthodox looking characters (just bad animation in general) from the first episode of the 4th stage I just downloaded these wrongs seem to have been more or less corrected ^_^. The horrible CG we once hated and loved is no more and has been revamped with a newer (Form of Cel Shading i beleive o_O) form og CG graphics, many of the character desgins look sharper and the music that has been played so far has been great and has the same great Initial D feel from the 1st and 2nd stages.

Anyway... o_O I doubt most people have seen Initial D 1st stage, even though it was licensed by Tokyopop (and ADV I believe) and is currently being serialized/dubbed, horribly dubbed and translated that is... But to get to the point, while I generally hate watching a "sequel" type anime without watching the series that went before it, I'd definatly reccomend this anime for those of you who are looking for something new and different from your average anime or are just bored as hell x_X.

Basically from what i've seen you can still download the 3rd, Extra, and Battle stage off of Bittorrent, as for 1st and 2nd stage if you watch the episodes of 4th stage and like what you see I reccomend you buy them off of E-Bay or somewhere where you can import/buy japanese/HK dvds.

... so anyone else watching this series :p ? *listens to the crickets chirp*

[Ashura]

I've seen all of Stage 1, 2 and the Stage 3 movie, and I loved it! It got me addicted to the arcade game (even though I haven't beat Bunta yet...stupid Bunta!). I personally had no problem with the CG whatsoever, and Stage 3's CG was pretty good IMO. Stage 4 is sounding pretty awesome though. Any idea when Stage 4 is released (not the really bad TokyoPop dub)?

Can you give us (well, me anyway) any tidbits story-wise?