I decided to watch Hamatora because I’d never heard of it and it seemed moderately interesting. About halfway through season 2 I took a break before finishing it. I was struggling to decide if it was worth finishing. In the end I would rate it around 3 out of 5. I was torn between loving and hating it.
The story takes place in Yokohama (hence the “Hama” in the title) and my guess would be that the tiger mascot character that appears a lot would be where the “Tora” came from (tora is the Japanese word for tiger). The main character is named Nice. He and a group of his friends are “minimum holders” which basically means they have super powers. The powers that they have are different from person to person. Nice’s minimum involves him snapping his fingers and moving quickly/instantly through space within a certain area. Other people’s minimums involve physical strength, predicting the future, healing, etc.
Nice and a handful of his friends (who are all minimum holders) have a business like a private detective agency or odd job agency where they take on various special requests for money. However as the show progresses it seems like they get more and more mixed up in things that they need to take on out of duty or principal than simple jobs for money. Characters are constantly getting into jams.
The show feels like a mashup between X-Men and Heroes, with other elements mixed in. For example, like X-Men, there is a special school that people with the potential to become minimum holders can attend in order to draw out their abilities. The show also brings up the same kind of social and political issues as X-Men does regarding the differences between normal humans and humans with special powers. The first season’s villain was a serial killer who was stealing the brains of people with minimums – which felt straight out of Heroes. However it seems to me that this show takes things a great deal farther than X-Men or Heroes in terms of drama, action, and plot twists.
For positives, this show has a lot of elements that make for good entertainment. There are a variety of characters. There is almost always some kind of fast-paced action going on at any given time. The villains are not one dimensional characters who just do bad things because they’re evil. The first season villain was a mad scientist who wanted to create more minimum holders, whereas the second season villain was desperate to eliminate all minimum holders, including himself, in order to maintain balance with normal people.
My main beef with this show in general is that it’s incredibly chaotic. It felt like the writer wanted to include all possibilities instead of picking one story. As a viewer I felt like I was riding in a ship being tossed about by wave after wave of plot twists and dramatic backstories until I almost no longer cared and just wanted some kind of resolution to the plot. Thankfully the resolution came. But it felt like the story dragged on for a lot longer than should have been necessary because of the countless detours. Ultimately, I felt there was a lot of potential in this show to be something really interesting, but that the actual execution of the show was lacking because it was trying to go in too many directions simultaneously.
Another thing that annoyed me about Hamatora was the fact that the characters have terrible names: Nice, Honey, Three, Birthday, and brothers named Art and Skill. I mean, really?
星女 