Anime 52405 Highspeed Etoile

Characters can be the heart and soul of a lot of sports anime, getting to know their motivations, what truly drives them, their journeys, how they got to where they are and how they interact with each other, whether it’s team camaraderie or rivalries against opponents can all be really interesting. That can get tricky with some sports, developing a bunch of compelling rival characters and teams for a tournament can be a tall order, which kind of presents a unique advantage for a seasonal racing format, sure you could probably sneak in a twist of someone losing a seat, but the cast is mostly ... locked in for a good while, which is fertile ground for developing all these aforementioned aspects.

That makes Highspeed Etoile’s writing all the more puzzling, because there's barely any real characters, it's staggering how they decided on such a seasonal format for their competition, and yet don't make any meaningful effort to show or develop any of the actual drivers, think about all the crazy rivalries in motorsports, and they have free reign to do anything they want, yet they chose to do basically nothing? The only real standouts are "King" and "Queen" in front of the pack, however there’s nothing beyond that, nothing about what makes them tick, their motivation, their thoughts, their personalities, well anything really, they're just generic good driver #1 and good driver #2.

This anime is clearly heavily inspired by F1 but instead of making some legally distinct car designs and calling it a day, they went all the way throwing in a bunch of gimmicks which were to its own detriment. The setting is futuristic so we have these spaceship looking monstrosities for cars, AI companions instead of race engineers on the radio which could've made for some banter or commentary on the races, pitting is seemingly automated, and oddly, self-driving cars to pad out the grid, which to be fair aren’t even that different from a lot of the human ones, since neither get any characterization whatsoever.

Worst of all is their DRS substitute, while it isn’t perfect in F1, you could at the very least make compelling arguments about it, the driver behind is able to get some increased speed to seal the deal on an overtake if they were close enough. This anime chooses to just give a crazy super boost to everyone, which renders the other racing bits kind of obsolete and makes the whole strategy focused around them. It’s definitely more flashy, that’s for sure, but more insidious than that, it’s also a tool for the writers to pull anyone they want to the front of the pack for that sweet sweet drama.

And then there’s the main character, which is terribly executed on a lot of fronts. It feels like they wanted a fish out of water type of situation, where it’s someone new getting into the sport and finding out all about the rules, how it works and all that, however the issue is she’s just thrown into the highest and most prestigious level of the sport anyways. She apparently had some training too which makes things even worse when she’s not aware of even the most basic rules of the sport she’s supposed to be competing in, like what a yellow or blue flag is, or that pitting is a thing. It would be like if there was a chess anime and the MC gets into a tourney with the likes of Magnus Carlson and Hikaru Nakamura and in their first match they say something like "uhm, what does the horsey do?" it's that stupid.

To cap things off there's also the generally terrible flow to the racing in each episode, there's no rhyme or reason to things, they show some parts, skip over a bunch of laps, show some other random parts and so on and so forth, this is miserable for the audience because they might as well be watching some random footage of different races, there's no sense of where each driver is, what's the distance between each of them, what they want to accomplish and stuff like that, this also doubles as a "good" thing for the writers since they can just lazily place whatever driver in whatever random place they want for those dramatic scenes. One time they mention there's a 6s gap, is that little or is that a lot? The audience has no frame of reference for these spaceship cars, and it's not like that was followed through anyways, it was quickly forgotten and things returned more or less to what they were with the King and Queen racing almost side by side in the first 2 places and everybody else being irrelevant.

It’s frustrating because that isn’t even necessarily a bad thing, if King and Queen had any personality to speak of their rivalry could be exciting or something to write home about, similarly, F1 has dominant teams and drivers, there’s a lot of material there, maybe it’s about a scrappy team trying to get their footing into the sport, maybe it’s an engineer with a novel solution for their vehicle, maybe it’s a genius driver that’s pushing the car to the very limits, maybe it’s about the tough realities about how funding is distributed in the sport and the bureaucracy behind the scenes, just anything at all really.

The MC also spins out 2 times in her first race, ending up dead last if she weren't disqualified for forgetting the rules, and yet the crazy thing is she manages to recover really quickly and almost overtake from her second spin out, again there's no frame of reference for these things and it feels like the writers will just do whatever they want with the racers and their placements. As much as something like MF Ghost had some super human stuff, that might as well be a documentary comparing how grounded it and Highspeed Etoile are, at the very least in that anime you had a sense of time and place where the drivers were and what they were accomplishing, and no character suddenly spawned in elsewhere because the writers felt like it. Overall I can't say anything other than this is pretty terrible and not worth anybody’s time.

Lowspeed Toilet

Somehow the makers of this show managed to make an ultra-high speed racing series unbelievably boring. There are multiple things that cause this, from the commentators sounding bored out of their mind, to us not knowing anything about the characters since we get tossed into the races right away without any buildup, to there being no music for a lot of the driving, which means that most of the racing shown is cars going down a straight with no BGM with only the low hum of the engines and a commentator droning on about something while sounding like a robot.

I really cannot stress enough ... how bad the commentator VAs in this show are. The male one at least tries to sound somewhat enthusiastic, but the female one sounds like she’s reading sales figures at a weekly business meeting. As you can imagine, this is extremely detrimental to building any sense of excitement and really doesn’t do the series any favors.

Our MC Rin is ditzy to an unbelievable degree. She is supposed to come from (sim?) racing games, but when she’s finally in the car she’s as clueless about everything as a person who doesn’t even know what a car race is. She also doesn’t know who one of the top two racers in the series is. This joke is the basis for the whole of episode 3, btw.
I have a hard time identifying if this show is trying to be a comedy or not. You have factors pointing towards it (basically everything to do with our MC), but then you have the rest of the show where it’s not really present.

The other characters just ... exist. Since the first two episodes were nearly all race scenes, there really is nothing to say about them so far.

There have been some blatant animation errors, like a large object popping in too late and someone’s hair changing colour. The cars in this series go way too slow around the track for the supposed speeds they are traveling at. Using Ep2 they are supposed to be going at an average speed of 640 kmph (400 mph) over a lap, yet when we see them drive they seem to be going f1 pace at best, which is 250 kmph at the high end.

I also have some personal nitpicks as a racing fan, like everyone being obsessed with a regular ass overtake she performed (while using a boost), direction arrows pointing the wrong way, showing footage of a certain turn while highlighting another turn on the circuit, but these are really minor compared to the overall boringness problem.

If the makers want this to succeed in any way, they NEED to make the next few episodes focus on the characters, since then there will at least be something to care about. If they don’t do this and the next episodes will keep the racing focus, I don’t recommend watching this. Watching Verstappen win by 30 seconds in F1 every race would be more entertaining.

The one positive thing I can say about this show is that it’s not as blatant of an advertisement as the Gran Turismo movie that came out last year, which has loosely the same premise.