Can you go through life as an anime watcher and a gearhead and not hear about Initial D I don't think so and I'll be honest I've watched a lot of Initial D back when I first started using Netflix and while I think the people in the anime look like crap (seriously some of the fugliest animated people ever) the car stuff was CGI awesomeness through out the series. Well Initial D isn't dead just yet as they just recently released an OVA called Initial D Extra Stage 2 which is the sequel to the first Extra Stage which focuses on the girls of Impact Blue. I wasn't able to find or watch the first half but thankfully it didn't matter as the second half deals with the stuff that happened during the first stage (first season) of the anime which I did watch (all those moons ago).
The Extra Stage 2 takes place about 6 months after Itekani messes things up with the girl that he likes Mako. Back in First Stage Itekani met Mako who is the driver for the all girl (well there are only the two of them) drift team called Impact Blue (her car is a blue Sil-80) and they start up a relationship of sorts. Bad luck follows Itekani as he messes up an important meet up with Mako by being more than two hours late. So they don't talk to each other until 6 months later when they have a chance encounter at a rest area and decide to try it one more time.
So it's meet up take 2 and this time Itekani is early but ends up helping an old man. Which makes him late for the second meet up again. Racing back to the meet up trying not to be very late again he punctures a tire and ends up without a usable car or cell phone and running by foot to find another phone. Luckily he is able to call Mako before he totally fails at talking with her. Itekani doesn't confess his love to Mako because he feels bad about the events and doesn't think it's the right time. Mako is then able to tell Itekani about her opportunity to go race professionally in Tokyo. She's really looking for Itekani to tell her not to go but Itekani the good guy that he is tells her to go anyways and that he'll support her wishes but never tells her that he loves her. Mako knew that he loved her and is grateful that he supports her and wants her to go race in Tokyo.
So it ends up being a love story believe it or not. While there is plenty of drifting action (mostly Mako) it's almost entirely a chick flick. Seriously if you took out the CGI drifting and sat a woman down to watch it she would say that it's a chick flick. I'm not saying that's a bad thing I just thought it was kind of interesting that it turned out that way. The question is though was it any good.
I liked it, I'd probably tell others who liked Initial D about it and tell them to watch it as it does give us closure on a story that was left just hanging there during the original series. Will we see this in America though....hahaha no, FUNimation which now has the rights to Initial D isn't licensing anything new from the property due to poor sales (I'd say that's entirely the fault of no fucking advertisement during the heyday of the fast and furious type shows) even though Initial D stuff still sells. Enough that I'd think that a good well thought out advertisement campaign would actually produce a tidy profit for them but then that would actually require FUNimation to venture outside their standard advertising outlets and into the world of actual gearhead territory. But that's what I've been saying all along about what is wrong with the American anime industry as a whole and that's their pathetic advertising campaigns and their reluctence to go outside the anime/popculture box.
