English Dub Review: Tank Chair “Episode 1”

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Overview (Spoilers Below):
Once the city’s strongest assassin, Nagi Taira is left unresponsive after protecting his younger sister, Shizuka, and now lives in a wheelchair.  Working as an assassin broker, Shizuka takes on assassination jobs and brings her brother to the battlefield for his “rehab”.  Hoping to fully awaken Nagi, Shizuka accepts a contract to take out Goro Arashiyama, the boss of a notorious robbery gang.

Our Take:
Whenever I finish another anime on Prime Video, I somehow get pulled back into the service with another one.  Fortunately, from the concept alone, this latest anime seems more original than another teacher/student harem series.  How original are we talking here?  Well, imagine the toughest assassin in the most dangerous city in the world, but in a comatose state and in a wheelchair.  That doesn’t seem all that exciting compared to other assassins like Agent 47.  Luckily, his youngest sister is by his side to help him back on his feet.  However, to do that, she has to find an opponent so menacing that he’ll be permanently awakened from his coma.  In its first episode, the show highlights this concept and world-building as Shizuka helps his assassin brother, Nagi, find and kill the ape-human hybrid criminal gang’s leader, Goro Arashiyama.
What we got out of that is a blood-soaked party that has a disabled killer make mincemeat out of the monkey men.  While it makes for a fun ride, it also shows the series still has a way to go to live up to its wild concept.  The first episode of “Tank Chair” does have some potential to be a tolerable watch, including the sibling dynamic between Nagi and Shizuka and even Nagi’s badass wheelchair tricks, but only when he senses the urge to kill.  For the latter, Polygon Pictures did an okay job highlighting the insane action from those wheelchair tricks, even if it works best with a stylized 2D animation format.  Outside of that, I’m still not convinced of the full CGI anime presentation.  Besides that, this appears to be another anime where its subpar English dub and poor sound mixing will become the bane of my existence as we progress through it.  The concept is interesting, no doubt.  I just wish other streaming services like Crunchyroll handled everything else instead of Prime Video.