Akira was living a typical, if quiet, high school life when he boards the wrong train car and learns that there really is a government conspiracy going on, all to cover up the existence of aliens! Faced with the option to either be “erased” or to work for the AMO, Akira chooses to cooperate, and in the process learns that he’s not the first person in his family to join up: his father wasn’t a police officer like he said he was but instead died in the line of duty as an AMO agent. Akira wants to learn more about his father, and maybe why everyone in the AMO who knew him seems to tense up at his name, but it seems like there are secrets about Akira himself that he doesn’t know about yet either.
To address the rainbow-colored elephant in the room: there is no heterosexual explanation for Akira’s interest in his classmate/fellow AMO officer Sho. It seems to have cooled off a bit by volume 3 but for the first two volumes I found myself wondering if this would be the rare, non-BL series to feature a gay main couple (and to be fair, that kind of dancing around is rather common in a G Fantasy series, the shippablity of characters is a feature not a fluke). It’s rather noticeable too — so far it seems like the series has no interest in having any major, or even reoccurring, female characters and even the majority of the background characters are male too. I had to double-check to make sure that Akira and Sho didn’t attend an all-boys school because there’s that few girls on the page!
By volume 3 the romantic vibes have died down a little bit and Sho has become convinced that Akira was in fact the one who saved his life years ago and that this means that sometime in the future Akira will be going back to the past to create that time loop. Personally I’m hoping this isn’t the case (I’m not a fan of that trope) and so far Sho’s sole basis for this theory is how similar Akira looks to the man who he remembers saving him, someone he only saw for a moment. We’ve been told that Akio (Akira’s father) died fighting the same alien that attacked Sho, and the time of his death lines up with when Sho was attacked, and Akira has specifically asked for equipment that was the same as his father’s, hence the visual similarities between them. After rereading all of these scenes, Sho should know all of these details so I’m puzzled why he made this jump in logic, especially since other AMO staff who interacted with Akio (and for a far larger period of time) don’t seem to think this is a possibility at all.
Although, Akira & Sho’s main contact at the AMO, the white-haired and eye-patch wearing Amamiya (who is as devious as you’d expect a character looking like that to be) certainly isn’t telling anyone more than 50% of the truth at any given point in time, and to be fair no one has outright said “Akira’s father Akio died protecting Sho and his sister in this specific alien attack” so the story could weasel its way into plausible deniability for either narrative direction. Plus, everyone is keeping Akira in the dark about the mysterious (alien) powers he manifested during his AMO entrance training exercise, maybe there is a race of aliens out there with time travel abilities! These mysteries are definitely at the heart of Tokyo Aliens and hopefully the series will be able to give them the proper pacing to flesh them out.
There is quite a lot going on at any given moment in time in Tokyo Aliens, and it’s clear that creator Naoe delights in drawing both the action scenes and the more comedic moments. There are a few times where the art for an action scene’s double-page spread does bleed a bit too far into the margins and I feel like I’m missing out on the full affect of a spread, so digital readers may fair better in this case, but there haven’t been any issues with word bubble placement so far however (which would be a far bigger readability issue). All of the main cast are drawn in the kind of way that is sure to delight fans who are into bishonen boys and inspire all kinds of merch, and it has the kind of slick looks, fun character dynamics, and yummy mysteries that a specific subset of anime audiences love to eat up; G Fantasy truly knows their target audience and I am one of its members.
I’m definitely looking forward to continuing on with the series, even if the waiting time between volumes is brutal!