Well, it’s the end of another year. Winter holidays have come and gone and we’re now in that awkward holding pattern of waiting for 2025 to die so we can get on with seeing just what woes 2026 will have in store. Well, I can’t think of a better way to pass the post-solstice depression times than by sitting down with an anime everyone tells me I’ll regret watching and giving it a review.
… okay, actually I can think of many better ways to pass the time, and I write these dang things ahead anyway, but it’s Taboo Tattoo time anyway.
It doesn’t take much time with Taboo Tattoo to guess what its major malfunction is probably going to be, because you realize pretty quickly you’ve seen this before. That’s the malfunction. It’s one I actually give a fair bit of grace to. Even if something has been done a million times, every time it is done is probably somebody’s first, and even for those of us who have been around the block a few times, as long as you bring something new and interesting to the scenario in the details, like giving us an engaging fantasy world or well-written and personable characters, there’s often some value to be found even in the millionth edition.
And anyway, just complaining about the urban fantasy action battler chassis would be pretty hypocritical of me. So, the devil’s in the details: how does Taboo Tattoo do?
We meet our main character, Justice Akatsuka, and I bet that derailed your train of thought. The kid’s name is literally Justice. It’s not his nickname either. And yeah “a strong sense of justice” is his primary and fairly overriding character trait. This isn’t a clever little parody setup either, Taboo Tattoo expects you to take it as seriously as something like Shakugan no Shana or at least Dream Eater Merry.
I will be referring to this character by his actual given name, not his nickname, for the entirety of the review just to highlight how silly it is.
Anyway, with absolutely no preamble, we see the 15-year-old Justice take out some generic adult goons, evidently saving a weird bum. Weird bum repays him by handing over a mystic crystal that evaporates and brands Justice’s hand with the titular tattoo. Literally the next scene, still before we’ve actually learned his absurd name, Justice is running late, barreling down the street with toast in his mouth, when he gets decked by an enigmatic magical assassin girl, named, as we will eventually learn, Bluesy Fluesy. Again, I will not bother with her nicknames. And yes, she wears blue.
We see some painful class lecture exposition about a brewing conflict between the fictional superpower the Kingdom of Selinistan and… America? Odd choice, kind of muddies the mysticism to put your super cool OC nation up against a perfectly normal and boring country and kind of gets in the way of doing Cold War style cloak and dagger politicking when you’ve got a flagrant fiction as the other party. Afterwards, it seems that the running late scene scored Justice no points with his stock-model childhood friend classmate and winner of the “most reasonable name so far” award, Touko Ichinose. Justice gets out of her sight for two seconds and Bluesy Fluesy shows up, steals his phone, and books it so as to lure him to an abandoned area where she can kick his ass for the tattoo, which is apparently some secret American ultratech weapon.
Bluesy Fluesy totally overpowers Justice and then… rather than removing the magic tattoo that she said she wanted back, killing him, or somewhere in between like chopping his arm off, she just explains how Tattoos work and then evidently lets him go. Why? No idea, as soon as she’s shown off her power to make bombs out of air like some cut-rate Colonel Mustang we just cut to Justice at grandpa’s dojo later getting his ass kicked in training.
We even see Bluesy Fluesy called to task by her handler for breaking every applicable rule on the Evil Overlord List (gloating, revealing her plans, letting enemies go for no apparent reason), but she doesn’t give him an answer either and just slips into unsubtly tailing Justice for some forced comedy.
When Justice finally confronts Bluesy Fluesy their talk is interrupted by a random encounter, which turns out to be some mob enforcer with a tattoo brawling with Bluesy Fluesy’s handler. She just sort of lets Justice fight for his own pride, but when he gets pummeled almost to death it turns out that his blood is the trigger for his Tattoo to work, allowing him to defeat the guy about to reduce him to chunky salsa.
And no, Bluesy Fluesy did not know that would happen, as it’s explicitly said the Tattoo Justice has was “triggerless” and had no proper wielder on record. Justice activating said weapon at last gives Bluesy Fluesy a motivation, that being recruiting him to her side since he can use the formerly unusable Tattoo and seems to like brawling with bad guys anyway.
Bluesy Fluesy manages to get her way in about half an episode of impressing the reality of the situation on Justice, though she does take the hangtime to make her school debut and give everyone the wrong idea about how she and Justice might know each other. This hits Touko pretty hard, even after Bluesy Fluesy decides to give Touko’s oversized chest a good groping.
I suppose I should mention at this point that despite being seemingly the perfectly average shonen urban fantasy action blend, Taboo Tattoo is technically a seinen – that is, a show that is made for adults. In this it’s somewhat similar to a show I reviewed previously, Isuca which elevated its age rating if not its storytelling with a whiff of erotic horror, indulging both nipples and gore for better or worse. Taboo Tattoo… is bloodier than average, at least. It bought into other exploitation as well, but we’ll get to those moments when they come and if necessary.
This showed a little in the fight where Justice awakened his tattoo, but really takes off when some goons from the Kingdom (which has recently been placed under new management thanks to a psycho princess doing a coup on her wiser and cooler-headed family, or so we’re led to believe) go after our absurdly-named heroes. They fight off the generic sadist and the basket-case bodysnatcher, but the whole “bodysnatcher” part drags Touko into the scenario when she’s used to attack Justice. I guess it’s less painful than her spending the whole show out of the loop.
Not that learning the truth of things stops her from delivering some really tired lines.
Anyway, the villains next divert from the main characters to kidnap an American agent and friend of Bluesy Fluesy, Lisa. They manage pretty well despite Bluesy Fluesy and Justice since the plot has to go somewhere. Between the heavy drama and some exceptionally poorly timed jokes, we get to Bluesy Fluesy trying to leave Justice and Touko safe and sound as she goes for the rematch. Justice, naturally, does not accept, and destroys the rest of Blusey Flusey’s house to escape and chase after her. Touko comes along because… I don’t know really. She’s forcibly involved because being possessed marked her with some sort of secondary Tattoo but it’s not like she can willingly use powers or actually fight, she just sort of tags along because her character is “loves Justice (the boy)” and “has huge boobs”.
She does at least prove surprisingly useful, getting one good hit in on Justice’s opponent. The whole thing involves, once again, Bluesy Fluesy fighting the sadist guy while Justice fights the little street rat girl, just this time in a container yard at port rather than in a house or such. Both do-gooders manage to win their battles, but the princess, Aryabhata, shows up to collect her minions. Well, mostly that’s why.
She appears before Justice, has her fun, and collects her crazy killer urchin. She then appears at the other fight to collect the still breathing pulp of her sadist whip dude, acting far more threatening to Bluesy Fluesy and Lisa than the bizarrely affable (even setting aside the random purposeless kiss) she was with Justice.
Thus, the rescue is successful, but Bluesy Fluesy’s keeping of Justice from the American authorities is busted and she has to answer to her superior officer, Colonel Sanders.
At this point I’m not even surprised. He’s not quite the mascot, but he does kind of have the pointy beard. Rather than court marshaling Bluesy Fluesy for her supposedly many crimes and infractions, Colonel Sanders instead to gives her the slap on the wist of insisting she take responsibility by continuing to act as Justice’s handler.
Briefly, we get some downtime that flips uncomfortably between over the top humor and theoretically serious talks, culminating with the introduction of a character known as BB (aka Blood, because edge), who looks like rejected concept art from The Matrix with his over-the-top black trench coat and shades. He acts like it too, completely no-selling Justice and trivially just grabbing him. He takes Justice to a pointless random battle against a Kingdom-aligned mad science lab and decides to start playing Morpheus.
Also, there’s something of a confession between Justice and Touko. In episode 6 so that’s not a nice flag.
Thereafter, the American-side forces (including team main characters with Justice, Bluesy, Colonel Sanders, and Touko despite her being useless) gather up to conduct a raid on the Japan Tattoo “ruins” where the princess is doing evil ritual things to probably overwrite the world. BB, though a free agent, is against her, but despite the fact that he apparently has a romantic history with Bluesy Fluesy he’s forced to be late to the party.
This whole thing is, of course a trap. The useless generic Americans get offed by some Kingdom samurai lady and her squad of battle maids, the princess turns that little girl minion of hers from before into a giant lion monster that eats helicopters, and even the previously introduced named characters are in a bad way.
As BB shows up to actually get work done, so does the princess. She nails Justice to a wall (in a bizarre move for her this is “with magic stone spikes through his body in a zillion places” and not sexually the way she’s been groping anyone who pleases her in most of her scenes) and is ready to proclaim her victory.
I could give the blow by blow, but really it doesn’t matter and this show is not good enough to warrant it. Instead, I’ll give the summary of the outcome. Everyone on the America side not introduced before BB? Dead. That Lisa lady we had to rescue before? Heartbroken, and also captured. Colonel Sanders? Has fewer body parts left than the Elric family but he’ll live. Bluesy Fluesy? She only lost her left arm. BB? Suicide by Justice when winning the battle causes his “source” to start turning him into some kind of monster through unexplained tattoo magic. After losing out on her chance to get what she wants (apparently), the Princess, having monologued enough about her goals, just sulks offstage.
Oh, except Touko was an idiot, ran away from evac, and decides to intercept a scene that was already decided by running to see Justice with the cutest big smile on her face even though he (and Blusey Fluesy) are clearly bloodied and despairing and there’s an obvious enemy right there that she should be able to see. This gets her reduced to cat food in the middle of her slowmo run via chomp from the previously unseen giant cat monster (who turns back human thereafter), while the princess monologues about hate and despair.
They don’t even give us gore like the show has otherwise been doing, just “oops, I guess everybody loses their significant other in this one”. It’s an extremely cheap shot that doesn’t land because Touko didn’t do enough to be someone the audience would actually like, and perhaps more importantly because of how idiotically complicit she is in her own demise.
This feels like it was trying to be equivalent to the Chomp from Muv Luv Alternative. But it fails on every level to replicate what made that moment so powerful. Even the anime version, which didn’t have tens of hours of bonding with the character and which didn’t deliver the legendarily traumatizing gore at least understood how to structure and pace that scene in a way that it would be as effective as it could be with the tools the troubled adaption actually had. Taboo Tattoo, despite a superficially similar composition, lacks that skill.
Rest in kibble, Touko. Your boobs (and non-absurd name) will be missed.
Anyway, Justice (and Bluesy Fluesy) is picked up by Wiseman. Sadly, this is not the bad guy of the second arc of Sailor Moon, but rather the bum who gave Justice the Tattoo. He was working with BB, explains the mythos of the tattoos you probably don’t care about, and sends Justice on a magical flashback ride into BB’s memories of his quest to destroy all tattoos because that’s what his love, Bluesy Fluesy, wanted. Specifically, it regards his time as a treacherous minion of the princess, learning her secret (that she’s a designer baby created by evil mad science that the king regretted too late) and how he got out of there.
Anyway, we launch into a training montage with Justice, Bluesy Fluesy, and a couple army guys retreating to the mountain for a year. Justice acts all bitter, Bluesy Fluesy has an artificial arm so good that it’s drawn just like her regular one, and all seems right with the world until the princess has a video message dropped off goading the team to come face her in America, with the captured Lisa as bait.
Thus, they get involved in the big battle at the Grand Canyon, facing off against all the level two goons as well as mind controlled and crazy Lisa.
Eventually, the fight left is Princess versus Justice. Justice loses because he’s too busy being angry ball of angst, so Bluesy Fluesy saves him with some subtext about him being like her long-lost brother we only learned about in this sequence.
Having the fact that being angry and emo limits his powers explained to him (and the audience. Doesn’t seem germane but this a making stuff up as we go along kind of affair), along with being rescued by Bluesy Fluesy, causes Justice to have a change of heart and jump back into the fray to save Bluesy Fluesy rather than get revenge.
Honestly the two of them had surprisingly decent chemistry for the show’s general lack of effort or skill.
Wiseman plays the double-cross card about then, which causes us to get a Kaiju battle at the end. It’s not much of a double-cross, though, as Justice is still in control of beating down the Princess’s kaiju form and breaking her ambitions. Esoterically beaten, the Princess escapes swearing to get Justice next time because Justice has properly inherited BB’s no-kill ethos. Framing of the final scenes also suggest he may have inherited BB’s girlfriend, since his last monologue is played opposite holding Bluesy Fluesy’s hand as the sun rises. The to-be-continued stinger that never will be shows he inherits the Matrix fashion sense too.
The end. No more. Please.
Taboo Tattoo was a chore. It has too much childish humor and lame Saturday Morning Cartoon philosophy to feel good to an adult point of view, but too much gore, misery, and dirty ecchi to really come off as just fun. The world building is clearly being written along the way in service to the plot, with new details being thrown in whenever we need a twist, yet it’s so complicated that keeping all the bizarre stuff about souls and powers in this straight feels like homework. It’s at once over done and half baked. The characters are jokes. The only one I can really take seriously as a legitimate character with a legitimate sort of arc is Bluesy Fluesy, and even then it’s kind of torpedoed by the fact that the characters she needs to play off aren’t good.
The best thing the show has to offer is the action. Every now and again, it will serve up a fight that’s a nice mixture of super powers, martial arts, and gunplay and legitimately well choreographed. Of course, it also fails there from time to time, and it’s hard to care about a cool fight if you don’t care about the characters fighting.
Taboo Tattoo is choked by its competition. These urban fantasy battlers are a dime a dozen, and the variant we have here where the main character gets the tutorial along with the ultimate power (or the knowledge they already had it) are particularly stock within the subset. Taboo Tattoo, however, couldn’t quite walk the walk of making that work.
It’s true that these kinds of stories often have a ton of colorful individuals each with their own thematic power, friend and foe alike, but you’ve got to do more than that. Shakugan no Shana had all the eccentric Flame Hazes and Denizens, and we enjoyed watching them because their own understandable cores brought them into conflict. You could have a brick do what Margery Daw does, but she is compelling because of how her hard-line hatred clashes with the more moderate realities of Shana and Lamies or Yuji’s kind naivete. The Toaru series thrives on named and specific powers, with countless helpers and arc villains who all have their off-the-hook abilities, but the core of what makes those series watchable is who is using the cool powers, not that just the powers themselves are cool. Taboo Tattoo tries to hold its neat abilities together with international politics the characters don’t care about and a hackneyed fate of the world finish that’s impossible to realize. There are no epic rivalries; the only real grudge match anyone cares about is BB versus the sword lady and not only are those two fairly satellite, their facts are played for a laugh in the middle of a serious scene where it doesn’t fit.
But ultimately, the competition doesn’t matter. Any show could be somebody’s first, or at least their first taste of a genre or pattern. It wouldn’t matter if Taboo Tattoo’s core had been done a million times before and better if this one was at least done well. As you can probably intuit from my complaints so far, though, this one was not done well.
I will spare Taboo Tattoo the worst of the worst and issue it a D-, mostly for the visuals of the super-powered combat. But to tell it straight, this one is a bad idea to watch and pointless to seek out, and anybody who does come into it sight unseen will probably be convinced that they don’t like Urban Fantasy.