When I first heard about this series, I was interested in watching it, but just sort of forgot about it when it aired. Luckily yesterday I decided to finally give it a proper chance and became instantly engrossed. It took a serious topic and made it into an 11 episode series and made it something entertaining to watch. That in itself is very difficult to accomplish, but Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 managed to pull on all the right heart strings and came out with a series that was a near masterpiece.

It tells the story of if Tokyo were to be hit by an 8.0 earthquake and focuses mostly on young girl named Mirai and her younger brother Yuuki. Before the event happened, Mirai was a very selfish and cellphone obsessed girl who would look out for nobody but herself, but when the earthquake happens and she is left to take care of her brother alone to get home, so she has to find somehow a place in herself where she can soften up to others to help her get through it all.

I think this is more of a show that holds a greater impact in Japan, in the sense that when you see “monumental” places like Tokyo Tower and the bridge they were talking about throughout and the name escapes me completely collapse before your eyes. I would at least think that makes a bigger impact because I heard that for example, with the film 2012, people in the US actually liked it and it was hard for them to watch certain scenes like mentioned before, but I guess that still is not the best comparison. Well my point was that despite that, I still felt like this series hit home and I managed to catch myself crying through many scenes. It had some very good character development throughout and despite what say may say with it being boring in parts, I was very interested throughout. The production values were obviously very high as the animation was definitely top notch. Admittedly, the weakest part of the series was probably in the middle, but after episode 6-7, the rest of the series was still pretty incredible at showing the harsh realities of losing everything.

There is only a handful of series that I am able to say that I really marathoned or I just could not wait till the next episode was released and this was one of them. I have been a bit at loss of words to in what to say when I started to try to write this review, but I hope the fact that I felt this was an amazing series came across. Thinking about my top ten list of 2009, I would probably put it near number four if I were to rethink my list. By keeping in mind that this is a series that will probably leave you on the edge of your seat and that it will be an emotional ride, I do recommend this series. I recommend to watch it all at once for the main reason that once the first episode comes to a finish, the only thing you will want to do is watch the next.