You can have a simple and fun martial arts action story with tons of nudity and violence with a high school backdrop. Or you can have a darker adult-oriented narrative, where the characters are dealing with great supernatural threats in a constantly deepening plot filled with twists and turns. You can't have it both ways. This is Tenjou Tenge's biggest downfall. It's an impossible mixture of things that just don’t blend.

A lot of the characters that the story fools you into becoming invested in are eventually tossed to the sidelines or reduced to mere spectators until the very end where the series hastily tries to give their stories some sort of meaningful conclusion. In Tenjou Tenge's fumbling attempts to expand its scope beyond the simple high school setting, some of these characters end up serving almost no purpose at all - making the reader constantly wonder why the creator originally even made such an effort to introduce them to us.

A series that tries to have an over-arcing plot that extends throughout the entirety of its storyline should have all the central plot elements in place by the half-way point. Not so with Tenjou Tenge. New characters are constantly being introduced to hammer home one or two new ideas that the creator just happened to fancy at the time. And you know it's always a bad sign when the story has to do flashback sequences to make it seem like there's any sort of continuity or logic behind the actions of the characters.

Now, the manga ain't completely without its merits. The art style is very pleasing, bordering on amazing. The series' humor can also sometimes be hilariously self-aware and witty. The fight scenes include some great fist pumping moments (one of the best ones for me was Mitsuomi's brief encounter with Inue Shindayu). Some of the character drama is easy to get into and I want to give the series some bonus points for Mitsuomi's and Maya's tough breakup acting as the central conflict during the earlier parts of the story. Many anime/manga stories deal with characters establishing and maintaining love affairs - not that many stop to deal with the aftermath of a failed one. The tongue-in-cheek attitude of Tenjou Tenge can also be a lot of fun and for me it was this over-all silliness that provided the main spark that made me want to keep on going, even while I felt like the entire plot was crumbling into pieces around me.

I would call Tenjou Tenge "a mixed bag". Its weird style does make it somewhat unique and mildly entertaining, but it would be hard to argue that this weird combination of ideas actually works. The series tries to evolve into something greater than its humble origins and it sadly fails while doing so.