Dragon Drive

Dragon Drive a Japanese manga by Kenichi Sakura, was published by Shueisha and serialized in the manga magazine Monthly Shōnen Jump. Publication ended on January 5 2006, with a total of 14 volumes. Viz Media, leading publisher in Weekly Shōnen Jump (Shueisha) and Shōnen Sunday (Shogukukan), acquired the rights to distribute the Dragon Drive manga in North America.

An anime adaptation directed by Toshifumi Kawase began airing on TV Tokyo on July 4 2002, running a total of 38 episodes, the last episode aired March 27 2003. In 2004, the anime series was released by Bandai Entertainment in North America. There are no VHS releases, and there are only DVDs. The DVDs are uncut and bilingual. All the opening and ending credits seen in the openings and endings are left out unchanged and untranslated. At the end of each DVD, there is a credit scroll showing all the crew that made the anime. However, the anime is targeted at older children. Some violent scenes such as characters being slapped are left in.

Dragon Drive follows lazy junior high school student Reiji Ozora who routinely gives up on everything he starts and is terrible at his school work. Tired of seeing him give up at everything and continue to perform so poorly at school, his childhood friend Maiko Yukino shows Reiji the virtual reality game called Dragon-Drive. It is a fighting game in which players and their dragon partners face off within a virtual reality city. Reiji's general lazy personality and lackluster school performances lead him to gain a seemingly equally lazy small dragon whom he calls Chibi. Only later do both of their true strengths show as Chibi, despite being small and sleeping in his first appearance, turns out to be the rarest dragon in the game, a discovery which leads Reiji and his friends to another world called Rikyu.