Wangan Midnight wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be.
It's biggest and most immediate problems is that it focused way less on the tuning scene, had bad/forgettable music, and almost never featured any cheap/easily obtainable cars. The series oddly doesn't portray Wangan racing in a good light. It also doesn't do a good job of making you excited to see the next race.
The characters were mostly adult men and women, with the exception being the main character, so it's often hard to relate to them. Most of the characters, including Akio, are very solemn and depressing. Akio himself is not very likable, and they all have major personal issues that stem from racing or from how racing negatively affects their personal lives.
It weirdly never makes an effort to tell you how much time passes either; often the viewer learns how much time has passed through offhand remarks. The scenes take place within months of each other, since Akio feels the need to basically rebuild the Z after every race. It makes it clear that racing and repairing these cars took a lot of time, effort, and money, something that Akio could only do at his young age by being a workaholic loner. So it portrays street racing a little too realistically to be all that fun to the viewer.
All of this and maybe a little bit more is probably why it was never as popular as Initial D.
