Akira takes place in Neo-Tokyo in the course of the far future 12 months of 2019, ravaged by gangs the federal government is struggling to manage what stays of humanity, resorting to authoritarian strategies and clandestine experiments. Pockets of resistance fighters are putting again, and the teams collide when Shotaro Kaneda and his greatest pal, Tetsuo Shima, lead their gang into fight and by accident get wrapped up in a authorities plot centered on psychic powers.
Tetsuo is captured and experimented on, unleashing his latent psychic skills which have the facility to destroy what stays of Neo-Tokyo. 30 years earlier, Akira, with comparable powers, destroyed Tokyo, prompting the resistance and the escaped psychics to try to forestall historical past from repeating.