YMMV / Dragon Drive

• Draco in Leather Pants: Himuro Hikaru is a badass Pretty Boy Deadpan Snarker, and is therefore one of the more popular characters. He's also a vicious, Ax-Crazy Blood Knight who has zero interest in Saving the World, and the only reason he ever helps is because he doesn't want anyone to kill Reiji before Hikaru has a chance to fight him. He's no more altruistic after the Time Skip, flatly refusing when asked for help in the battle against RI-IN, but at least he's not Ax-Crazy anymore.
• Fridge Horror: At the end of the manga, after Rikyu and Earth fuse, the resulting world seems no different from modern Earth. People who have lived in Rikyu now have to adapt to a world with technology centuries ahead of theirs, with none of the dragons that were integral to their way of life. Factor in warriors like Silver and Himuro (the latter of whom left Earth ten years ago because his nature was incompatible with society), and you have disasters waiting to happen.
• Ho Yay:
  • Hikaru's obsession with Reiji has hints of this. Reiji outright calls him a stalker more than once, and adds his own hints to the mix.
  • Sumishiba's fixation on Himuro can be interpreted this way.
• Informed Wrongness: Reiji yells at Sumishiba for killing a girl's dragon in-game, and it's presented as a horrible thing. But Dragon Drive is a fighting game. The entire point is to defeat other players' dragons, and you don't get any points if you let them go.
• Jerkass Woobie: Many of the Jerkasses have Woobie elements, especially the younger ones.
  • Himuro Hikaru is fifteen and completely isolated from everyone in his peer group. It's not clear if Lonely at the Top came first or if he started fighting because he was alienated, but regardless, this kid has issues. Ten years later, he's Covered in Scars and has not gotten any nicer.
  • Sumishiba Ichiro is so obsessed with living up to his mother's ridiculously high expectations of him that he can't handle losing. She died when he was a child, and he clearly has never gotten past thinking that she was disappointed in him.
  • Toki Kouhei has an extremely abusive father who has manipulated him into thinking that the war in Rikyu is a game in which he is the hero. Yeah, he's awful, but it's hard not to feel bad for him sometimes.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The first arc is only seven volumes long, and the actual plot doesn't begin until the third. The entirety of the first volume consists of Reiji either failing miserably or unintentionally pulling incredible feats out of his ass. The anime moves the plot along a bit more quickly.
• The Woobie: Silver. A former dragon buster who befriended a legendary dragon named Kobakukono and turned her life around, only to have Hysteric Rose blackmail Kono into sacrificing himself to save the dragons under his protection. And then Rose killed him because she couldn't break his spirit, leaving Silver with his child to protect (though it turns out that Koko is actually his reincarnation, not his child). She's Covered with Scars by the time Reiji meets her and gets badly hurt more than once. Silver's a little prickly, but not enough so to fall into the Jerkass Woobie category.