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[series:4443#628] | ||||||
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(All episodes watched): Someone must have asked 'are there any sports that haven't had an anime made about them yet'? 'There's still badminton', someone else observed. And here it is. Still, any sport can be exciting (at least for me) if the characters are interesting and likable. I was encouraged by the fairly detailed character designs here, since the amount of effort put into those is often proportionate to how seriously the topic as a whole is going to be taken. Early on I got the impression that something important was missing here. Basically, I never felt that I had gotten to know Shiratori well enough to care how he fares. The players on the Mitsuhoshi team seem to be jerks who mistreat him, but I didn't get the sense that he was all that great a person himself. He's not exactly friendly. He insists on playing Single matches even though all the evidence is that he would be better as a Doubles player. Some sort of traumatic incident in which someone got hurt in a match he played torments him, but for the moment we get little detail (later the matter is explored in greater detail). The other characters didn't endear themselves to me either; some were kind of annoying. Right up to the end of the entire series I had a hard time keeping track of who was who. It seemed like a very typical sports anime premise was being re-used here. Namely, a newcomer who is good but could be better, and has a stick up his ass, joins an underdog team. But if you are going to use a generic premise like that, at least the characters have to have some originality, and I didn't initially sense much of that here. I watched a second episode and the characters didn't bother me quite as much. Shiratori's partner, in particular, didn't seem as annoying as he had at first glance. Shiratori makes one big mistake as a beverage salesman but conveniently he immediately scores a big success to cancel it out. He has a talent called 'foresight' which is a psychic-like ability to predict what an opponent is about to do. But no explanation is offered and it was hard to take seriously. Still, I got the impression that this show wasn't as bad as it had first seemed and might be worth watching. There's hardly any badminton in episode three, which is almost entirely about the five guys doing their jobs at Sunlight and in doing so getting to know Shiratori better and vice versa. In my experience that's generally a good idea, rather than just leaping into the sport and expecting it to entertain the viewer all by itself. In episode four we learn some more about how Shiratori got into badminton in middle school and the accident that injured his partner. It turns out that this person's injury wasn't quite as bad as Shiratori had thought, however. The two face off on opposing teams and Shiratori must get a grip on his phobia (or whatever). As usual, it turns out that it is largely in his head and he can shake it off easily if he really wants to. Episode six is about Shiratori's attempt to get a new product that he has invented onto the beverage market, and contains no badminton at all. This show isn't entirely about sport and competition. It isn't entirely about Shiratori, either; the other players get some development and have issues of their own. It wasn't a favorite of mine, but it seemed well worth watching. Things start to move in a discernable way towards a pleasing climax in episode nine or so. Tatsuro, who had insisted that Shiratori become a Doubles player, suddenly wants to break up their partnetship. It turns out that the two have a slightly corny bond from the past that neither had realized until now. It would help if it was easier to express age on the faces of animated characters--I had assumed that the two were more-or-less the same age. The stuck-up manager at Sunrise considers the team to be nothing but a waste of resources and wants to disband it. A deal is truck by which the team must do well in an upcoming tournament in order to survive. Predictably, their final opponent is none other than the Mitsuhoshi Bank team that Shiratori was unceremoniously dumped from. He and Tatsuro face off against one particular asshole. The story and climax were good but not great. Things seemed distinctly incomplete at the end; as might be expected, the team has dodged a bullet, but both they and every other team seems to be gearing up for the next season. One would suspect that a second season might be in the works, but there was no mention of such a thing. If one were released someday, I would not mind watching it. Last updated Saturday, April 30 2022. Created Tuesday, February 01 2022. | ||||||||
