Eijun Sawamura (CV: Ryouta Oosaka) lives at the countryside and loves baseball and is the pitcher of his middle school team. His team, however, isn’t that great and they lose a match in the preliminaries, in which Eijun throws a stray ball the catcher couldn’t catch. But on that math, a scout happened to be there watching and she tries to recruit the young pitcher to Seido. During a visit at the school Eijun gets angry at one of the players and duels him, winning the duel and changing his life. He decides to go to that school and become their pitcher. But on his first day, he’s late and isn’t even allowed to practice with the team, but has to run and that’s all he can do. Now Eijun has to prove he’s good enough to practice with the baseball players and prove he’s the one to stand on the mound.
Breakdown
Story: 3
Characters: 4
Animation: 5
Music: 4
Total: 16/20
Average: 4/5
This is a very typical sports anime targeted towards boys. Except they don’t have superpowers, inhuman abilities or attack names. It’s just an idiot loving his pitching, really. It’s very funny and the goal is to win the national championship on a high school level (ie, “go to Koushien“). It’s pretty straightforward – Eijun has to fight his own battles, get better at pitching, sometimes he loses in a some way when he wins, and ends up at the first ring as one of the four pitchers on the team together with fellow first-years Satoru Furuya (CV: Nobunaga Shimazaki) (pitcher) and Haruichi Kominato (CV: Natsuki Hanae) (first base, reserve).
As I mentioned, there are no super powers, or special moves. It’s just very realistic. Satoru and Eijun have a rivalry as fellow first-year first-string pitchers, while Haruichi is the tsukkomi to Eijun’s boke. And I love the comedy in the trio. The rest of the cast is also very realistic, although I feel a little sad for a few characters that seemed like they would get a bigger role than they have, like one of the managers which was clumsy. She just appears in the sidelines. There was also a female childhood friend of Eijun’s which after a while got completely forgotten. No romance allowed in this show, I guess.
As there is a certain amount of action, the animation has to be good or it’ll look weird. And they definitely did well in those action scenes. I didn’t notice anything funky during the half-ride (yeah, I dropped it after a little more than half of the series, because I got tired of watching just baseball) either, and the quality was good. The music was fitting too, which also include intros and outros.
Over all, it was a good sports anime. I liked it, but simply got bored when there wasn’t much character development or relationship development (I would prefer Kuroko no Basket in that case) and it just felt dragged out at around 30 episodes. But for a sports anime, it was definitely really good.
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