Awww, what a lovable end. I was a bit afraid that 10 minutes would be too little for the big finale (yes, I do not consider that baseball match to be the finale of this series), but the creators ended up making something nice out of it. Ideally of course, this series should have screwed the Olympics and just have gone for 51 episodes, but even these 10 minutes reminded me exactly why I fell in love with this series.
It’s such a shame to see this series go, though. I mean, I could totally see a series in which we follow the lives of the characters after Koushien, which would rock even more. Still, this has really been a wonderful series.
The baseball series of the upcoming season also promises to be interesting, because it proves to be good at exactly the thing that Cross Game was worst at: the baseball matches. And on the other hand of course, there’s no way that the slice of life of Ookiku Furikabutte is going to be as good as in Cross Game. At least, the conclusion of this baseball match was a lot more enjoyable than the previous two episodes, because it turned Kou into a mere mortal again.
And yeah. Kou and Aoba holding hands together. That was totally worth the wait of these 2,5 episodes of baseball.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
I am rather surprised the anime was able to follow the manga considering 50 episodes was alot of stuff to pack in. I was especially worried that the ending of the anime would not be the same as the ending of the manga since it would have to cram that ending within 10 minutes. But hey its good to hear that they were able to. I definitely agree that this is one the better slice of life animes out there as baseball is only the secondary aspect.
Wait. 2.5 episodes of baseball?
I should get to watching this…sometime. It took FOREVER in the manga. :’D
It took nearly 3 volumes in the manga. ^^
But I’m glad the anime followed the manga all the way to the end. Hope they won’t produce anime-original OVAs the way they did with Touch and completely change the end point of the series, though.
Haven’t watched it yet, but I’m very curious about who said the “Is it okay if I lie?” question at the hug, since that was an ambiguous point that really played well to manga’s strengths.
Really really nice way of ending the show, I admit I shed a little tear. This anime got to me really well, a lot of times.
What a hateful guy. The most hateful guy … in the world …