Surprising amount of comedy in this episode. It ranged from the tickling to the interplay between Mihashi and Abe to angry coaches. Especially the tickling seems to be something that’s going to return more often in this series. Regarding this I do hope that the creators will prevent it from turning into a weird gimmick.
In any case, I’m intrigued about the length of this match. According to what people say, its length is even longer than the match of the first season, and yet in two episodes we’ve already gone through four innings. I’m guessing that the pacing will tone down in the next number of episodes, and these past two episodes indeed looked like they were setting the stage for the rest of the match. The point that was scored against them in this episode was really there to make clear that a lot has to happen here for them to win.
So yeah, that’s pretty much it. My entries on this series have been a bit short, but commenting on the episodes has been fairly straightforward: it’s consistently excellent in its portrayal of these matches and the animation still is consistently detailed.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
I can’t recall if it is longer than Tousei, or slightly shorter, either way this would be the major match. They have a lot of material to work with so no shortage here XD. But I think I vaguely recall it slowing down (?) readers with better memory can probably attest to this.
Went through this episode, had to struggle with my rusty nihonggo, well after watching this I can say that they do plan to end by episode 12. The pacing was much faster here, 2 and some parts of the next chapter, but more importantly from the episode preview THAT happens (readers should know this and keep quiet as to what THAT is but lets just say it should be a sign).
Well on a bright side it wasn’t a mess with the pacing, just that they had to sacrifice development on the side of Bijou and from the looks of it eventually some of the Nishiura side too.
Ah, that really sucks. I knew that there was some kind of catch that A-1 pictures suddenly came with three series in one season.