Category: Finished Series: Sports

This was one of those episodes that really caught my attention. It played with a common trope in fiction: the Underdog. With these kinds of competitive series, the underdog is a lot of times the focus: the people who you would not expect to win, yet prove to be surprisingly skillful. They’re very often main characters.

In Chihayafuru though, the characters aren’t underdogs. Perhaps the juniors, but all of the seniors have this undoubted talent, and stand out like they will get very far. And in this episode, they had to fight a group of underdogs. A group of players who only started recently, and yet who made a a huge improvement thanks to a very passionate coach who has regrets over never reaching his own goals.

And I love how they gave the cast a challenge, especially Taichi had a difficult time, and his opponent would have fitted perfectly in any underdog team. I also lvoe the way they were announced: completely out of left field. Taichi has always had his problems, but this was a big moment for him to realize that he thinks too much. In this way he really needs to take an example of Chihaya, whose entire mind is filled with nothing but Karuta. In that area, they really are the complete opposites.

One detail I really loved: Taichi finally dares to ask for a towel, and Chihaya immediately leaps over Tsutomu to give him one. No dialogue, no animation even. The creators just kept focusing on the same shot for what felt like ages. That was simple, but made a ton of impact.

Beyond that this episode also showed how important good readers are in order to keep people on their focus: a different rythm must make things more difficult for the seasoned player who is always used to the same timing.
Rating: 6/8 (Awesome)

Okay, with the previous episodes I complained about the second season not looking as crisp as the first… and here this episode comes and it really looks amazing again, without the distorted animation that stood out. The thing with animation is that with every series, a different kind of animation is appropriate: some series can get away with distorted faces because they either have the character-designs for it, or they put in a lot of movements in their frames. Chihayafuru however was always amazing in how every shot looked great. The previous episode abandoned that a bit, butthis episode acted like nothing happened.

Speaking of acing like nothing happened, this show just continues to develop its characters like nothing happened. This episode was focused on Tsukuba, but at the same time it also found time to push Hamano’s character and Tsutomu’s character forward. Nishida is developing to be a dependable senior and the rest of the cast also had some nice moments. One of the big strengths in this series is its consistency in just about everything it does.

Nice little twist at the end: the queen has a history with Arata. It had it coming: they must have run into each other when they were young. But didn’t she gain a few pounds?
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)

Awesome, Chihayafuru is back! More addictive Karuta, and the two new characters will definitely bring in a new dynamic that will keep the series fresh here. Karuta was just a simple card game, and yet this series made it exciting beyond belief.

I do have to voice two major concerns at this point though. First of all, there was the animation. Unfortunately, it’s clear that the second season either lacks the budget of the first, or a lot more scenes are outsourced. In the first season, every hit on the mat packed a punch. Here though, there are a lot of awkward movements, rushed drawings. It does not look as polished.

Second of all… the series composition has changed people. This time there are two people doing it. The first is pretty much new: after writing one of the Stitch series, she did a bunch of episodes for the first season, and she adapted half of Sakamichi no Apollon. The second one though… is behind the mess that was Persona 4. In fact, she did the series composition for a lot of different series, none of which I liked. For Chihayafuru, it is the original material that shines through, but I’m really scared about them keeping the balance, which was done so well in the perfectly paced first season.

So far though, the two new characters still need to get introduced, and the problem with them is that they’re initially very unlikable, so they need a lot of time to warm up. With that in mind, the past two episodes did a very good job. The girl in particular is already developed and has quite a few different sides, playing off really well against Kana. Meanwhile the new guy will probably play really well off Nishida. It’s an interesting idea here to have this guy show off a different style of Karuta.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

So it was pretty obvious from the start that Chihayafuru and Natsume Yuujinchou would have the best final episodes of this season. But what about the ending? Ironically the best shows this season are both based on manga that are still on-going. Natsume Yuujin-Chou solved it wonderfully. Chihayafuru’s ending did some things really well, but at the same time, it unfortunately also did what I feared for ever since this show was announced: it made me hungry for more. There is so much potential with that ending… that we’re never going to see animated.

But don’t get me wrong though, I loved this episode. Perhaps it wasn’t as intense as the previous episode, but it really brought this series to a great closure, while pushing the charcters even more forward. And yet again it does that for every single member of the main cast. The King match taught the characters a lot about themselves that flowed so naturally from the rest of the series. This episode emphasized even more how different the playstyles of these people.The creators also brilliantly used Arata at the end. Finally he is thinking in-depth about karuta again, and ironically it was Taichi of all people who he needed to remind to do this as well. Everything fitted together amazingly.

And yet, then the second half came, and that teacher suddenly made the deal that the club will lose their position if they can’t recruit five new members. Five new characters will be joining the Karuta club to add to the current main cast!? Talk about potential here! I mean, fleshing out such a large cast is difficult and all, but this is Chihayafuru: if anyone can do it, it’s these guys. This is by far the series that is in most need of a sequel, out of the entire season.

Overall though, I absolutely love sports series. And yet, I have no interest in sports series whatsoever. In fact, I find myself not looking forward to most sports series, because of their premises. And yet, for some really weird reason, the majority of them is incredibly well executed. And this standard just keeps on going. Sure, we have a Knight in the Area once in a while, and I wasn’t really charmed by Major either, but for those series in return we have such beauties as Chihayafuru, Cross Game, Ookiku Furikabutte, Giant Killing, Touch, Shion no Ou, Hikaru no Go, and that list just goes on and on. Net season will have two new sports series: one shounen jump adaptation and a NHK show about a kid and his football team. These two series are really going to challenge this trend, but heck. I have been pleasantly surprised by so many sports shows already. It’s entirely possible.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Shock! Gasp! Surprise! A major character actually put on weight!? In anime where characters always need to look perfect!?

I mean, once in a while we get overweight side characters here and there, like Nishida in this series. But the main antagonist? It’s really been a while since we had one of those, let alone characters whose physique changes so drastically. Of course it’s a bit exaggerated here, but this was nevertheless a really interesting twist.

Heck, I’m really baffled here. Ever since the show was announced, I’ve been dreading this moment: the ending, knowing that there was no way for this show to end well. And here, this show actually pulls off a stunning penultimate episode.

I don’t care about wrapping things up, but for me an ending needs to take the series, its themes, characters and push them even further. So yeah, the actual king and queen match are a great way for this show to close off. This really goes against all conventions. I really was expecting this show ending with Chihaya playing some random match, as is the norm with all other sports shows. And instead, this episode was completely different, yet completely in line with the rest of the series. It shows the level that Chihaya has yet to reach: a match between two players of actual Queen material. She played them both, but actually watching the two of them play taught her how much she still needs to grow. Shinobu blew her away in the first match, but in this episode she really became human. And again we’ve got another top player who becomes a bit weaker (yet much more intriguing) due to some imperfection or laziness.

I really admire the guts of the creators to not have this episode revolve around Chihaya (like the entire rest of the series), but instead put two side-characters into the spotlights. These kinds of creative twists are some that I can really appreciate, especially when the characters in question are so damn good. Chihaya herself also had a great place in this episode so she still is the main character here.

Now, I have a message to the next episode: end with an ACTUAL ending. I don’t want to see a sequel hook, or the feeling that there still is going to be some sort of next episode or something. It’s obvious that this show isn’t going to get a sequel, now make use of that! What I want is “here is an awesome and creative climax that pushes the characters to new levels!” not “thanks for watching and let’s hope that someday we can tell the rest of this story…” This show deserves it!
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Okay. We’ve finally gotten near the point that has been looming over the entire series: the ending. At first I thought that the creators wanted the finale to focus on a really important match, but Chihaya’s loss last week made that impossible. This episode instead was really different from all of the previous episodes. And to be honest: this would have been a great point to close off this series, knowing that it had to.

Finally Chihaya is doing something other than Karuta. Finally her character is growing and experiencing new things. The romance subplot also would have worked even better if the creators didn’t shoehorn such an obvious loser into the picture. With this episode I also realized how rare these kinds of parties are in anime. Usually everyone focuses on festivals and all, but simple events where everyone goes to some bar or something hardly ever happen.

Also, I would have said that Taichi is getting on my nerves. But I really liked the part where Chihaya locked herself into the closet. My big fear is that with two episodes left, his angst won’t go anywhere. This guy still needs to develop and as corny as it is, I hope that the final two episodes will focus on this. I also do this because at this point, it will get really hard to use Karuta as the climax for this series. And don’t get me wrong: there have been plenty of series with one-episode or two-episode finales, and I loved many of them. But not with series who only adapt part of their manga and cut off right in the middle of their story.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Holy crap, Chihayafuru. Out of all of the minor characters that Chihaya had to face so far, this was by far the best match against it, and it totally went against my expectations. Yamamoto Yumi was wonderfully fleshed out in just one episode, and as a first I actually found myself rooting for both, rather than the match being a simple “protagonist versus non-protagonist”.

I really thought that at this point, Chihaya would get to the queen finals, but then again that may also be because the story is nowhere finished, I kept hoping for some sort of finale with Arata and the Queen. At this rate that ending is not going to be about an important match at all, but who cares? With this series’ writing talent they can still find a ton of great points to end on.

I loved how this episode was even more full of emotion than usual. The hot sun had a lot to do with that, but also Yamamoto and her coach really brought life to this episode, and did so in a way that I’m really not used to for characters who only appear in one episode. And as an added bonus, she wasn’t one of those “I’m really pretty”-girls like you see everywhere in anime, and yet she still looked great. The thing with anime is that it’s so focused on “hot” looking characters that more often than not, it’s the plain looking characters who stand out (and more often than not, the supposedly “hot” characters try way too hard to look good). In this case the animators gave her just as much attention as the rest of the cast, and it showed here.

Also, Chihaya: I really thought that she learned by now. And yet she was taken over by her instincts again. It just shows how hard it is to get rid of things that you’ve been doing for years. Just one tiny incentive is enough to get back to your old patterns. This episode was a great point for Chihaya to actually mess up on the show’s title card “Chihayafuru”.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

With this, Chihaya finally learned the lesson that she needed to learn: there’s more to Karuta than just timing. The thing is to also feel the flow of the cards. Humans are only human, and therefore they only have a fixed amount of time it takes them to react. The challenge for Chihaya was to 1) time her movements better and 2) use her trademark speed with that. After all the previous episodes, it was very interesting for her to run into a player who played the same way she did, with a focus on speed.

Also, these people here are harsh: talking down to this nine-year-old girl for not being as good as the second-best karuta-player in the country when she loses one match. It’s interesting how you usually see these child stars being pushed too much by their parents, but this is a nice subversion of that, in the way that her mother is putting so much effort into letting her daughter play Karuta to get her to cope with bullies.

Overall, I must praise this series for piquing my interest in Karuta. It’s not like when I watched Hikaru no Go and Shion no Ou, which made me immediately want to play the game, but that’s probably also because of how incredibly steep the learning curve is at the start: you can play Shougi and Go as a complete beginner and still do something with it; it’s as you start to think about it more you realize how incredibly complex these games are. It’s impossible for a beginner at Karuta to even play: for that you first need to spend a lot of time memorizing cards. After that, it’s not going to be a matter of depth, but rather combining strategy, speed, memorization and timing together. It’s much more a physical sport.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Oh, Taichi actually lost so that he won’t be able to play in the A-Class East Qualification tournament. Oh, wait there’s another chance for him to do so. Wait, he didn’t make that one either? oh, he got offered a promotion instead. What the.. he declined? He’s not focused on making the next tier as fast as possible, but rather as someone who doesn’t run away? Very nice here, Chihayafuru.

On top of that, this episode showed the return of Arata. Finally! Again, the encounter was short, but very sweet. The best part of this episode was how much more we got to learn of Arata’s grown up version. Up till now we’ve mainly just seen flashes of him, but here he was present for an entire episode. His worries about Chihaya and Taichi having become a couple really worked well with Taichi getting more and more depressed in this episode. Chihaya herself was the icing on the cake: her emotions went wild in this episode, and the creators portrayed them really well.

Overall, out of all of the Fall series that are still airing, Chihayafuru still stands out as the best. The way it handles its characters is just unrivaled here. As the representative of its season however, when you start to compare it to other years, it unfortunately isn’t the best: Autumn 2010 is the only fall season in more than 8 years where I didn’t consider the best 2-Cour series to be better than Chihayafuru. (As a frame of reference: 2009 had Armed Librarians, 2008 had Michiko e Hatchin, Clannad and Casshern, 2007 had Shion no Ou and Ghost Hound, 2006 had Red Garden and Bakumatsu, 2005 had Noein, Mushishi and Jigoku Shoujo, 2004 had Fantastic Children and Gankutsuou.

Obviously Chihayafuru is very well made, and in that aspect it doesn’t lose to the abovementioned series. But if I had to give a reason for why it doesn’t live up to those others for me, then it’s probably a combination of its lack of ambition and variety. The abovementioned series were series who kept evolving and kept bringing new things to the table. Chihayafuru however, has all been karuta matches, karuta matches and more karuta matches. Sure, the characters are evolving, but the plot isn’t. For me, Chihayafuru is a series that does really well when you look at the short picture, but in terms of the bigger picture it’s just karuta over and over. That’s solid, but not solid enough to measure up to some of my favorites.
Rating: ** (Excellent)