Category: Finished Series: Sports

Team building. I like how this series uses the quiet moments in between the matches in order to do this, rather than scheduling in a random episodic adventure somewhere. A lot of stuff happened in this episode, and it immediately started with the message that the opposing team that the lead characters faced in the previous arc isn’t done yet.

In this episode it also becomes more than clear that Abe and Tajima are taking turns in dealing with Mihashi. There’s actually a tiny bit of development here: Abe is getting more and more relentless with Mihashi, so much that even the teammates are really noticing how much on Mihashi’s lip he’s sitting. His reaction after Mihashi suddenly asked whether or not he’s going to stop catching was the most over the top we’ve seen of him so far. There’s a bit of a danger here with the creators going over the top with that, however. Like, the creators using a gimmick that worked well in the first season to extremes in the second.

Oh, and we learn a bit more about the coach: she’s a 23-year old college student. It’s still a bit of a mystery how she became the coach, but there are more characters like that who have yet to reveal their backgrounds despite very obvious hints (I’m looking at you, Hamada). This episode also introduces… fangirls. The fandom was always a bit downplayed in this series: even though it was mentioned a few times, you can really see that the creators were focusing on what happened on the field. At this point those girls are still a bit too one-sided at this point.
Rating: * (Good)

And so the first match that did not have Mihashi at the centre has ended, and even though it’s mostly been used as building and warming up, it still was a fun and interesting game to start off the second season with. Mihashi works surprisingly well as a side-character (which I guess is a trait that a lot of lead characters have: refreshing when they aren’t the ones in the spotlights), as the entire team works hard to get a called game.

Looking back, the opposing team probably has the least amount of depth out of all the teams that the lead characters have faced so far, but they still have their charms, and they’re much, much better than what you’d usually see with those unimportant matches. The one thing that was interesting though was that it did very much break a stereotype that you often see in baseball series: the fact that awesome hitters are solely responsible for victory. This episode showed that even though you have probably one of the best hitters out there, you can still lose without scoring a point on a called game.

It’s interesting: I’m a big fan of baseball series, but before, I never watched them because of their baseball. I loved Cross Game for its slice of life, Touch rocked due to the character-development, One Outs kicked ass because of the mind games and Princess Nine had its atmosphere. Ookiku Furikabutte is really the first that really is awesome because of how much time it puts into its baseball.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

It’s interesting how the past two episodes have subverted a plot device that often caused the baseball series with mediocre matches to write themselves into a corner: why not let the big hitter walk? It’s the result of trying to make the storytelling too shounen, and have everything end with a big showdown between some sort of really good pitcher and hitter, and this is often reserved as the climax of the match, even though they don’t always make too much sense. Take Princess Nine for example: a nice show in many other ways, but one particular match in it made no sense because of this wrong mind-set in which you’re required to have some sort of huge show-down between pitcher and batter.

The rest of this episode was very much typical Ookiku Furikabutte: a ton of strategy, and nearly every pitch outlined, in which we both get to see a lot about the lead characters as the antagonists. Central to the antagonists surprisingly isn’t the awesome batter, but rather the pitcher, who isn’t having his day it seems. I think that the creators meant this match to be for him to find his place in the team, something that apparently his captain has been trying to no avail.

Azusa also subtly gets into the spotlights. He doesn’t necessarily have the most screentime, but you can really see that he’s struggling with living up to the place of fourth batter. The creators are making use of how he’s continually in the shadows of Tajima. I’m interested to see where the creators are going to take this: is he going to develop into someone who knows his place, or do they intend to take this somewhere more complex?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

And so it has begun: the next one of the gruelingly long baseball matches of this series. However, that’s exactly the reason why they stand out: the creators skip hardly any of the pitches. Even the unimportant innings are fully animated. It really makes the matches much more unpredictable than your usual baseball matches.

And like with the first season: the creators waste no time in fleshing out the team that the lead characters have their match with. They gave all of them so var a personality, even the ones who aren’t ace or pitcher. Take that batter before the ace, for example: it’s a small touch, but having him feel a tad under-appreciated under all of the attention that their ace is getting is a nice touch. We also get to know the pitcher a bit more, who seems to be a person who likes to be in control. It’s interesting how he feels like that team’s Abe, and the Ace feels like their team’s Mihashi.

Also, while I am a baseball noob (all of the things I know about the sport are from playing softball in high school at PE (and sucking at it) and watching anime as a student), I’ve been wondering something: why is the fourth position so often reserved for the team’s best hitter? I mean, it only works in the very first inning, when one of the first three batters manage to score a hit. At the rest of the innings, it’s completely random how many people he’ll be able to bring home as a cleanup hitter because all of these games can progress so differently. To me, it actually seems the most logical to stuff the best hitters at the first place: this way they get as many chances as possible to get a good hit out of the pitcher, and score a point.

Also, is it me, or does Ookiku Furikabutte really have the best animation of this season? I mean, it doesn’t have the eye candy of Sarai-ya Goyou, nor the money shots of Angel Beats nor the background art of Senkou no Night Raid, but there are no still frames, and there really is a ton of movement in this series. And not just that, but the characters all just move naturally; more naturally than anything else I’ve seen this season so far. Also take a look at those far-away shots: in most series they’re used as a bit of a cheap trick: people far away require less detail. With Ookiku Furikabutte however, the creators grab their chances to up the frame-rate even more: the animation at these parts is incredibly smooth and realistic.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

As for the series I’m not going to blog:
– It’s a bit pointless to watch Heroman as an action-series when the creators bluntly skip half of the fights.
– B Gata H Kei has a prime: an important side-character who actually has a boyfriend other than the lead male. Still, regarding blogging it… it’s not the series that I think I can be able to write about every week.

In any case, this season surely turned out to be excellent, and better than I ever could have expected. There are so few series that aren’t worthwile, and just about every series save from a bunch of kids’ shows and KissXSis, Ikkitousen and Koihime (and perhaps Arakawa, but that’s just my bias) has its own strengths. And the best of the season hasn’t even aired yet.

What I also love about this season is that it’s overall a lot darker and more down to earth than the previous season. There, we had a lot of bright fantasy that was a lot focused on brightness and heart warming storytelling. This season, while there are of course the upbeat Heroman, Daimaou and B Gata H Kei, the best shows of this season are actually far more based around down to earth and straight to-the-point dialogue. From the outside it indeed looks less flashy, the content might become even sharper because of it. It’s interesting, because this Spring Season is completely different from the spring seasons we’ve seen during the past five years or so. Usually, those seasons had lots of fantasy. This season barely has any.

Instead, there really is a TON of dialogue, and the beast in this hasn’t even aired yet. It’s also going to be a huge challenge for me to try and understand it, especially since in the previous season most stuff was either a) subbed fast, b) for kids c) didn’t have dialogue that was that hard to understand. There are a ton of shows this season however that look like they’re neither, so please do correct me when I make a mistake. My Japanese at this point is NOWHERE near perfect, so I might pick up a number of things wrongly.

Having said that, after Noitamina Ookiku Furikabutte was THE show that was bound to rock this season. Especially compared to the baseball series of the previous year (Cross Game and Taishou Yakyuu Musume of the last summer) it excels in exactly the things that those shows were rather bad at: the matches. You could really see that the creators put a ton of research in this.

Before they start however, we’re treated for a few episodes of slice of life, which in this series mostly consists out of people, talking about baseball, introducing characters and analyzing patterns that feel out of place in an actual match. The team that they have to play against for their next match also has a bit of a weirdo as their ace. If I understood things correctly, he’s a guy whose average isn’t that good, but when he hits he hits HARD. I can understand why the creators came up with him: his unpredictability promises quite a few interesting situations for Mihashi.

A lot of things passed the radar this episode, but a major theme was Abe versus Mihashi. In my review of the first season I mentioned that one of the things that annoyed me was that the creators overplayed Mihashi’s quirks, but at the same time they have no intention whatsoever to not develop them. And really, I can totally understand Abe for losing his patience. The guy’s a perfectionist, and quite a proud one at that, and while he tries to get Mihashi to feel comfortable, he just can’t lower himself to Mihashi’s level. Even in this episode, when he knows what his problem is, he still loses his temper. I feel like the rest of the season will focus a lot on him, trying to find a balance between pushing his ideas into Mihashi and allowing him to be himself.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
PS. Is everything clear about the episode numbering. This is basically how I always number my sequels unless they’re significantly different from their prequels. Basically episode 28 of Ookiku Furikabutte is just the same as episode 2 of Ookiku Furikabutte ~ Natsu no Taikai-hen~, but is that clear for everyone?