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4-Ban Sado manga review

4-Ban Sado is a one-volume baseball manga by Aoyama Gosho, a fairly well-known shounen mangaka. And by “fairly well-known” I mean he’s the author of the absurdly long-running never-getting-anywhere Detective Conan/Case Closed. Since he’s so busy with Conan it’s not strange that he doesn’t have much time to devote to any other series. It’s understandable, but 4-Ban Sado could have been a very interesting manga in the hands of someone with more time and attention to devote to developing the concept within.

Story summary from mangaupdates: About a boy who plays baseball for his school and has a magical bat, but every time he hits a pitch he has to pay money to keep it.

The boy’s name is Shigeo Nagashima and he is named after a famous Japanese batter. Because of that his team makes him the clean up and third baseman like his namesake, even though he can’t hit worth a lick. One day he stumbles across a mysterious sporting goods store and gets a magic bat that allegedly belonged to Babe Ruth and which is capable of hitting any pitch. The catch is he has to pay for it by putting money into his back pocket. Matters are further complicated when the mysterious store owner gives a magic pitcher’s glove to a superstar pitcher and sets the two on a collision course. It’s the unbreakable shield vs. invincible spear dilemma again… or maybe not.

As I said, plenty could have been done with the idea if the manga had been longer. And if the protagonist Nagashima had been smarter about things. A bad batter with a good bat is still a bad batter, so all he ever knows how to do is stick a random amount of money in his pocket and hope for the best. Not smart.

For example, he really should have tried harder to figure out the full capabilities of the bat. What kind of hit do you get for 100 yen? 200? 1000? He makes a weak attempt in the beginning, then throws everything out of the window quickly and uses whatever amount of money he has on hand. This comes to bite him in the butt at least once when he puts everything he has into a hit… and it turns out to be a foul. It’s also really stupid that all he ever aims for are big homeruns when he could win more cheaply and more efficiently with well-placed singles/doubles/triples.

Also, strangely enough, nobody ever suspects anything when this weakling suddenly starts belting them out of the park on a regular basis. Again, maybe in a longer manga reporters and rival teams would have come sniffing around, especially when it got to the Koshien stage. There’s also the issue of Shigeo’s love interest Enatsu (named after legendary pitcher Yutaka Enatsu) who seems like she will have a key role to play in the story but is instead relegated to sitting in the stands doing absolutely nothing for the bulk of the story.

And so on and so forth. There are lots of wasted ideas and plenty of unexplored potential in 4-Ban Sado. The whole thing was so rushed and unsatisfying, it’s a real waste of potential. It’s only 1 volume long and it’s by a famous mangaka, so it should be easy enough to find on Amazon if you’re interested. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re disappointed, though.

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku chapter 2

I think chapters one and two of Iruka-chan Yoroshiku are more than enough to give a sense of much of the rest of the series is about. Iruka is really played up as shockingly good at every sport in the world, so while I hope later volumes will counter this by eventually introducing someone she can’t beat, it doesn’t seem like that kind of series.

For a while I was reading it for the romantic content, but even that didn’t pan out too well. Yes, Haruumi does become a bit dull as I mentioned in my last post, but in a way that was refreshing because in 99% of shoujo manga in the last 20 years the nice, good boy never gets the girl. Not that I’m an expert or anything on shoujo manga, because I tend to drop them pretty quickly when the so-called hero starts acting like a jerk.

But still, returning to my point, Haruumi was a nice guy and that was cool. At the start of volume 2 (spoilers) it is revealed that Haruumi and Iruka (and most of the rest of the cast) actually met for the first time 6 years ago, and that’s when the romance between H and I actually started. They all forgot each other quickly, but still it’s totally meant to be right? …Right. So there’s no point reading any further. I plugged away at the series for another volume, but when everything is so obvious and the sports content isn’t exactly lighting my world on fire, there’s no need to keep going. Ze endo.

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku manga review

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku (いるかちゃんヨロシク) is a sports/romance shoujo manga by Masaru Urakawa. It ran in the mid-80s for 7 volumes, though I’m not sure of the exact timeline. There was a first series of 4 volumes, then it got renewed for another 3 and ended. The story is simple: A Wild Transfer Student Appears! If you’ve read manga for any length of time you must have encountered the Wild Transfer Student type. They’re cool and unusual and good at everything and somehow they get away with doing all kinds of wacky things that a normal student would never dream of. Wish fulfillment at its finest.

It’s the same with Iruka-chan Yoroshiku, where by virtue of being the principal’s granddaughter and extremely good at sports in a school that values athletics, Iruka Kisaragi basically runs roughshod over school rules and basic moral decency all in one go. In chapter 1, for example she antagonizes the school bully and not only refuses to apologize but actually physically attacks her and her lackeys. Oh sure there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances and Iruka herself isn’t a bad person, but she ranks rather low on the likeability scale as far as protagonists go.

The supporting cast is similarly bland. They may start out with their own agendas and personalities but by volume 3 the whole school is virtually a huge Iruka fanclub. Which isn’t all that strange, since Kurashika Academy explicitly values athletic ability above everything else. It makes for rather boring reading though.

What about the romance? It’s all right if you like foregone conclusions. And if you like the fact that Haruumi Yamamoto, the main guy, is basically Mr. Perfect. While he does show a few prideful and competitive traits early on, these are stripped away quickly leaving him as more or less Ken to Iruka’s Barbie. Bleh.

Well, then how is Iruka-chan Yoroshiku as a sports manga? Not bad at all, actually. I picked it up because it was labeled “baseball” on Mangaupdates, but as of volume 3 the only thing they have played is girls’ softball. It’s probably a mislabeling caused by someone who just flipped through the raws and didn’t actually read it. The softball and soccer games Iruka takes part in are moderately interesting and easy to follow, albeit rather heavy on the generic sports drama. But since Iruka-chan Yoroshiku is a romance/character manga and the romance and characters are both rather flat, it’s worth a quick read but not much more than that.

Shikotama manga review

Shikotama, an ecchi sports manga by Jun Nishikawa, ran in Bessatsu Shonen Champion in 3 volumes from 2012. There are two other manga also called Shikotama, but this one is about fanservice+baseball so don’t confuse them. This is the one I’m talking about: Shikotama on Mangaupdates. Ignore the nonsensical description over there.

Shikotama is about a girl named Tama who is a phenomenal pitcher (in name only. She’s not really all that good). She enrolls in a famous sports academy with the hopes of becoming their ace pitcher only to be told that girls can’t play with boys at the high school level. Interestingly enough it seems they can play with boys at the grade, middle school and college levels, though I’ve never actually seen a girl playing baseball at the college level with boys

She talks the boys on the team into giving her a pitching test, which she fails, but when she plays the “It’s because I’m a girl, isn’t it?!” card and they give her another challenge: form your own team and play against us. The winning team becomes the official school team. Thus Tama sets out to get people together, starting with a girl named Shiko, who has trained all her life to be a sumo wrestler. Shiko (catcher) + Tama (pitcher) = Shikotama.

I wish I could tell you how the manga ended, but I stopped reading after chapter 3 so I wouldn’t know. Since Shikotama is only 3 volumes long, it’s quite likely that the girls’ team failed to beat the regulars and continued playing normally, but I’m just guessing here. Like most manga about girls’ baseball, Shikotama is going to spend a lot of time first getting the team together before anything of note happens. There isn’t much sports action to be found in the earlier volumes, at any rate, apart from one pitch or one at-bat challenges.

The real reason I quit though, was because it’s a sports comedy manga that isn’t very sporty and isn’t very funny. It tries to make up for that lack with a truly ridiculous amount of fanservice, which is fine if you’re into that sort of thing but I’m not. If anything it makes Tama look even less talented than she already is when she resorts to showing off her bra and panties in every single game.

If you distract a world-class batter with your goods and manage to get a single strike against him, that does not make you a pitching genius. I’m not discounting the possibility that there might be female pitchers out there as good as male ones at the high school levels, but Shiko and Tama’s shenanigans and excessive fanservice only make them look desperate and inferior. It’s like Princess Nine all over again.

If you like fanservice, though, you might enjoy yourself. As a sumo wrestler big-busted Shiko wrestles takes on the whole sumo team dressed in only a skimpy loincloth and a few strategically-placed strands of hair. Then at the start of chapter 4 she wins a bet that lets her decide what the rest of the team will wear as training uniforms and chooses loincloths… Yup. I stopped reading at that point because it exceeded my acceptable levels of ecchiness. Shikotama is for fans of excessive fanservice and borderline nudity only.

Otasukebito Hashiru! chapter 1b

Reading chapter 1b will be enough to give you an idea of the shift in power that characterizes the rest of volume 1 of Otasukebito Hashiru! (おたすけ人走る!). Before and during the entrance exam, Kana held all the cards. She could decide who got in and who stayed out and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. Once the entrance exam ends and the new students are selected, however, they become the new heroes of the school. Nothing is too good for them, since they hold the future of the school in their hands while Kana is now just another student. Now then, what will they do with their new found power?

I don’t want to spoil the whole story, but if you suspect that Sukesaku Oda with a little bit of power is going to be a serious jerk, you are not far wrong. It was hard not to feel sorry for Kana at time, but she retains just enough selfish and mean tendencies to make it hard to root for either one.That’s all in volume 1. As the series progresses, Oda starts to like Kana more, a rival for her affections appears and she doesn’t seem to entirely hate him any more by the end of the series. Volume 2 is spent on the team’s qualification for the Koshien tournament, with all the wacky hijinks this entails, while Volume 3 is spent on the actual tournament itself.

The series blurb promised that Otasukebito was funny, but I didn’t get any real laughs until volume 3, where Oda inadvertently pisses off the umpires for his match in a cross-dressing incident and then has to deal with the inevitable fall out when they decide to take revenge. A picture speaks a thousand words:

The series becomes a more than decent sports manga in the last volume, featuring a typically long baseball game full of ups and downs, twists and turns and drama galore. It was very interesting stuff, though a little hard to believe in places.

Unfortunately this focus on pure sports and away from the gags and romantic tension that defined the earlier volumes was probably the downfall of the series. All the other characters fell by the wayside as this became a sports manga worthy of Shonen Jump or any other boys’ magazine. Not bad at all, but not the sort of thing you’d see in Margaret Comics. Or maybe there was some other reason for the series to end somewhat abruptly. I thought the characters needed a bit of help in the likeability department, but they got some laughs out of me in volume 3 and the sports component was satisfactory, so I was sorry to see it go. No sense living in the past though, so on to the next series!