Category: Reviews

Bench – one-shot by Masashi Kishimoto

A one-shot manga by Masashi Kishimoto, author of Naruto. I haven’t read any Naruto in roughly 8 years, but I liked it in the early days so the author is okay in my books. The blurb on mangaupdates is as follows:

Transfer student Yamaguchi Tsutomu has just joined the baseball team. Yamaguchi is overweight and can’t run very fast, so the coach places him on the “D” team. Unlike the “A” team which is has nothing but aces, the “D” team is filled with baseball misfits who don’t expect to see any playing time. Despite this setback, Yamaguchi is determined not to give up his dream of someday becoming a pro second baseman! 

The story behind Bench itself is… boring. I like baseball well enough, and I like stories about underdogs doing their best. That’s the story behind 90% of shounen manga anyway, so I might as well like it. But this story isn’t funny or interesting and it doesn’t go anywhere. The D-team does really suck, the A team bullies them for sucking, the main character shouts them down with garbage about Effort and Love of Baseball! But in typical Kishimoto fashion, the D-team suckers are also (ex-)elites, which makes them the same as the A-team and defeats the whole point of the “effort and love” story they have going on there. Why am I not surprised?

Anyway, the two D-team elites end up having a challenge against the A-team, but since they’re both elites it doesn’t matter who wins either way. It’s good this was a one-shot, because there’s no room for continuation. Two guys who were good and suffered temporary setbacks find a way of working around those setbacks. It sounds really heartwarming when you put it that way, and it might have stayed that way if Kishimoto hadn’t insisted on making the A-team A-holes and bringing up his [elite]-vs-[normal]=(elite wins and normal might as well not bother) theory again. In the end defeat = friendship, but the same goes for 99% of all other shounen manga so no surprises there.

Well, it was worth a read at least. I regret reading the online version though. It doesn’t read very well, and they got the Oh/Hanshin reference wrong right off the bat. The reason it’s a problem that Oh (the character) is a Hanshin fan is because he has the same name as the most famous Yomiuri Giants player of all time (Sadaharu Oh), and the Giants and Hanshin are bitter rivals. It’s like someone named George Best being a Manchester City fan, or someone named Babe Ruth being a Red Sox fan. Or something like that. I’m not too good at sports history.

Now, a minor mixup like that doesn’t affect the manga as a whole, but it doesn’t inspire faith in the translation either, especially when it’s so literal. “Anti-athlete’s body.” “Overly-serious tub of lard.” “As the ex-A team ace with a crushed shoulder.” “4th-seater.” (shouldn’t that be “cleanup?”) There should be smoother ways to put it than that.

Disclaimer: Translation is hard work, the translators are doing this for free and in a very short amount of time because they’re rushing to beat other releases (the fools), I make mistakes in my own writing and translation all the time. I’m just saying, that’s why I like to read manga in the original Japanese where possible. I was too lazy to hunt down a raw today, but stuff like this shows me that it’s worth the extra effort.

Last Inning manga review (spoilers)

Last Inning is a baseball manga about a con bailed out of prison with the condition that he help lead his former high school baseball team to the National Baseball Championships (Koshien). I read from vol 1 up to vol 15 and didn’t like it for several reasons.

1. No likeable characters. Or rather no likeable ones on the protagonist’s team. There were a few interesting chaps on rival teams, but the main team was made up of either slavish do-gooders or whiny crybabies. This includes the management as well.

2. Main character Hatogaya is a self-confessed crook that gets away with massive fraud and scamming innocent people. And is not even sorry for it. I can’t support someone like that. He should be in jail or at least working his butt off to pay people back.

3. Too repetitive. Train, complain, train, play practice game, win, train, complain, train. The kind of training changes, the specific complaints change, but it’s the same old cycle in the end.

4. They try to paint the main team as the underdogs, but they haven’t been an underdog team since they almost went toe-to-toe with Virgin Mary Academy in volume 5-ish. Makes it hard to root for them when they’re so good they can’t find opponents on their level.

5. Apart from the pitcher, the catcher, the cleanup and the captain, everyone else is completely forgettable. This is usually the case in baseball manga, but it’s extra bad here because it makes the matches completely forgettable. Speaking of which,

6. Apart from the Virgin Mary game, all the other games they’ve played have been routine and boring with 0 (zero) suspense.

7. I am disillusioned by the fact that conditions mean nothing in the series – things work out anyway. The VMA game was based on a bet: beat VMA or you don’t go to Okinawa. But they lost. Yet they went to Okinawa anyway. That means the main condition of the series – go to Koshien or the team is disbanded – means nothing. The team won’t be disbanded anyway.

Besides, I skipped and read the blurb of the latest Last Inning volume out in Japan and they not only made it to Koshien but are in the third round against a Tokyo school (don’t blame me, I did say “spoilers” in the topic title). So, yeah. I’m done here.

Update: I hear the Last Inning series is now over at 44 volumes. I wonder how it ended? Time to find out!

Mr. Fullswing manga review

I stopped reading manga and watching anime for a while back there, but I’m slowly picking up one or two series here and there.

I like baseball and I’d heard Mr. Fullswing was really funny so I thought “Why not?”

Story: Saruno, our main character, falls in love with a girl who happens to be the manager of the school baseball team. To impress her, he joins the team and pretends to be a good player, but he’s actually a complete beginner. He does however have a legendarily powerful swing that just might bring luck to the down-and-out Juunishi baseball team…

My verdict: It’s not that funny, and it’s not really about baseball either. Firstly the team has yet to play a real baseball game. They’ve been doing bullshit shonen-style training like catching three balls at once and throwing balls at moving targets. Their “baseball” games have also come with ridiculous conditions like stripping and adding weights. On top of that are all the bogus magical moves like razor balls and super speed, stuff that the series can do without because when it gets serious and normal it’s actually pretty good.

I read up to chapter 54 and it was hard going. There’s a gag on every page, usually a forced and unfunny one. It slows down the progression of the story, and it’s hard to laugh at jokes you know are coming. You know every time you turn a page that Saruno is going to do something “wacky and unexpected” so very quickly you stop finding him amusing and just want him to get on with it. It’s especially bad when it breaks the mood when something important is happening… which is all the time, come to think of it.

As I said, Mr. Fullswing is pretty good when it tones down the LOL RANDUM stuff and sticks to the story it’s trying to tell. That makes the occasional gags more amusing and easier to take. I think the author has realized it, which is why the more recent chapters are slightly more bearable. I don’t I care enough about the outcome of the Year 2-3 vs. Year 1 game to read the rest though.

I dread what will happen when they get to the Summer Tournament and Koshien anyway. If the older team members of the Juunishi team with their Time-stopping Fielding and Razor Curveballs couldn’t crack Koshien then the opposing teams must have some unimaginably (stupid and) powerful techniques that will only make Mr. Fullswing more of a slog than it already it. Maybe it’s best if I quit while I’m ahead.

Ookiku Furikabutte Volume 19 cover + anime review

I knew I’d seen that pose somewhere before! Not that it’s a secret that sports mangaka use real life athlete photos as source material, but I just wanted to post this somewhere ‘cos I’m feeling rather clever. Ookiku Furikabutte Vol.19 comes out in Japan on June 22nd, but I’m not buying it because it’s just more Musashino Daiichi and Haruna, and that’s not who I read Ookiku Furikabutte for.

As for the series itself, it’s one of my favorite manga. Currently my favorite sports series now that Hajime no Ippo has been stagnating for goodness knows how long. I haven’t mentioned it here before because first I wouldn’t know where to start and secondly I only got into it recently. I watched Big Windup twice on Funimation’s youtube channel and liked it so much that I bought the S.A.V.E. DVD set as well.

What I like about it is, of course, the characters. Every sports manga lives and dies by its characters, which is only obvious because if it’s the sports the fans want to see, that’s what ESPN is there for. Ookiku Furikabutte has Mihashi Ren, a wimpy, crybaby pitcher consumed with guilt (as well he should be) for making his middle school team lose for 3 years in a row because he wouldn’t let anyone else pitch.

In high school he meets up with “genius” catcher Abe who latches on to Mihashi’s potential and easy controllability and together with 8 others member of the Nishiura High School baseball team and their big-boobed coach, they aim to make it to Koshien.

Normally I dislike whiny types like Mihashi and bossy types like Abe, but something about these guys makes them not just easy to bear but actually easy to like. It helps that the author Higuchi doesn’t try too hard to make them sympathetic. Yes, Mihashi had a hard time at Mihoshi, but it was 90% his own fault. Yes, Abe went through a lot with Haruna, but he shouldn’t take it out on other pitchers. They’re not perfect – and they’re not even that great as a battery – but that makes it all the easier to root for them.

So far there are 2 anime seasons and 90 chapters of the manga out. I’m suffering from the usual “Caught up to the manga and now waiting is a pain” disease. I dropped Hayate no Gotoku because waiting for releases got too tedious and the manga wasn’t going anywhere (gimme back my A-tan!), and it might only be a matter of time before I drop Oofuri too. For now, though, I’m just having fun.

Okami-san and her Seven Companions anime review

An anime with 12 episodes but that can be summed up thus: “No matter how tough a girl is, she is useless without a guy to protect her.” And so we are introduced to Ryoko Okami, a girl with years of boxing experience who nevertheless frequently finds herself captured or beaten up and in need of a rescue from her weak inexperienced love interest Ryoshi. His battle cry – “I’ll protect Ryoko!” – carries the implicit declaration: “Because she can’t protect herself!”

I’m sure fans will try to argue that the real moral of Okami-san and Her Seven Companions is that it’s not good to try to do things on your own and that you should depend on the people around you, but that doesn’t explain why the other girls on Ryoko’s team who stay in their place (the kitchen or the office) rarely run into trouble or why it is always her love interest who comes to Ryoko’s aid and not say, any other character, or why the guys who take to the frontlines are invariably successful where Ryoko has failed.

There’s a story in there about the “Otogi Bank” club that Ryoko belongs to that helps people out with requests and the rest of the members of the team (the seven companions) and how they get involved in all kinds of funny scrapes and adventures. There’s also some would-be rapist guy from another school who turns up from time to time to kidnap Ryoko so she can be saved.

It’s a fun show, when you ignore the highly misogynistic message. Lots of silly situations and memorable characters and a ton of references to various fairy tales. I quite enjoyed myself. But having the “Women can’t protect themselves, they need a man!” message shoved relentlessly down my throat every episode has left me a little nauseous. I can’t believe they still make shows like that in this day and age.

Ah well, it’s entertainment. I’m not going to think too deeply about it. I got some laughs out of it, and at least it was better than most other tsundere-and-wimp series. If they make a season 2 I probably won’t watch it but still, good show.