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