Tag: Shounen

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.

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.

Heroic Age anime review

Gundam meets Evangelion meets Dragonball meets Fail. Just goes to show it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about how you cook them.

The raised-in-the-wild savior protagonist has been done before, the ship on the run from enemy forces thing has been done before (in at least two Gundams), the pure, all-knowing, everybody-loves-her princess has been done before… There’s nothing new to see here, so enjoying Heroic Age boils down to whether you like the characters or not. I didn’t, so I didn’t enjoy the show and gave up after 10 episodes.

The main character(?) Age is basically perfect. He’s a little wild because he was raised by super-powered aliens, but he starts out knowing all about his powers and all about his mission, is clearly far stronger than anyone else in the universe and knows exactly what to do and when. No doubt, no anger, no passion, no confusion. It’s impossible to relate to him. The second main character(?) Dhianelia, is also basically perfect. Psychic powers, good looks, princess, everyone loves and worships and obeys her and she, too, knows where to go and what to do 90% of the time and her few moments of doubt come across as insincere and put-upon. The supporting cast exists only to fawn upon or unsuccessfully attempt to oppose these two. The ending was a foregone conclusion from episode 1.

It would be have been okay if the action at least was good, but that wasn’t anything noteworthy either. The first 10 episodes had the humans fighting the same bugs over and over again even when it was clear that the humans were useless against them and Age was the only one who stood a chance. Bugs, bugs, bugs, more bugs. Age also fights enemies with similar powers, but since we can never get into his head, it’s hard to root for him when you can’t tell how well he’s doing or how he’s feeling. Maybe it picks up after episode 11+, but I’m not sticking around to find out.

Chrome-Shelled Regios anime review

A bunch of kids live in a mobile academy in a world where the outside air is toxic and giant bugs roam the landscape. Our main character Layfon Alseif is extra strong but has issues using that power. He also has lots of girls only too willing to jump his bones. Chrome-Shelled Regios is basically a cross between Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Gundam Seed, without the mecha.

It’s one season, 24 episodes long and divided into a number of arcs, but there’s no real story. It’s just episode after episode of Layfon and his captain Nina taking turns angsting over inconsequential crap.
Layfon: I don’t wanna fight.
Nina: Get over yourself.

Nina: I’m too weak.
Layfon: Snap out of it.

Layfon: I don’t wanna fight.
etc, etc, etc.

Intersperse this with battles against bugs and men and add a number of side characters who don’t do much or mean much and you’ve got yourself a series. It does seem like *eventually* they’ll figure out a way to purify the skies outside and take out all the bugs and reclaim their world, but at the glacial pace the series moves, this probably won’t happen till Kenshiro comes around in 20XX.

It’s still fun enough that I watched the whole thing, but if they made a second season it would still be more angst angst-action-angst-action-angst-lame attempt at comedy-angst stuff, so I’ll just wait for the whole light novel series to end and read the ending with my grandchildren.

Update: Huh. The light novel series did end, in 2013. Much sooner than I’d expected. I’ll have to find the time to read the whole thing from start to finish, because apparently the anime left out a lot of things. I was rooting for Layfon to get together with… never mind, I’ll save the spoilers for when I do read the whole thing. Look forward to the update, in 20XX.