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Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! volume 1 manga review

Mais oui, of course I’m still reading Japanese baseball manga. Ikkyuu-san was a bit of a failure, so I’m reading something more recent now. Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! by Shinji Tonaka started running 2008 and up to 18 volumes and counting. I usually avoid ongoing series because then you get to the end and you’re like WHERE’S VOLUME 19?!! but every rule is meant to be broken once in a while.

The main characters are Ichiya Touma and his younger brother Yoshi. They were a feared pitcher-catcher combo in middle school, but their parents’ divorce forced them to split up. Two years later Ichiya returns from Mongolia to try and reform the Touma battery only to find out his brother Yoshi has turned into a fierce delinquent who absolutely hates baseball! Whatever happened to Yoshi? Will they ever play together again?

Uh, the series has 18 volumes so it’s safe to say the answer is “Yes.” I’ll avoid spoiling what happened to turn Yoshi bad, but by the end of volume 1 he’s slowly (very slowly) rediscovering his love for baseball and starting to (slightly) open up to his team mates.

Not much happens in the first volume since it’s mainly an introduction to the team as well as a chance to get the obligatory “Main character’s team takes on the strongest team in the prefecture” match out of the way. Almost all baseball manga series have at least one such battle, usually in the first 5 volumes or so. I won’t tell you the outcome of this one either. I can’t spoil everything all the time.

My impressions on Otouto Catcher Ore Pitcher de! after one volume? I’m not exactly raring to read the rest, but it’s a definite diamond in the rough. The chief attraction is the cheerful, silly, irrepressible personality of Ichiya, who regularly takes a licking from his brother Yoshi and comes back for more. His love for baseball and desire to keep pitching is also rather infectious. I hope they don’t turn him into the serious, angsty type before too long. There are too many such pitchers in baseball manga.

Apart from Ichiya, the other characters didn’t make much of an impression. To be honest I couldn’t even tell most of them apart, they all looked so similar. Most sports manga at least make an effort to give the main characters unique designs, but Ichiya and Yoshi look just like everyone else. I usually have to read their lines to try and figure out who said what. By the end of vol 1 I think I can recognize the Touma siblings on sight. The team captain has dark skin so I can tell him apart too. Everyone else is just so much ink on paper.

I don’t think too much of the baseball action so far. It hasn’t really been about the baseball anyway. More focus is on getting Yoshi to be the catcher so Ichiya can use his full strength pitching. Yoshi isn’t a particularly good catcher and Ichiya isn’t that good a pitcher, but both of them have been out of practice for 2 years so we can look forward to better things from them in later volumes.

I’ll be reading this slowly on and off and giving my thoughts here and there from time to time. Will I make it all the way to volume 18 or will Shinji Tonaka ruin the series long before that? Stay tuned to find out!

Ikkyuu-san volume 5 manga review

What, you thought I’d dropped Ikkyuu-san, did you? I very nearly have, but I decided to see through the end of the inter-team game first, just for closure. I’m probably going to skim volume 6 really quickly, but the manga isn’t good enough to finish so I’m not going to bother.

The results of the game – Team B managed to reverse Team A’s 10-run lead and beat them, making Coach Iwakaze the new coach, but he’s recruited the other coach to help him groom Ikkyuu. Turns out the other coach has realized Ikkyuu’s potential as well. Yeah, yeah.

Meanwhile Team A pitcher Ootomo has gone missing, and the rest of Team A is pissed off because they blame him for the loss. They’re waiting for him outside his crush Reiko’s birthday party, but Ikkyuu tries to persuade them that ganging up on one guy is not the manly way to do things. Just then several members of Team B challenge Ikkyuu to a one-on-one battle, but then Ikkyuu’s friend Kurou says he wants to fight them, so now he starts fighting Ikkyuu and it’s just a total mess. What a terrible manga.

I’m pretty disappointed with the way Ikkyuu-san has turned out. Normally I love sports stories about characters who don’t know they have a certain skill and then they’re discovered by someone who trains them into a prodigy and then everyone is like WOW, THEY’RE SO GOOD! and stuff. Wish fulfillment, of course, but enjoyable stuff nevertheless. So that’s the kind of stuff I was expecting when I picked this manga up, but it really fails at that.

First off, it skips straight to the WOW, THEY’RE SO GOOD! part without actually showing what makes Ikkyuu so good. He makes rookie mistakes all the time and doesn’t play particularly well until the latest volume, but from the start most side characters have been fawning over him. The people who aren’t crazy about him are his own team mates, and they’re portrayed as dumb and jealous for not realizing how wonderful Ikkyuu is. It’s really annoying because the reader is being painted the same way by association. I gave the Ikkyuu-san manga 5 volumes to impress me and pull me in and it has’t done so, so I think now’s a good time to call it quits. Verdict: Not particularly recommended, even if you’re really bored.

Gyakkyou Nine volumes 5 & 6 manga review (ending spoilers)

It’s been a while since I finished a series that was longer than 1 volume long ^.^ And it’s probably been even longer since that ending was an actual good one. Of course given the nature and message of the series, the ending of Gyakkyou Nine was a given from the start, but the whole point was to see them overcoming all kinds of challenges and adverse conditions on their way to victory.

It seems like the author had to overcome some sort of adversity himself around the volume 5 point, because both the art and the story took a sudden nosedive in quality. It’s pretty obvious he’s cutting corners in a lot of places, and a lot of the characters – Fukutsu Toshi in particular – look seriously off-model half the time. Things improved somewhat in volume 6 (or my eyes got used to it). Note that Toshi cuts his trademark hair at the start of the volume!! It’s really weird seeing him without the hair, but like all other things I adjusted.

Story – volume 5 can pretty much be skipped IMO. Naturally Toshi fights back against all odds to take the team through to Koshien. The only thing worth noting is that Sakakibara-sensei leaves, since he was originally a substitute teacher to begin with, and the original useless club adviser comes back. The only reason to note this is so you don’t get confused when you see some blonde bimbo in volume 6.

Most of volume 6 has the Zenryoku 9 blowing away all their opponents thanks to Fukutsu’s unhittable ‘otokodama’ pitch. But it isn’t Gyakkyou Nine without a final challenge, is it? And so disaster strikes! Right before the finals! Fukutsu fends off a final approach from Kuwabara-chan only to run into the opposing pitcher Muteki, who is like him in every way, but better. And he has an ‘otokodama’ too! And they’re being coached by Sakakibara-sensei, who has told them all the weaknesses of the Zenryoku Nine!

But it gets even worse when the taxi Fukutsu is riding in collides with a truck and is totaled right before the game. I was afraid Shimamoto might pull an Adachi and kill off his hero for the tearz, but luckily Fukutsu survives… with amnesia! Can any team possibly pull a win out of these impossible odds?!!!

Haha, if you’re still wondering at this point then you haven’t been reading the same series I have. It’s pretty cool how at the very, very end, the final adversary Fukutsu and the team have to conquer is ‘Adversity’ itself. Fight on, team! Makeru na!

Now it’s done my final thoughts on Gyakkyou Nine are highly positive, the slowdown in volume 5 notwithstanding. The earlier volumes are the best because the team faces the greatest challenge then – their sucky selves. Once they become a team that’s actually good, the problems they face become ever more far-fetched and the hot-blooded speeches ever more long-winded. It’s still fun to root for them and see how they resolve situations, and the series is pretty good from start to finish.

As a baseball series… well, this isn’t really a baseball series. It would work almost as well with just about any other team sport, so there isn’t much focus on the actual play-by-play aspect of the game. But it’s plain to see what the point of the series is from the very first chapter, so no complaints here. Gyakkyou Nine is a good series. If you can’t find the manga, there’s a 2005 movie which is supposed to be very funny. Either way I recommend the series.

Gyakkyou Nine volumes 3 & 4 manga review

AwwwRIGHT! Things are getting better and better! Gyakkyou Nine is only 6 volumes long, so that means Shimamoto has to pack a lot into those pages, which means a lot of hot-blooded action in every chapter. I always pick it up intending to read just a few pages and end up reading half the book.

I’m not going to give a blow by blow of each volume. I’m too lazy for that. All you have to know is that after the fiasco where Toshi ditched his baseball team for a girl, they were really, really mad at him but eventually forgave him when Hagiwara (replacement pitcher with the blond hair) goes through almost exactly the same thing but busts his arm and is forced to rely on Toshi’s pitches.

All good right? Nope. It’s clear that Toshi is wavering between his love for the girl and his love of baseball. Meanwhile the Zenryoku team is scheduled to go up against Hinodeshou High for real this time, and Hinode just blew out their opponents by a ridiculous score. The whole Zenryoku team is down and only Toshi can inspire them… but only if he can sort out his own feelings once and for all!

Volume 3 is a good one just because I like romance and drama, plus it’s fun seeing Toshi deal with adversity that isn’t directly related to baseball. That and it’s funny how his family sticks their nose into everything. Anyway, once that whole crisis is over, the Koshien qualifier finals take place, starting from the first chapter of Volume 4. Toshi gets on the mound full of pep and vim… and is knocked out like a light by a liner from the very first batter. It knocks him out so hard that he lies where he fell in the right field until the 9th inning. Then he wakes up and takes a look at the score. 112-3. Could any team possibly bounce back from such a deficit?

Hoo boy. Now I have to read volumes 5 and 6 to find out. If the Gyakkyou Nine were any longer I would be worried about how much longer it would take to get through it all, but one of the nice things about short series is that it’s easy to keep the fire going and your enthusiasm up because everything happens quickly. Win or lose, it won’t take long to find out!

Gyakkyou Nine volumes 1 & 2 manga review

Yuup, you guessed it! Another baseball manga! I haven’t dropped Ikkyuu-san entirely, but volume 4 was rather boring, so I started something else on my list. I meant to just read a chapter or two for a change of pace, but before I knew it I’d finished the first two volumes of Gyakkyou Nine.

Gyakkyou = adversity. Nine = the nine members of the baseball team. This super hotblooded shounen manga is all about a baseball captain named Fukutsu Toshi (i.e. Indomitable Fighting Spirit) overcoming all kinds of far-fetched trials to keep his team intact and get them to Koshien. First he has to keep his team from disaster long enough so they can face the best team in the prefecture, then later on he has to study hard enough to avoid remedial classes… only to find out that most of his team didn’t pass the exams either… so now he needs to recruit a new team… and then he injures his arm… It just never ends.

Is it good? So far, it’s definitely amusing. In a trainwreck kind of “Just how bad can it get?!” situation. Everyone reacts in a completely over the top way to the least little problem, and it’s pretty funny somehow. That’s how exaggeration has to be – waaaay beyond the realm of reason, otherwise the reader starts trying to insert some logic into the situation, and then the whole thing falls apart. Kazuhiko Shimamoto avoids that by keeping the manga constantly moving along and making the problems flow thick and fast. At the end of volume 2 Toshi is in yet another pinch: his dream girl asked him out on a date… on the day of his match… and he accepted and ditched the game! How is he going to face his team now? Heh heh, this should be interesting to see.

Despite being a manga about a baseball team captain, Gyakkyou Nine isn’t really a baseball manga, so there isn’t much focus on the game itself. The team does some cursory practice once in a while, and we’ve been shown fragments of a game once or twice, but it’s a manga about a guy who just happens to play baseball, so the sport is just a way to introduce more drama into his life, nothing more. It could be a baseball or a boxing manga without losing much. Which is not to say I hold that against it. It’s a pretty fun and silly manga, and I’ll be taking a break from Ikkyuu-san to finish this off first since it’s only 6 volumes.