Tag: sports

Gamushara manga review

Another terrible manga from the terrible duo of Juhzo Yamasaki (writer) and Mitsuru Adachi (artist). Adachi has produced several all-time classics since he struck out on his own, but his early artist-only series SUCK.

I only finished Gamushara (がむしゃら) a few days ago, but I’ve already forgotten all the character names. It is completely unremarkable and not really worth a read, not even by someone like me who is currently grabbing any and all baseball manga I can get my hands on. By the way, all manga reviews on this blog will contain free, unmarked spoilers so, yeah. I probably should have said that earlier.

Anyway, the main guy on the cover there is a transfer student at a high school. He gets into an altercation with the guys on the regular baseball team and decides to form a softball team so he can go to the national softball tournament. As with many baseball series (e.g. Princess Nine, Taisho Yakyu Musume), a ridiculous amount of time is spent early on gathering members, even more time is wasted on some stupid rivalry and then the main character’s team loses the final match of the series but learns valuable lessons from it.

It’s a standard pattern, but in the case of Gamushara it rankles quite a bit because the main character is way off base. He is 100% in the wrong and probably has some serious personality problems. He picked the fight with the baseball team for no good reason and formed his own team largely to get back at them. Throughout the series he goes out of his way to antagonize and annoy them, yet somehow he’s treated as a hero for his pettiness. It’s very hard to swallow, which is why I took to skipping large chunks of volume 2. At least it was short, that’s all I have to say. I can’t think of a single redeeming feature of Gamushara, because even the baseball sections were boring, poorly-written and predictable. Another manga for hardcore Adachi fans only, I guess.

Taisho Yakyuu Musume anime review

Moderately interesting baseball slice of life anime set in 1920s Japan. Rich girl’s fiancee says something mean and she forms a baseball team to get back at him. The girls seem to be having fun, at least, and there are all the different kinds of wacky misunderstandings and romantic mix-ups that you would expect from your everyday high school anime.
I didn’t find Taisho Yakyuu Musume interesting enough to watch till the end, so I stopped around episode 10 and just skimmed through the rest. I’m happy that Koume’s relationship with Saburo seems to be going along well. Apart from that, I didn’t care to watch any more. Nice characters, but nothing you haven’t seen before from any moe slice-of-life show. The baseball action isn’t very good because for most of the show the girls really suck at it. The pitcher only learns to throw a breaking ball around episode 8 of 12, etc. etc. Worth a watch if you like high school girls, moe, or slice of life.
Spoilers: Most baseball anime series end with the protagonist’s team losing. This ratio goes up to 100% when it’s a show about girls facing off against boys. Heaven forbid that XX chromosomes should ever triumph over XY. Keep that in mind when you watch this.

Little Boy manga review

Little Boy is a miserable excuse for a manga. Its only redeeming feature is that it’s about baseball. And I suppose there might be points of interest for Mitsuru Adachi fans, since he drew the art for this series. Since this manga came out in 1974, early in Adachi’s career, it might be interesting to people seeking to trace the evolution of his art, before he settled on the same few character archetypes and evidently decided, why fix what ain’t broke? The story is by Mamoru Sasaki, who I’d never heard of before and hope to never hear of again.
I’ll skip lengthy explanations of the story and characters because it really doesn’t deserve it. I’ll just say it gets worse and worse as the series progresses and it’s a good thing Little Boy only lasted one volume. Gou, the main character only gets more and more difficult, rude, selfish and impossible to root for. In many series this is balanced out by letting you root for the rival instead, but all the “rivals” in this series show up for only a few pages a chapter to lose unceremoniously to Gou’s overwhelming skill and power. The one match he does lose isn’t satisfying either, because he isn’t that torn up over it. He’s just like, welp, gotta work harder. Typical shonen hero.

little_boy_034His ‘girlfriend’ Michi isn’t worth writing home about either. Gou threw one bloody ball (literally) which landed near her, and that makes her go all “I’ll follow you forever!” Michi even kicks up a stink when Gou agrees to marry another girl so the other girl can teach him a secret pitch (because that’s the kind of guy Gou is. He sucks.) The question of what she sees in him is never, ever answered. Unless it has to do with their mutual fetish for public peeing (yes, you read that right). Every Jack has his Jill, as the saying goes.

For the reasons I’ve mentioned above, Little Boy has zero merit as a romance or character-based manga. More importantly, because of the monotony of the matches, the nastiness of Gou and the colorlessness of the opposing batters, it has zero merit as a sports manga as well. The art is actually decent for a manga that old, and the action is always simple and easy to follow, but that’s as far as it goes for the positive side of this manga.

Amateur Slugger manga review

Amateur Slugger is a baseball romance drama manga, this time not about high school baseball or professional baseball but about amateur sandlot teams sponsored by local businesses. Apparently they’re quite common in shopping districts in Japan. Kousuke, a college player, plays for one of those teams. As a high school player his one claim to fame was hitting a homerun off an amazingly good pitcher during his final Koshien tournament. Now, as a sandlot player, Kousuke’s motto is “Don’t put pressure on me.”

One day, however, Yuuki Tsukasa, the girl on the cover, shows up at a game and strikes him out with ease. Turns out she’s the sister of Yuuki Toujiro, the pitcher he hit the homerun off, and she wants revenge. She even promises to give him her first kiss if he ever gets a safe hit off her.
Long story short, he gets the hit and she gives him the kiss. Turns out that while she did start out looking for revenge (because the homerun exacerbated her brother’s already terrible pre-game nervousness), she quickly discovered that Kousuke isn’t a guy who hates pressure, despite his claims, but rather one who performs best under pressure. She decides its her job to provide that pressure and one day get him to move up to a bigger stage in the baseball world. That’s it for the story.
Despite the “1” on the cover, Amateur Slugger is complete at one volume. While the story starts out about Kousuke, it quickly becomes clear to the reader that he’s a boring, overrated player and that Tsukasa is by far the more interesting and promising player. I mean, when you think about it seriously, a player who performs excellently under pressure but is meh everywhere else is basically useless. Sure Kousuke would probably play great in the playoffs, but you wouldn’t even get to the playoffs with him on your team.
01_016Tsukasa, on the other hand, is a fantastic pitcher. Despite being a high schooler of diminutive size, hitting her pitches is enough to train Kousuke to handle her brother Toujiro’s pitches when said Toujiro shows up to challenge him. At that point Toujiro is a major league starting pitcher, which means Tsukasa is on the major league level as far as speed and form go. This makes her one of the best pitchers in Japan (if we can believe such a thing is possible), and a shoo-in to be a softball star if she ever takes it up.
If the manga had continued and had not ended with Kousuke and a starry-eyed Tsukasa starting a lust-fueled relationship, I’m sure eventually she would have noticed his feet (and whole body) of clay, as opposed to her own overwhelming talent, and the whole basis for their relationship would have crumbled into dust. As it is, things end pretty well. Kousuke gets his hit off Tsukasa as well as a base hit off her brother, Kousuke and Tsukasa hook up and may or may not start dating, Toujiro returns to the majors and continues to dominate, and business continues as usual in the shopping district.
Apart from the needless fanservice, some rather bad art, and the tendency of Tsukasa to do and say stupid things (like promising her virginity to the opposing pitcher if he wins), Amateur Slugger not a terrible manga by any means. The short length definitely works in its favor. Worth a read if you like sports romance manga and don’t mind some awkward fanservice.

Ah! Seishun no Koushien manga review

Ah! Seishun no Koushien (ああ!青春の甲子園) is a 7-volume collection of romantic stories by Yamasaki Juuzou and Adachi Mitsuru. As expected of Adachi (though he was only the artist, really), all the stories involve baseball players and, as per the title, the National Koushien tournament, but that’s as far as the sports goes.

I know I’m on a baseball manga kick, but that doesn’t mean I’ll read just anything with ‘baseball’ in it. I read the first two or three chapters of volume 1, then flipped idly through the pages until volume 3 and hated it more with every passing page. After that I stopped reading it, because while I don’t hate romantic series, I do hate those with a foregone conclusion where the writers nevertheless spend way too much time trying to make us wonder “Will they or won’t they?” We know they will.

If I recall correctly, the first story was about the female manager of a baseball club. Junk-o, I think her name fittingly was. She has a crush on the pitcher Shun. Shun’s catcher Dobashi has a crush on Junk-o. Shun has a crush on Junk-o too, he just doesn’t know it yet. But he finds out pretty quickly when she forces her way in to live with him in the name of ‘taking care of him’ when his father moves to Kyushu on business. After that they just play baseball and waffle on and on for a while, and, I’m supposing, eventually get together. Whether they win the tournament or not is another issue, but the story never does anything to make you care about it. Not when the battery and their manager have nothing in their heads but romance.

The second story was even more off-putting. It started out very well with a sweet almost-romance between a girl named Natsuko and a boy named Hongo, who is in the kendo club. Wait, kendo club? But this is an Adachi series! The pitcher always gets the girl! That’s right, so it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s already lost the game. This is only confirmed when the pitcher appears in the form of a Wild Transfer Student, basically Ranma before there was a Ranma. Natsuko starts out a little prickly towards him, but we already know she’s going to waffle back and forth between the two guys and eventually pick the pitcher (because he’s the pitcher in an Adachi series) so, yeah.

I’m going to try to read something a little more drama-free next time. This crap just put me in a bad mood. I should mention before I go that I don’t dislike Adachi manga at all. I read both Cross Game and H2 with enjoyment (while the pitcher didn’t get the girl in the latter, she very definitely preferred him). He’s a great writer now, but his partner in this series, Juuzou Yamasaki, is not quite as good at creating likable characters and believable romances. I’d give this a miss unless you’re a die-hard Adachi fan who will read just about anything he has ever touched.