Tag: Sports

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Cestvs: The Roman Fighter

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Story Summary: As young Emperor Nero ascends the throne, a young boy named Cestvs is enslaved and brought to Rome to enter the brutal world of slave boxing. Cestvs has a slight build and by all accounts he should be easily-defeated, but specialized training by Zafar, himself a former slave boxer, helps him to make the most out of his speed and reaction time. Cestvs’ master promises freedom to any of the slave boxers who win 100 fights, so Cestvs has a sharp uphill climb through the fists of some of the most brutal fighters to achieve his goal of escaping slavery. But his greatest challenge may be in Ruska, son of one of the Emperor’s military leaders, and a master of hybrid hand-to-hand combat.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Battle Athletes Victory RESTART!

Camaraderie in action.

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Story Summary: When Kanata was young, she witnessed the crash of a spaceship near her rural home. Thrown from the ship was a young white-haired girl who implored Kanata to train and take her place in the tournament to decide the Cosmic Beauty. Kanata’s farming skills turned out to be a major boon during the qualifiers, giving her the strength to represent Earth in the finals. But after arriving at University Satellite, an orbiting city where the competition takes place, she discovers that not everyone is quite as friendly and outgoing as she is. Still, despite her lack of social graces, Kanata’s true and pure heart begins to win over her fellow competitors. She becomes roommates with Shelley, the competitor from Venus. After finalizing her registration, Kanata is surprised to see what she believes to be a familiar face among the students.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Backflip!!

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Original

Story Summary: Shotaro Futaba has been a bench-warmer all three years on his middle school baseball team. After the conclusion of their final game of the season, he happens to wander into an auditorium where a high school boys’ rhythmic gymnastics competition is taking place. Shotaro is instantly enthralled by the leaps and tumbles of the team from Soshukan High School, to the point that he chooses to attend that school the following year. He doesn’t have any experience with gymnastics, but his history with swimming, soccer, and baseball has conditioned his body to be flexible and strong. Though he may be a newbie, he falls in love with the feeling of his body being in flight and chooses to join the rhythmic gymnastics team. And since the team really needs to have six members to compete with other schools, they welcome him with open arms.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Farewell, My Dear Cramer

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 13

Source: Manga

Story Summary: Women’s sports are often underfunded and given significantly less prestige than men’s sports; the girls and women who play them sometimes have to navigate additional hurdles to find recognition. Nozomi has played on boys’ teams through middle school because she feels the members of the girls’ teams aren’t serious enough; Sumire has become a one-girl show, rivaled only by her, well, rival Midori. These players and others find their way onto the struggling girls’ soccer team at an unassuming high school, and suddenly against all odds, their competitive spirit starts to find a home. Soon after their year begins, a big name returns to the school to help coach this group into becoming a winning team.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Burning Kabaddi

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Story Summary: Tatsuya thought he’d left sports behind after middle school. Irritated by the cliquish-ness he encountered as a soccer player, as well as by the undue pressure forced on him by adults, he decided to drop sports all together and reinvent himself as a live streamer. His fan count has yet to reach the double-digits, but Tatsuya remains optimistic. His dreams are interrupted, though, by a first-year named Azemichi, who knocks on his door and begs him to join the school kabaddi club. Tatsuya’s “no sports” policy is challenged once there’s a little blackmail involved, so he’s convinced to check out the club, if only once. One thing leads to another, and the combination of strategy and physicality that kabaddi demands is more interesting than he would have thought. After losing a bet, Tatsuya is forced to become a member of the team.

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Reviews Short Takes Simulcast Reviews

Winter Simulcast Check-In, Week of 1/17/2021

Hi, all. This post should be significantly shorter than the previous check-in, mostly because I’m just cleaning up a few episodes of shows that hadn’t had second episodes at the time I wrote the first post (or which I cut for time and my own sanity). If you’re a new reader, it might surprise you to know that I do actually like to write things other than episode reviews! Yet, I find it helpful to go through the process even if writing about it isn’t as interesting as it could be (though maybe some folks out there find it interesting to read).

I’ll mention this again – these recaps won’t be a weekly feature of the blog, but if there’s an interesting episode of anything in particular in the coming weeks I might take time to write in more detail about that episode specifically.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for 1/11-1/13 2021

As I suspected, there are only a few premieres left (aside from a few shorts, but I like to give those a couple of weeks so I’m not attempting to write about just 3 minutes worth of material), so I’m going to try to finish them off in this post. Hey, look at that! I think I may have achieved my goal – finishing first impressions before the series’ second episodes have aired. I’m going to chalk that up as a win.

After this, I’m going to pin a digest at the top of the blog for the near future with links to the first impressions by series name, since having multiple anime per each post makes it slightly more difficult to search. If My current methodology has frustrated you, hopefully this will help make up for it.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Saturday, January 9th, 2021

The first couple weeks of a new anime season sometimes feel like running a marathon – it’s a long haul task of watching new episodes, constructing coherent thoughts about them, and then moving on to the next one in a relatively short amount of time. From the outside it might seem like a pretty easy job to sit at a desk and watch anime, but as a lone blogger it can get pretty intense especially since I’m editing my own posts without the benefit of an outside force reminding me not to use certain pet phrases too much (for some reason, this season has been all about the word “albeit” for me, even though I haven’t used it that much in the past). The urge to self-edit in the midst of the writing process is tempting, because then the second pass takes less time. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to get hung-up on finding the perfect phrasing that I find that methodology to be more limiting. It takes training to let oneself word vomit to the benefit of the final product.

I hope folks are enjoying these little asides at the beginning of my posts; I have a difficult time getting started sometimes, and providing a window into my thought process seems to help me a get into a writing frame of mind. If you’re not keen to read vaguely-related personal things, it’s easy to just click the “continue reading” button and skip to the good stuff.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Thursday, January 7th, 2021

So far I’m really enjoying the more chill pacing of writing reviews this season. It’s not that there are fewer premieres, it’s more that I’m holding myself to more realistic standards and not getting so stressed about being one person attempting to complete the work of several. Knowing that I’m trying to write a reasonable amount rather than word-vomiting the huge essays I had been writing about each new show has kept me from dreading the process. I can’t guarantee that there will never be word vomit, but I’m trying to keep it as a “sometimes” issue.

These premieres mark the end of the first week of the new year. It’s already been a wild ride, that’s for sure. There have been quite a few jokes about people deciding not to renew after their free 7-day trial… I for one am deeply hoping that the year will be looking up a little bit from here. At least I will try to enjoy some great anime!

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – The Early Bird Catches the Worm

You know, over the past year I’ve come to truly dislike the word “unprecedented,” because it’s been used time and time again to describe the utterly batshit state of affairs in the world today. And yet, here I’m about to use it to describe the roll-out of this most current anime season.

This season is an odd one for various reasons, perhaps the biggest of which is that it’s turned into kind of a catch-up situation for some series that were meant to have been broadcast sooner, but which were delayed due to the Covid-19 situation. Now we’re being delivered more anime than may have been anticipated, some of them extremely high-profile released. Another thing I’ve noticed is that there have been a few early broadcasts. This in itself isn’t that odd; the odd part is that the early broadcasts are available to us in the US, rather than on, say, Japanese Netflix or some other platform unavailable to us in the West.

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