When you are traveling in the desert, be sure to watch out for scorpions.
What They Say:
Seventh Serve: “National Caliber”
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
So, the girls go to Mozuyama Junior High to face off with a National-caliber team in a practice match. And there we meet the weird girl who Koyori helped at the store. She turns out to be a deadpan threat-maker, though she has the skills to back up her threats: Kururi Futamaru, the Driver of the East. She is the player who led Mozuyama to the National Tournament the year before. Looks like Suzumegahara is in for some trouble.
Koyori gets into a bit of an existential crisis right before the match starts when Kururi challenges Koyori over why she plays “the life-or-death game of table tennis.” The other members of the team also begin to see how far they fall short against a team that managed to make it to Nationals. Hanabi seemingly gets to an early lead over her opponent in the first match, but the Mozuyama player makes a full comeback. In the second match, Hokuto loses the first game (which is just whipped through without showing us the shot-by-shot play). It’s not looking too good for Suzumegahara’s team.
As a full playing match episode, at least we’ve broken through the “setup” monotony that was beginning to set in with the past few episodes. Okay, I get it. I know who the Suzumegahara team is now, as much as I need to or care to know. Enough time is spent giving us a quick run down on the Mozuyama team without being stuck in another full round of introductions and character establishing scenes. Only Zakuro, the team captain, and Kururi, the weirdo ace, get pre-match introductions and they apparently come as a pair, at least in Kururi’s mind. That’s because the yuri content is kicked up to maximum with Kururi’s obsessing over Zakuro. The sharp contrast with how weird and death-consumed Kururi is most of the time and the bursts of excessive deredere-style cutesy-ness she gets when thinking about Zakuro…got a bit boring after a while.
I think we can safely say that this is going to be the path for the next several episodes, as we see the superiority of the Mozuyama team, though obviously we need to get to the final match between the two weirdoes, Kururi and Koyori, so we can expect that the doubles team of MuneMune and Kiruka will surprise the Mozuyama team after Hokuto loses her match (predictable at this point). Agari will have to pull out a win to bring things to the final match (as they explain early on, the standard match rules are a best of five matches, 4 singles and one doubles match played in the middle, but the first school to win three ends the contest).
In Summary:
The Suzumegahara Middle School Team makes its way to Mozuyama Junior High for a practice match. While Mozuyama only became good last year, they became good enough to make it to the National Tournament. Kiruka wants to test our her team to see if they are ready for the big time. From the first match, it looks like that climb to the top may have to be put on hold, as Hanabi goes down in defeat. Hokuto starts off in the hole in her match as well and so the pressure begins to build. Three losses in a row will end the contest. Will Koyori even get to play?
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 12GB RAM, Mac OS 10.11 El Capitan
