The newly discovered training camp is nothing like that new guys thought it would be.
What They Say:
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The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the strange turn of events with the series by getting Ryoma knocked out of the camp and then going through a near survivalist adventure in order to find a new way to get some training, he and the others managed to scale a mountain only to find a disturbing camp on top of it. It’s like something out of Grappler Baki or some other rough and tumble fighting series where you have a large group of young men training in a near spartan way with a man in charge that reeks of alcohol and absurdity. It feels like such a departure from the property that I’m familiar with yet in some strange way still manages to work that I’m not entirely sure what to think of the whole idea. While the main camp we’ve seen for the first half of the series was one thing and felt out of place, this just throws us for another loop.
What everyone discovers rather quickly is that this is a pretty rough camp, if you can call it hat, as they run it in two different types at the moment. The previously exiled high school students are already doing their tennis training itself, on courts drawn in the dirt, and they’re pushed physically very hard. The new guys are pretty much subservient to them at this point, from filling in the holes that they dug to bringing the previous group water up another small mountain side. The new arrivals definitely have a difficult time with this since it’s the last thing they expected, but as we see, they have every incentive in the world to try and do better. And since we do learn that the whole thing is just a big psychological test to see which camp can do better with training these kids, it is admittedly an interesting approach. It’s just been handled poorly since the start.
Of course, they do manage to get some tennis into the show as well. While we see the original group doing some training along the way while the others are doing the chores and menial work, it does get to something more competitive later on as the two sides compete for who gets to sleep in the nice cabin and who gets to sleep in the dark and gloomy cave. It’s an amusing style of play since the court is anything but regulation with all the divots and rocks that can be found in it and that provides far more of a challenge for the new group than they could have imagined. Of course, there are a few tricks in the bag that the new guys can pull, especially with some of the Seigaku guys that are there like Inui, but it’s kind of forced when you get down to it.
In Summary:
As we get past the halfway mark of the series and it shifts gears for a bit to deal with this new training camp, I can definitely feel my enthusiasm for the show draining away. While I continue to like the core cast of characters from Seigaku and there was some appeal to the original training camp we saw for the first five episodes, the shift here has left me liking the turn of events less and less. I keep coming back to the fact that I like the characters themselves but even this arc is really making it hard to do so simply because they’re not doing things they normally do and it’s spread out in such an uneven and interesting manner with the addition of a lot of other characters that just aren’t worth caring about for such a short duration. While I didn’t have high expectations for the series in general, especially considering it’s just thirteen episodes, I had expected more than what we’re getting since it’s been off the air for quite some time.
Grade: C+
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
