It’s time to compete on the world stage once again!
What They Say:
Countries from around the world gather together once every four years to celebrate the most ancient of traditions, the pinnacle of sports! Testing their own passion and training against the best the world has to offer, the Sket-dan goes forth, with the pride of their country on the line! Will the goddess of victory shine down on our heroes? Will they be able to claim that yes, they are the winners of the Genesis World Grand Prix?!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a good run of back stories involving Bossun and his connections to others with a nice if understated coming to terms between him and Tsubaki, the show enters less than welcome territory from almost the start here. The introduction of the Genesis World Grand Prix to the trio is something that makes me nervous after that long arc early on in the series when the group was involved in a series of competitions with Yabusa that nearly killed my interest in the show overall. It was only a bit of inertia that got me through it and every week that it ran that arc I was closer and closer to dropping it. So the idea of another competitive tournament arc fills me with unease.
The introduction of this sport that happens every four years hits fairly quickly and through a bit of a push, the trio get wrapped up into the idea of participating, especially since Switch is pretty much ready for it already with a morningstar style net for each of them. While it takes a little wrangling to get them all on the same page, the problem is that they need a manager that’s an adult of at least twenty years of age.So while they have that, they need a fourth member to actually participate. But who to get? With Captain making the most sense, they head off to some unpronounceable nation that instantly gives me flashbacks to the previous arc with how its laid out. Cringes are the order of the day throughout this episode unfortunately.
Naturally, it takes a bit to get to the actual competition as there’s an opening musical act with plenty of hip animation going on, but once we get to the matches themselves, which is like a weird version of volleyball that Captain can’t seem to get her head around, we get to see some of the teams from around the world, such as the State of Wyoming where Genesis is really popular and another group of American’s who are just brash and outgoing. Captain’s struggles early on reflect the way she doesn’t know anything about the sport and how poorly her teammates prepared her, but they do of course get things moving along a bit as there are many matches in the bracket to deal with.
In Summary:
With this thankfully being wrapped up in a single episode, it was the kind of show where we get a lot going on but very little in the way of humor. This can work as we saw during the recent back story episodes on Bossun, but here everything just falls incredibly flat. The show is one that makes me very leery of it when it does competitive things like this on a big scale since it burned that bridge thoroughly very early on but even past that there’s little to be enthusiastic about here. Captain is a good addition to the team but even here she’s not well utilized since she hasn’t a clue about what’s going on and just handles it all by luck when you get down to it. At least next weeks episode looks a little more amusing as the preview has more humor than this episode did as a whole.
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.
