This is a fastball right down the middle.
What They Say:
I want to pitch to that mitt again… A meeting with catcher Kazuya Miyuki changed the 15-year-old Eijun Sawamura’s life. He said goodbye to all his friends and knocked upon the door of Seidou, a prestigious baseball school, intent on testing his own strength. There, he met many proud baseball players who were betting everything on the sport! A classic tale, yet new and fresh. All the emotion and excitement of the popular baseball manga is at last coming to television in the form of an anime!
The Review: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Eijun, like Tatsuya, “throws straights for life,” as he says. Straight, as I’ve learned from Touch and now Ace of the Diamond, is Japanese for fastball. Fastballs are alright situationally, but you can’t rely on that for an entire game. And Kazuya, like either Touch’s Kazuya or Koutarou, is the genius that can read every pitch Eijun throws like a master. These moments are for the audience who might not understand baseball (which I do not enough to read pitches) to the extent that they need to in order to understand everything that’s going on.
After Eijun’s clash with (future) designated hitter Azuma, he comes back to his school in the country. He focuses so much on his team, because HE put them together and HE wanted to do something before graduating, that he doesn’t want to go to the school in Tokyo. The theme of friendship is beaten into the ground here, but it works. His attachment now isn’t just to his friends back home, it’s to Kazuya and even Azuma. Eijun’s convinced by his friends—the very same that he recruited to play baseball—and his father who went through the same experience, albeit through music, that Eijun is right now.
The hesitations I had about last episode seem to have all but vanished. Eijun has matured so much in one episode because of the new friends he made at Akagi and the friends he left behind. Shonen anime does this sometimes amazingly cheesy thing where all the characters cry at the climactic moment, and it totally works for me here. That’s Eijun’s growth. He’s determined to go to Toky because his friends said it was alright. But when he’s on the train, and the doors are closing, they deny him a clean break. They say that they want to continue playing baseball with him with a tear in their eyes. And it’s amazing.
The love interest/girl-playing-baseball Wakana is simply that for now, which is too bad. She showed her more gentle (and tsundere) side when she says to “at least text or something.” Wakana could have been a much better character up to this point, but I’m not going to complain too heavily about it.
In Summary:
Ace of the Diamond has started off as a much better anime than I thought it was going to be from the first episode. The clash between Eijun and Azuma is reminiscent of the clash between Tatsuya and Nishimura, and it’s every bit as exciting. The thing that sports anime can do, hopefully immediately, is put you into a situation where you WANT to root for the main character and Ace of the Diamond delivers in full. Only time will tell how it holds up from here.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Equipment: Radeon 7850, 24 in. Vizio 1080p HDTV, Creative GigaWorks T20 Series II
