What They Say:
After getting over everything, Hyuga decides to play basketball again. Impressed by the rooftop expressions of determination of the members, Riko joins them, and the Seirin High School basketball team begins playing in earnest.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The shift to giving us some of the early formative moments of the team halfway through the previous episode certainly was interesting to watch. Teppei’s intention of getting this going was well handled and the way that he was simply so affable and capable of making friends made it clear he could draw people to him. But his focus on getting Hyuga on definitely makes an impression because he sees someone with a lot of potential and isn’t going to let him just slide away. We also get a few other nods towards what we know is to come and it’s fun to see Riko at this stage and some of the others around the edges of the story.
What really makes the show fun at the start here is that the five players that Teppei brings together, himself included, sneak onto the roof to do some morning announcements of their own to the entire student body. They’re so full of intention and hope that they make it clear what they’re going to do as a team in a great way. And they do prove inspiring as it gets Riko to join on s the team manager who knows what to do. We’ve seen that in the earlier part of the series with how she got the team running when Kuroko and Kagami joined and it definitely makes a good and scary impression with what she has planned for them. The group comes together well and it’s fun to see that at the same time, Hyuga gets drawn into the position of captain even though he figured it would be all about Teppei since he was the one that drew it all together. It’s solidly fun experience seeing this startup come together as it does.
While we get some good game time montage moments here, we also get them going up against another team that contains members from the Generation of Miracles, which isn’t something that they quite get this early in their high school career. Though they make some good moves as it goes on and establish themselves with some potentially, especially Teppei, but there’s something insurmountable about their opponents at Kirisaki. It’s a good game to watch, but mostly because of what we get from the Seirin boys. As it goes on, this arc corrects one of the biggest problems of the series in that outside of the Generation of Miracles characters, we knew little about the Seirin characters. Not so much their home lives and so forth, but about their own careers. Getting the restart of the team here and the challenges they faced makes them a lot more accessible when we get back to the present day storyline.
In Summary:
Kuroko’s Basketball isn’t afraid of not focusing on the two main characters as a lot of the rest of the team have fans, and rightly so. This episode spends all of its time there with the boys as they started up the Seirin team and really started to find a groove, even as they came up against some impressive players. But it also sets the stage for what’s happening in the present as we get Teppei and Hyuga talking about how little time they truly have to leave a mark before they end their high school time and move on to what’s next. It’s a good motivating factor that’s in there and spending the time on their suffering and anguish along with the strong hope and desire they have for as much as they do here is so very worthwhile.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
