What They Say:
An up-and-coming power player, Taiga Kagami, is just back from America. When he comes to Seirin High School, he meets the super-ordinary boy, Tetsuya Kuroko. Kagami is shocked to find that Kuroko isn’t good at basketball, in fact, he’s bad! And he’s so plain that he’s impossible to see. But Kuroko’s plainness lets him pass the ball around without the other team noticing him, and he’s none other than the sixth member of the Miracle Generation.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Kuroko’s Basketball really worked the emotions nicely in the previous episode as every time it felt like things were starting to look up for the Seirin boys, Touou managed to have a way to stop it. So much so that you started to really feel the pressure that Kuroko was feeling in seeing his specialty passes not able to pass muster anymore and the general feel of the tide turning against Seirin. The feel and flow of the game is hugely important and once you lose that, it’s a real struggle to get it back. With Aomine really pushing up his skill level here and showing Kuroko that his moves won’t work twice, it’s the kind of moment where Kuroko either has to break past it or fall by the wayside.
With the game moving further along here, and with Kuroko out of it now, Kagami is intending to change the tide himself, though it’ll be a team effort overall. Riko thinks she has it right in that Kagami has finally cut loose with his real strength and skill having see Kuroko taken down like he was and it’s made him into something different. It’s definitely a certain kind of intensity that comes from him now, one that Aomine really likes since it means he might finally get the challenge that he craves that nobody else seems able to deliver. What really makes a difference here is that since Aomine does start to get excited, he starts pushing away his own teammates since he intends to take down Kagami himself and that frustrates a lot of them. But not quite so much as Aomine as Kagami’s change in personality is proving to be a bigger challenge than expected.
While the match is exciting to watch, and very fast and fluid, the first half does end rather quickly and left me feeling surprisingly anti-climactic considering the stakes involved. What it wants to do, rather than focusing on the match itself, is to deal with the way Kuroko handles what happened to him and his own past with Aomine. That does help to set the second half as Kuroko gets back in the game, but so much of the first half really felt like it was worthy of being the second half that even though it’s handled quickly, it just feels like too much at that point as the comeback comes into play. As much as I’m into the game, it has that sort of fatigue moment here in the third period because of how intense it was.
In Summary:
Kuroko’s Basketball is working through some difficult opponent material here in pretty good fashion, though of course there’s plenty of quick twists as the first half comes to a close. Kagami really does manage to stand out and you can see the way so many of the power players are realizing what he’s actually capable of, which is a good thing since it raises the stakes for him in the future. He can’t just be who he was, they’re going to expect this level. The down time between halves is a bit awkward overall since it’s all about getting Kuroko and Kagami on the same page and essentially shaking Kuroko back into the game after a pretty difficult period. It’s just too quick and too easy for my tastes considering what they’re facing and the emotional hit that Kuroko seemed like he was taking for it.
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.
