What do squats and beach balls have in common?
What they say
Nozomi Kaminashi is a fantastic gymnast, and in order to help her family out of poverty, has decided instead to become a competitor in a new women-only sport, Keijo. A lucrative endeavor, Keijo is a popular gambling sport where female players stand on floating platform on the water and must push other players off by only using breasts and buttocks. Will Nozomi be able to make it big in the world of Keijo?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Episode two starts off immediately with butt exercises, including 100 meter butt walks. I’ll admit, seeing an anime where training involves walking on your butt made me snort out my drink. It was definitely a better way to start this episode than episode one’s beginning.
After the butt training exercises, Nozomi, Miyata, Toyoguchi, and Aoba are stuck doing core exercises to train their muscles—running around a track field while dragging a tire, pull ups, sit ups, squats… you know, the good stuff. I wasn’t particularly impressed with this aspect of the episode, which I felt could have been a lot more outrageous to increase the parody-esque humor. I feel like it would have been better if we saw them doing ridiculous shounen-style training like trying to split a waterfall in half with their tush, but that’s just me. Saying that, I do think watching a bunch of girls sit in a classroom while their teacher lectures them on the difference between American butts and Japanese butts is hilarious. Seriously. There cannot be anything more ridiculous than a class called asstronomy and boobology.
While the first third of this episode was dedicated to exercises, the last two-thirds dealt with teamwork. Nozomi, Miyata, Toyoguchi, and Aoba have to bounce a beach ball back and forth between them. The caveat is that they can only use their butts. Disregarding how ridiculous that sounds, the group quickly learns that it’s not as easy as it looks. The wind kept blowing the ball off course, which caused everyone to keep bumping into each other. We even get our first yuri boob fall, which I do not believe I’ve seen in an anime yet. I’m not really sure how that works, but I guess I should give them props for that. While the group starts off as the weakest team, thanks to a bit of nakama-style bonding, they pull through and end up winning during their last test.
Perhaps the best scene of episode two comes in at the end. Nozomi and the gang are now using the land—a sort of giant float that women try not to get knocked off of during Keijo games—and they are facing off against Ujibe-sensei in a test to see how well they can do. Nozomi calls Ujibe-sensei a seal because she’s so, uh, large… rotund? Anyway, seeing Nozomi embodying the typical loudmouth characteristics of a shounen protagonist like Naruto and Luffy made me laugh. It was quite possibly the best line I’ve heard so far.
In Summary
Overall, this episode was better than episode 1 but still not where I was hoping it would be. Some of the humor was on point. However, there were a number places where I felt like the directors could have afforded to be more outrageous in their parodying. I think this episodes strongest point was actually the bonding of the four girls: Nozomi, Miyata, Aoba, and Toyoguchi. It reminded me a lot of the shounen anime I used to watch when I was younger. Not only did this leave me feeling nostalgic, but I also felt like it helped increase the idea that this anime is a parody of the shounen genre.
Grade: C
Steamed by: Crunchyroll
