Out of practice and back into the swing of things, our team faces down an absolute giant on the court!
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Haruichi Furudate
Translation: Adrienne Beck
What They Say
Thanks to their practice games with Tokyo’s powerhouse teams, Karasuno now has a whole new arsenal of weapons at their disposal. Hinata and Kageyama’s new quick set is also starting to come together! When the Spring Tournament preliminaries begin, Karasuno has high hopes of turning all their past frustrations and losses into victories!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While we’ve been bogged down in a whole lot of training as of late in the series, the time has at last come for that to pay off in the form of some real matches in the prelims for the Spring Tournament! And the first match to kick things off is… just kind of okay, to be honest. The core focus is mostly on the other team and showing through one player in particular the importance of never giving up, no matter the odds, and always putting in 100%. Which is a good message and makes for some nice moments… but at the same time, it’s honestly kind of been done better before anyway. So that makes this feel like a bit of a retread in a way. Again, I certainly wouldn’t say this makes for a BAD match, and heck, it probably helps elevate it above the boring shutout it would be otherwise. It’s just… not the most mind-blowing thing in the world, and more just kind of gets the job done than anything else.
Fortunately, though, there’s still a second match contained in this book, and it’s got a much heavier theme to it. Which is to say, Karasuno ends up against a team with a six and a half foot tall player on it! However, the player himself is actually a complete newbie at volleyball more or less, so despite being the core of the team, his skills aren’t that great. Rather than leading to another landslide, though, the team actually STILL has significant trouble dealing with him. They do inevitably figure out how to play around him and come out on top of course, but it takes more effort than you’d expect after a “this guy is physically gifted but inexperienced” type of reveal. Rather than using this as a chance to focus heavily on the way that skill can trump natural gifts, it actually does mix in a heavy dose of harsh reality, making it abundantly clear that height still isn’t something that’s at all trivial to overcome in volleyball. In addition to that kind of interesting setup, it also fortunately does a real good job of showing the team start to click back together, and is just an enjoyable match overall.
Finally, to end things off, we see Tsukishima getting even more focus as he starts to get serious. That’s probably a good thing, as he still hasn’t really had a chance to stand out yet after his last bit of attention. So ideally, this’ll be the thing to finally drag him out of the position of being kind of underdeveloped and not all that interesting that he’s been stuck in.
In Summary
While we’ve gotten out of training hell with this volume, things still haven’t fully ramped back up again just yet. The matches here are still nothing too crazy, and just seem to be the tip of things warming back up. The first one in particular is like a textbook example of what a middle of the road match looks like, at least by the standards of this series. This fortunately is still enough to make for a decent ride with some nice moments to it, even if they’re nothing too fresh or exciting. The real star though, is the second match, which has a strong theme in the form of an overwhelmingly tall opponent on the opposing team. It’s played pretty well, taking some unique turns in the way develops, and perhaps more importantly… it’s just a nicely done match in general, with the action flowing well from start to finish. There are of course still plenty of matches in the series that blow this one out of the water, but this is still a great joy to read, and is a good sign that things are back on track and should keep on really heating up from here on out. So yeah, not a perfect or mind-blowing book, but a good sign that things are definitely trending upwards again, and a nice read in its own right.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A-
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: June 6th, 2017
MSRP: $9.99
