Battery

At least initially, I found it more interesting than the second summer sports anime series concerning football. At first, this show seemed like it was going to be a classic sports anime series about how two guys meet and join a baseball team, and then they work their way up to the national league they have been dreaming of. Unfortunately, as time goes on, it turns out that is not really what it is about at all. There is not a lot of sports and baseball games in this show. So most of the episodes deal with the relationships between the teammates, the fact that the main male protagonist is a self-centered and arrogant wan*er, and how to be in a team with someone like that, even though he is really incredibly talented. Next, they are faced with the problem of who to play with. In the end, there is a weird "love story" going on concerning "the hitter and the princess." So instead of dramatic baseball game scenes, we see some rather unsuccessful and boring dialogues between the main protagonists, going around and around in circles without any significant shift towards real harmony in the team and between the individual characters. And just when you think that something might start to happen, it is all over. It felt like if I met a seemingly nice girl, and she said something about having sex but then gave me a psychology lecture for hours that would be as convincing as the news from a tabloid newspaper. Then I would walk her home after an unbearable amount of time, on the one hand rather bored, but at the same time feeling like a coiled spring. I would be thinking that perhaps something was going to finally happen in the bedroom department because she is quite pretty to look at; however, she would then turn to me and just say "goodbye" and close the door in my face. And so you go with your impression from mediocre to bellow average to unsatisfactorily... 3/10. (15/07/2016)

I totally understand why people don't like this anime. You go for some baseball and it's not really about baseball. Baseball is sort of a place where everyone meets, clashes, but it's more about the dudes playing it than it is explicitly about the game. Games? Don't expect any. Suspense? It's not about that either. It's the slow, unspoken "from life" subgenre. What else do you expect from Noitamina? They're boys between about 13 and 16 and they want to play baseball, and that's pretty much the end of the description of what the anime is about. It's actually not particularly interesting, it could be likened a bit to that time when you're excitedly looking for rain in the muggy weather and it still doesn't come. Still, it's nothing downright bad, it's just probably going to have a hard time finding its audience. A weaker 3 stars. (16/08/2020)