Baby Steps 2nd Season

Baby Steps oftentimes gets praised for being one of the most realistic sport anime out there. This point stems from the fact that all the moves MC pulls out are thought out and explained in a rather elaborate manner, and we see everyone, not just main character, struggle to get better match after match. Yet, everyone seems to forget that Eichiro - as talented and as gifted as he may be - has only been playing tennis for so long. If you wish to thread the line of realism, it's impossible for him to beat people who have been playing tennis their whole lives. Onthe flip side, Baby Steps definitely is amusing. To be honest, it's really kind of like a shounen battle manga translated into sports, with a dash of well-done romance (if you'd believe it, I consider it to be the most realistic aspect of this manga). Rivals come and go, stronger ones appear, random new-moves MC thinks up on a spot work, and he often wins battles that seem far out of his reach. It's not a bad anime, just calling it realistic is quite a stretch. Story is slow paced. And I mean slow paced. It may not seem so at the beginning, but the longer you keep watching it, the more you realize that not many things are happening. Sure, it's not the slowest paced sports anime out there, but it's not the fastest either. This takes a huge, huge spike if you get into manga where 1 match can drag on for 20+ chapters which mostly consist of monologue - and the same case is with the anime itself. During matches, audience is being fed exposition like no tomorrow. Main character literally explains everything that's going on as if everyone in the audience is a machine incapable of grasping a simple concept of "oh, he's trained for his whole life that's why he's better". Anime tries to shrug it off on his personality, as Eichiro is a rather anal person, but it's a large stretch and I often found myself skipping scenes as they literally recap what happened 2 minutes ago. This alone stagnates the story in a large way, and slows it down too much. Some people call it realism, but, what it actually is, is just dragging the shit out. Another weird part is that anime will sometimes have huge time skips (for three months as an example) so it makes me wonder why not just balance the pace. Such large contrasts in storytelling only serve to bring the overall quality down, and were the first signs, at least to me, that this won't be as fun of a ride as I had hoped. Another point that I need to drill on is monologue: it's insane. If you think that Your Lie In April has a lot of monologues, you haven't seen a damn thing. Monologues usually go this way: 1. Ei-chan is in trouble and/or is being completely ran over by his opponent 2. He initiates a severe dose of monologue waging his options and the success rate of each 3. His chosen option flat out works or he says something along the lines of "well, I didn't score the point but that move shook my opponent so it was worth it". It. Never. Changes. Absolutely never. Yes, problems and options may differ, and sometimes the outcome itself is unexpected, but that doesn't change the fact that the pattern is noticeable the moment you start thinking about it. It's not rare for writers to fall into a trap of explaining things in the same manner, but this is just literally acing it home. Within the story you'll find your standard sports drama; unfortunately, this is not a good thing. Why? Because it's the same shit you've seen everywhere. Zero-to-hero stories can be done well, but if you follow every aspect of it, you simply make it predictable. I never had any trouble figuring out whether Ei-chan will win or not. As the matter of fact, I predicted every single match in 2nd season with 100% accuracy, something that hasn't happened even in Diamond no Ace, the epitome of cliche sports anime. This trend continued on in the manga, basically nullifying a large portion of what makes sports drama exciting: being unable to predict the outcome. Story is by far the weakest aspect of this anime (and manga as well) and drags it down by quite a large margin, just making you think "what could have been". On the flip note, production values are higher. Art itself is colorful and crisp and, while it isn't really spectacular by any means, it's more than enough to hold the show itself on a higher note. Animation can be hit and miss; oftentimes, you'll simply see stills of shots rather than the animation itself, but it has some decent moments. Don't expect nothing on the level of KnB or DnA because, remember, this sport story is realistic. Music itself is passable. Opening song is catch and good though, simply showcasing just how bland the soundtrack is. Voice acting is fairly decent and there's a huge cast so you'll probably find a performance or two you'll like more than others. Overall, nothing spectacular, but definitely on-par with today's standards. Now we come to the characters, the thing that makes this anime realistic supposedly. Nope. Again, I'll repeat myself: no matter how talented he is, he should NOT be able to compete on national level after mere 2 years of training. Not only is the tennis one of the hardest sports to pick up as you get older, but he actually doesn't even have innate talent from it. They shrug it off on "working his body beyond its capacity", but if that's all it took in real life, everyone could be a great athlete. Don't get me wrong though: Ei-chan is a good character outside of tennis, but I have a feeling this manga would have been far better if it focused on a sport that's solely about thinking, as this would be far more realistic. With side characters ... as expected of sport stories, there's a bucket load of them. From the ones that get forgotten to the ones that stay all the way through. You have Nat-chan, probably one of the best female leads I've seen in a while. There's nothing exceptional about her character, but it was executed so well that you can't help but somehow feel entranced by her. She's "go with the flow" type of a person and, even though I usually have a hard time connecting to people like that, I found myself drawn to her far more than any other character in the entire series. The romance between the two MC's is definitely slow (as in, real slow) but as it's just a side thing, it was actually a breath of refreshing air whenever it came up, and it didn't drag on for as long as I thought it would. Props for that. I won't discuss any others because then it would take me 10 pages to cover them all. Just know that there's a huge cast of diverse characters and even though sometimes you'll be thinking "ugh, freaking backstory; I don't care, just go back to the fucking match already, Jesus", I found myself liking more characters than I disliked, so that's a good thing. Overall, if you're into sports anime, you will enjoy Baby Steps. It's a relatively easy going watch but, again, if you're expecting true realism, you won't find it here. You'll realize this rather quickly, but it shouldn't really deter your enjoyment of the series too much.

I've only done review for poor shows so now here's a good one. After the experiencing the incredibly strange and very disappointing Prince of Tennis, I was hesitant to pick up another tennis series. But after marathoning a slightly slow but promising first season, I continue into the even better second season of Baby Steps Story and Characters: Maruo Eiichiro continues on his path to professional tennis, having only just started playing 2 years previously. Maruo goes to THE LAND OF THE FREE, to do some training and improve. The show keeps things interesting and continues to show how he grows and improves at the sport. Inthis aspect it may be the best sports anime. It details Maruo's training regimen and the numerous hours he spends while being believable. Along with that it shows different strategies and techniques needed to win matches, making viewers interested in the show and the sport itself. This importantly comes together so that at no point does Maruo have a strange or illogical jump in skill and neither does it make his opponents look weak. You continue to see just how difficult MC's training is and how hard he works with weight training, jogging, drills, and all the other crap no one wants to do. The show doesn't preaching about working hard though. Maruo works in the most effective way possible. MC then goes onward to reach the All Japan Junior tournament, competing to be the best young player in Japan and eventually go pro All the players represent different playing styles and personalities that are interesting and believable. In sports and shonen anime at times characters can be ridiculous exaggerations of certain personalities and archetypes found in real life but that isn't the case here. A few things I did like was after MC played someone who used various "dirty" tricks, the lesson at the end wasn't that you can't use tricks to win, you have to use them in the right way. In the end the player need to use the tricks to back his tennis, rather than making them the center of the play. Animation: The animation does it's job. Though there are sports anime with better animation at certain moments, Baby Steps never has issues with poor animation or episodes where time and money is clearly being saved for later. That being said this is a case of you'll find the best of the animation in the OP. Overall: 8/10 Everything makes it truly interesting to see how far the MC can go. Though matches don't create the same excitement and some other sports anime, they're still interesting and moments in between are never dull Season 2 steps up from last season and I eagerly await a third. Baby Steps is one of the best sports anime out and it's well worth watching

An Almost Too Deep Vision of Tennis Hinders Character Development. Story - 8 Story and characters go hand in hand. What helps or hurts one can also help or hurt the other. This story follows a "I must get better to win" concept that is at the competitive heart of most sports anime. What it tries to do, it does well, but it doesn't try to do enough. The knowledge of tennis I gained from watching is really incredible. I went from knowing almost nothing to really understanding on a deep level what actual pros might think about during a match. There are enough surprises and changes of paceto keep you guessing, but during matches it can get very repetitive. I understand the need to build tension, but watching every single point of a set does get old when you aren't actually there. The story does go a lot further than the first season, but it spends a bit too long to make each point. If it went a little quicker at some points, there would have been more room for other stories which could have developed the characters. Character - 8 The enormous cast is really incredibly talented and well-designed. Like the story, the characters are all realistic, and almost every one provides good insights to tennis and life. Unfortunately, many of the characters change very little. Ei-chan does change quite a bit, but many of the main supporting characters continue to fill the same old roles. Although not necessarily a bad thing, the fact that the characters are so limited in what they do makes them close to one-dimensional. When a character is allowed to tell a different part of their own story, it is brief. Ei-chan takes too much screen time when others could have taken the spotlight for a while. Some characters are introduced and then completely forgotten, not only by the writers, but even by the characters themselves. The series could continue and make up these problems, but as of this season, it still falls short. Art - 5 The design of the characters and settings is average. Maruo's notebooks can be quite detailed at times, but that is where most of the detail stops. Most of the show happens on a tennis court. The players do change shirts between matches, but lots of the other shots are replayed. This is to be expected in a sports anime, but it is still repetitive. Sometimes the ball bounces somewhere it shouldn't - if it needs to be inside a box on a serve, it isn't always there, and some rallies have shots where the ball lands in the doubles boundary. It might be a clever way of inserting different court backgrounds to change the camera angle just enough so that some replayed cuts aren't as noticeable. There are times where the art really shines, and actually tries to rise to great levels, but these are few and rushed, and lead back into more replayed cuts. One example is when a player is bouncing the ball before a serve, and the ball carries some of the court's dust up with it. Sound - 7 Voice acting is top-notch. Game and environment sound is very good. There is enough variety in sound that I never thought I heard the same ball bounce twice in the entire show. But the soundtrack is lacking. This season's OP is the same as the first season. More songs could have been written instead of just re-using the same few over and over, but I suppose the budget was tight. Enjoyment - 8 Overall - 7 As far as sports anime go, this one goes for it all and then some. The story and characters are a solid 8 or 9, doing a fine job to make the time enjoyable, but not quite complete. There aren't many times I actually laughed at a joke, but the character humor, while sparse, does get the job done. There aren't a lot of times that this show pulls your emotions in, but the depth of tennis makes up for it, especially for a sports anime. I hope that this show can get better by adding another season, because this season definitely improved on the first.

As an avid tennis fan and player for almost twenty years now, I stayed away from tennis anime like the plague, for fear of anticipating constant cringe in an anime, from a sport that I know and love. Let's just get one thing out of the way, I REALLY like tennis and have been pretty obsessed with it in the past. I mean, absolutely balls deep into the game, following the professional tour every tournament, playing down at my local club 3-4 days a week (used to me more back in my School days), learning and studying the techniques, the grips used, the rules, theplayers, the history of the game, etc, the list could go on and on. These days, I don't have as much time to keep up with the tennis world as intensely and rigorously, as I once had, and I have a couple of other interests that also share up that time, one of them being obviously, anime watching. I still go down to the courts when I can and while I don't watch nearly as many full length tennis matches of the pro tour, I still follow what's going on, who's winning, who's losing, who's injured, replays if I have time, highlights on YouTube if I don't, etc. Still, nothing compared to what I was doing a few years back. I frequent a tennis forum and I got recommended this anime from another member, who knew I was into anime. Prince of Tennis was a no go for me, mostly due to the amount of episodes, but this show "only had 50" in comparison. He told me he enjoyed it himself and his analytical tennis brain is similar to mine, so I ended up taking him up on his recommendation. So, what did I enjoy about this show? Well, the first thing is, and this goes even more so for the first season, was how much time and effort went into explaining the rules, strategies, game styles, the mindset, the overall physicality of it all, the training side of things, it was rather meticulous and detailed, you can obviously tell that the author is a fan of tennis or at least has people in his vicinity that know their stuff. A lot of accuracy in all this information we are spoon-fed. And it is spoon-fed, for better or for worse. The second thing I enjoyed was the little romantic sub plot, it didn't feel forced, nor was it swept to the side, their chemistry was always there and it finally came to fruition in this 2nd season. It was handled well and it didn't become overbearing or affect the plot much at all. The third thing were the characters, especially Maruo. All different personalities, builds and game plans, same end goal. To turn professional. Maruo has to be most analytical main character I have ever seen, not just in sports anime, but in anime overall. I loved the notebook thing (even if remembering and drawing patterns of play, point by point during a match, suspends my belief lol), it reminded me of myself who would take notes and do write ups of every pro match I used to watch, did hundreds and hundreds of them, so I could relate to the nerd inside him. I did like the idea of an MC like that, my favorite players are the smart tacticians, and most sports protagonists are generally gifted elsewhere, mainly physically. Now, what I didn't enjoy. His rise to the top is ridiculous and clashes with the realism of the sport shown and the meticulous analytical side of things, to the point where it is a little too nonsensical for me, even as a sports shounen. No tennis player EVER has managed to do what Maruo does, no matter what other members here say, "some people develop at a much faster rate, yada yada", no. This goes well beyond that. Maruo's incredibly fast development and rise is a big "press X to doubt" moment throughout the series for me, though I kind of took all that at face value for the most part. You can be the most dedicated, diligent person on Earth, you're not improving at such a quick rate and competing against top 500 players in the world, which he was doing a couple of times during the show XD This could have all been prevented if the author just tweaked his backstory a little bit or something, he started young, quite tennis, but came back, for example. I don't think you would have lost much overall. The second thing I thought was overdone, was the introspection side of things. The endless inner monologue, the dry exposition of the way a match was going, his thoughts and feelings about every single thing, no matter how big or little it was, all throughout his tennis matches. This is where my thing as a tennis fan comes into play, personally, this was torture at times, listening to him repeat things ad nauseum, information that I am already aware of. I could also see this being incredibly boring and off putting for a casual watcher, getting info dumped like this during a match or Maruo's. The third thing I thought was subpar at best, was the visual direction of the tennis matches. The animation of the matches themselves were poor overall (whether it was in birds eye view or not), from the overall fluid movements of the strokes (the serve looked quite good for the most part) to the player positioning on the court, to the wide shots of the court and the frigid player and ball movement. It left a lot to be desired unfortunately. Still, ten times better than 1973's "Aim for the Ace", where everyone is falling over every damn point, so I suppose there's that XD There were other minor nitpicking things, technique being completely wrong for the underhand serve, the complete lack of forced errors in matches, Maruo being very competent in almost all areas of the game, yet not enough screen time or practice on these certain elements to believe it, etc, small things in the grand scheme of things (well, maybe not that last one lol), but again, it's the tennis fan and player in me. Overall, it was a pretty solid watch and around the same sort of level that the first season showed. Fairly abrupt ending, though obviously they were hoping for a 3rd season in the near future. Unfortunately, it's been about 8 years, one can still hope though, especially with all these anime being adapted with big gaps in time between seasons.

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