HaHaXXspetten
December 19, 2016
Recommended
The idea of putting moe girls in a competitive environment is not anything new to the world of anime. It is something which has been pulled off with great success in the past in shows like Saki for example, and in general I think it adds a nice touch to the otherwise somewhat formulaic sports genre of anime. Following a similar idea, Shakunetsu no Takkyuu Musume is a surprisingly engaging series which keeps you coming back for more. However, although it exceeds expectations in some areas, it also comes across as rather frustrating or awkward in others. It is the kind of show which Ireally enjoyed watching as a whole, but when actually thinking about it I cannot help but find quite a lot of holes in it regardless.
The story is quite straightforward and can be roughly divided into two parts. The first half of the anime follows a group of female middle school students in a table tennis club who interact and compete against each other within the club itself. Then in the second half they start playing team games against other schools instead. In other words, completely standard stuff for a sports anime. What is perhaps a bit less ordinary though is the in-house rankings they have where every club member is placed on a ranked leaderboard which is constantly updated based on recent performance in order to determine who the best player in the club is, and in turn to motivate everyone to play their best. What exactly determines these rankings is never explained in detail, but it seems to be some sort of combination of a king of the hill format and an overall collective skill evaluation. In either case, the games are generally quite fun to watch and the anime as a whole is surprisingly addictive as a result, but there are definitely some problems with it as well.
The first issue I have with Shakunetsu no Takkyuu Musume is the characters. There are two main girls: Koyori and Agari, the two most highly ranked girls in the club. Agari is to a large extent a rather stereotypical twintailed tsundere (albeit with boobs for once), but initially she also has a rather strange superiority complex which causes her to frequently look down on others and just take it for granted that she has to be the best, though she grows out of this behavior over time. She can be pretty arrogant but for the most part I am honestly okay with that; in a sense I think it is refreshing to see some main characters every once in a while that are actually intentionally flawed rather than being 10/10 perfect goody-two-shoes all the time, so I actually kind of like Agari as a whole.
Unfortunately she is an exception rather than the norm on that front. Koyori is the newcomer prodigy in the club who jumps straight to the top of the rankings right after joining. She is very shy, gets embarrassed easily, and is kind of hopeless at anything other than table tennis, but that is where she truly shines. The problem is that she shines way too much... and in the wrong way. Honestly, Koyori feels too much like a battle shounen protagonist to me, as her special "ability" is awfully close to nakama power in my eyes. Essentially she magically powers up from "having fun" when playing the game (more on that later), which I think is really immersion-breaking and stupidly cliché. And as far as the supporting cast goes, it's somewhat bland across the board. There is Hokuto; the calculative girl who refers to everyone else by the colour of their panties, Munemune-senpai; who is literally named after her enormous tits, Hanabi; the energetic girl who goes >.< at any given moment, and Kirika; the club president who likes enforcing punishments onto everyone she defeats in a match. However, beyond these quirks, they are quite uninteresting as a whole. Probably the most interesting character in the show to me would ironically rather be Kururi, the ace player of the club from a different school that they play against in the second half of the anime. She is an interesting case of a borderline yandere, which is not exactly something commonly seen amongst moeblobs, at least outside of Higurashi.
Secondly... there is the somewhat awkward usage of blushing and fanservice. Do not get me wrong, I enjoy seeing red-faced moeblobs as much as the next guy, but Shakunetsu no Takkyuu Musume takes this concept way too far. Essentially, Koyori has this obsession of wanting to "feel her heart race" when playing games, which it seemingly does whenever she is playing a skilled opponent, and it is also the main source of her suddenly powering up as I mentioned before. Not only is this stupidly cliché and cringey to watch, but whenever she does this she also starts blushing so hard it looks like her cheeks is going to catch on fire. What are you so embarrassed about? All you are doing is playing a sport. Are you just blushing for the sake of blushing? It makes no sense at all, and only feels like the producers are trying way too hard to make the girls look cute. I often complain about how many anime tend to throw in ecchi fanservice shots in untimely situations where they simply do not fit in just for the sake of having them, and what Shakunetsu no Takkyuu Musume does here is effectively the same thing except with moe instead of ecchi. And it happens way too often for me to just ignore it, especially considering that Koyori actually infects Agari with this syndrome after a while so that she starts doing the same thing too, and so we are left with two tomatoes playing table tennis all of a sudden... which is really awkward to watch. As a side note to the above, this anime also has some other form of fanservice in the sense that these girls tend to sweat *a lot* when playing, turning their gym clothes rather transparent a lot of the time. However, this part actually does make sense unlike the needlessly excessive blushing and can also look pretty sexy, so I would consider it a plus point.
Thirdly, this is quite evidentially a rather low-budget production and it kind of shows in the animation. Considering that table tennis is a very fast-paced sport, you would also need some rather impressive animation in order to keep up with it, and unfortunately Shakunetsu no Takkyuu Musume generally does not. There are way too many still shots during the duels instead of fluid animation, which makes it a bit stiff to watch. Occasionally it looks really good though, with some really impressive sakuga usage momentarily, but these are sadly mere exceptions. I think the budget distribution per episode is probably a bit uneven, as some games seem to look a lot better than others. Also, I personally have a bit of a problem with the general character designs: for many of the girls it looks like their cheekbones are completely deformed with almost 90 degree bends in the middle somehow. For Agari this is particularly noticeable. But again these are only visual flaws and not anything major. There are also occasionally some annoying adaptation issues, such as the anime skipping entire sets from matches when playing other schools. Like why are these matches played as best-of-five if you do not have time to show it all anyway, instead of just letting it stay at best-of-three? Probably because it was like that in the original web manga and they did not want to change anything, but cutting it out is hardly a better option in my eyes.
So evidentially, there are quite a lot of things which could have been done better. However, all that being said, I still enjoyed Shakunetsu no Takkyuu Musume decently as a whole. Yes, there are numerous flaws, but beyond the aforementioned issues, I thought it was a pretty solid anime. Even though these problems certainly do drag it down, I would still put the show slightly above average. Seeing cute moe girls working their hardest to achieve their dreams is a quite beautiful sight, and the unusually competitive nature of the matches even within the club itself certainly helps in catching your interest because it makes even regular practice games feel important. Normally training arcs tend to often feel like fillers in sports anime in my experience, but here the girls are competing just as much within the clubroom as outside it, which is a quite refreshing experience. All-in-all, what you have is an anime which probably will not leave much of a lasting impression, but for a mere 12-episode moeblob show you can do a hell of a lot worse. Though it really needs a continuation because the way this season ended was not exactly very conclusive.
PS: For whatever reason, Crunchyroll's subs for this particular anime were generally quite sub-par by their standards. Unfortunately I have not seen any other group pick it up yet at the time of writing this, but I hope someone does in the future, because the anime probably deserves it.
