Diamond no Ace

With a stray pitch that completely missed the batter, Eijun Sawamura loses his final middle school baseball game. Frustrated by this defeat, Eijun and his teammates vow to reach the national tournament once they are in high school. But everything changes when a scout unexpectedly invites him to Tokyo's prestigious Seidou High School after seeing the potential in his unusual pitching style. Encouraged by his teammates, Eijun accepts the offer, ready to improve his skills and play at a much more competitive level of baseball.

However, now surrounded by a large number of skilled players, Eijun struggles to find his place on the team. He declares that he will one day become the team's ace, but that's only if fellow first year Satoru Furuya doesn't take the title first, with his breakneck fastballs that earn him a coveted spot on the starting roster. With the addition of these talented new players to an already powerful lineup, the Seidou baseball team aims to become the best in Japan, facing off against a number of formidable foes that stand in their way.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Miyuki, Kazuya Main

Sakurai, Takahiro Japanese

Sawamura, Eijun Main

Oosaka, Ryouta Japanese

Kominato, Haruichi Main

Hanae, Natsuki Japanese

Furuya, Satoru Main

Shimazaki, Nobunaga Japanese

Takigawa, Chris Yuu Supporting

Namikawa, Daisuke Japanese

Kuramochi, Youichi Supporting

Asanuma, Shintaro Japanese

Yuuki, Tetsuya Supporting

Hosoya, Yoshimasa Japanese

Todoroki, Raichi Supporting

Ono, Kensho Japanese

Narumiya, Mei Supporting

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Kominato, Ryousuke Supporting

Okamoto, Nobuhiko Japanese

Masuhara, Mitsuyuki Director

Takakuwa, Hajime Sound Director

Asaka, Morio Episode Director, Storyboard

Kawasaki, Itsurou Episode Director

Reviews

Jan 26, 2024

Vikorean

Recommended

No need for superpowers, Baseball is already epic enough.

Ace No Diamond achieved the subtle performance of remaining technical and grounded without losing the viewers attention. We don't feel like we are being treated like idiots and rather enjoy becoming Baseball experts throughout the show. One of DNA's strengh is they keep the story very realistic. Which makes it very difficult to predict whether the MC will deliver or not. He eventually will (I presume), it is a sport shonen after all. But the storytelling is efficient to a point of rendering his progress unpredictable.

Since I mentionned the MC, let's have a closer look at ... him. At first glance Sawamura may seem like the regular loud generic shonen underdog. Which he kind of is. However, his abilities as a pitcher aiming to become the Ace are what make him more complexed than he seems. As the spectators are often taken aback and can't really put a finger on Sawamura's talent, so are we. After completing almost 3 seasons, I am still unable to tell exactly what makes Sawamura such a good pitcher. But I know he is, we can just feel how special he is. Which makes us even more eager to see how his progress will unfold.

Sawamura's complexities in his game make a very funny contrast with his rather simpled minded and straighforward personnality. Which is the opposite of his rival competing for the same position. Furuya is an overpowerfull and straighforward pitcher acclaimed by the whole country. And yet he has the social skills of a toddler and suffers with the immense pressure overtalented players put on themselves. These few examples just show how well written and complexed the characters are, giving a very realistic insight on what Baseball highschoolers in Japan may go through. The final product is a very relatable team we almost forget is fictional and meant to serve the plot. It almost feels like one of these Netflix documentories in the dailylife of a sports team.

Finally I must emphasise the show's secret weapon: an absolute smashing banging soundtrack. I have not experienced such an epic soundtrack since Naruto. Even though the playlist is pretty limited, the music is just too good. Its timing during a game to make Sawamura's moments pure adrenaline shots are the show's trademark. Nothing original, but perfectly delivered. Sometimes, it is best not trying to invent something and rather do simple things right. DNA understood it perfectly.

As it is a sports anime, it is difficult to give it the maxium note. It eventually ends up being repetitive with the game after game format. The show sometimes pays its realism by throwing too much intel, dedicating sometimes a whole episode about a game between teams we don't care about. Which leads me to DNA's main weakness. As a baseball anime, it ironically has almost too much baseball. As an anime viewer, a few moments of breathers between games to dive in the character's lives and struggles could have been well needed to catch a break. We are limited to baseball pitches, training grounds and sometimes the highschool corridors and classrooms, which sometimes feels a bit frustrating.

These few setbacks are the price DNA decided to pay to keep the anime away from any non sense and treat us to some quality Baseball actions. Besides, Sawamura's goal is so crystal clear, it will quickly become the only thing you care about. In its genre, DNA nailed every aspect making a sports anime a great enjoyement. I can only recommend it, especially if you don't know a hoot about Baseball.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Aug 14, 2020

littlemushrum

Mixed Feelings

This show has a very strong and engaging start. The introduction to the characters are nicely done, the premise is interesting. I like that it wasn't going to be an "underdog" story. I feel like the first 20ish episodes is where the anime truly shines after that it kind of goes downhill for me. The show was really good at setting up a goal for Sawamura and the team. Watching how they achive that goal was exciting and mostly rewarding. My favourite part was the Chris storyline and how Sawamura learns from his mistake and grows as a character.
On the other hand I think ... the show fails at creating a well-rounded rival for our main character. I hated Furuya. This kind of rivalry is hard to done well. You want this character to be somewhat threatoning yet loveable - and I feel like DnA fails at that. They put so much more on the threatoning part. Furuya starts of as lonely, somewhat shy, introvert, yet proud "monster" pitcher. Which is fine... Not too original but could've been done well. His personality is polar opposite to Sawamura's. It should've worked magnificently. Haikyuu had done it well with Kageyama and Hinata. I think the main issue with his character is that we see and know so little about him. Yes, we know his a "monster" but what else? Him being a prodigy is not his personality. Yes, we see him warm up to the others but he doesn't really creat any meaningful bonds with them, he's just there. I would've loved to see him talking about his past, how it effected him not having friends and being rejacted. Confiding in Miyuki maybe.
Overall, I enjoyed watching it for the most part. The games were exciting, but they also get more and more frustrating.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Dec 15, 2021

ktulu007

Not Recommended

Diamond no Ace is an anime from 2013-2015 based on a Terajima Yuki manga. The anime was handled by Production IG and Madhouse. I'm not expecting much since it's a sport anime but it was a request so, let's get into it.

Story:

We open with our main protagonist, Sawamura Eijun, being recruited by Seidou, a school with a proud tradition of throwing balls and hitting them with sticks. He sets his sight on becoming the lead pitcher and getting the coveted "Ace number." From there, the anime follows Seidou's performance in a big tournament and the aftermath.

Let's start with the main problem that really makes ... this series kind of unbearable. The pacing is horrendously slow. The longer games take longer than the card games in Duel Monsters and at least those have holographic monsters attacking each other. In these, we have a lot of the same thing with the pitchers throwing balls and the plays that follow and long, drawn out stretches of the crowd reacting. So, we have slow games, slow crowd reactions & slow training sequences. This series is actually so goddamn tedious and boring that you either have to let your mind wander and think about other things or you'll enter a catatonic state. If this is accurate to watching Baseball, it's no wonder the game basically ceased to exist in the Star Trek universe and had to be radically altered to be more interesting in Futurama.

Here's another huge problem I have with this series. It's set up so that we, as the audience, are supposed to be rooting for Sawamura and we're supposed to see him as a pitcher with amazing potential. But he comes across as a rubbish player. He can't control where his pitches go for shit. He's constantly breaking down at crucial moments, screwing the team over and having to be coddled to regain his ability to pitch. Maybe it's just because I don't know much about Baseball, but to me those seem like really horrible qualities for a player. Like, this person would never actually make a competitive team unless they got their shit together.
On the positive side, at least this series doesn't go the usual sports media route of following a group of plucky underdogs. Instead, we have a highly skilled team plus Sawamura and the tension comes from there being a lot of other highly skilled teams that are on their level or a bit above.

Characters:

The big issue with the characters in this is that they're all kind of similar. In the sense that they're all obsessed with baseball. Aside from that, there's not that much to their characters. Sawamura is the energetic protagonist who tries hard but has to overcome his own inadequacy. The coach is the understanding but strict mentor figure. Chris is the calm and collected upperclassman. I'm going to stop with those three examples because this anime has thirty million characters.

The anime also has very weak character interactions and relationships. We see them play together and train together but we very rarely see them talk about anything besides baseball or spend time doing things unrelated to their training or playing the game. Which just contributes to the sense that these guys are all overly obsessed with this tedious game that doesn't matter. I mean, is it normal to cry like a baby when you lose a game?

Art:

The art looks fine. I couldn't tell you if the character movements or pitching forms are accurate to baseball but they move smoothly enough. If I were to bring up any issue, it would be that a lot of the character designs are kind of similar and they basically largely consist of generic looking guys. There's a point where Seidou's old opponents are watching them play a game and it took me multiple episodes to remember who they are and even then it was largely because I was wondering why they kept cutting to these random people.

Sound:

The acting is passable. Mayhaps a bit exaggerated at times but it largely sounds fine. The music is mostly fine. The biggest problem with it is that they constantly play the same music whenever there's a "pinch" or triumphant moment and, in an anime this long, it just feels stale after a while.

Ho-yay:

Maybe if the characters had stronger interactions we would see some that came across as a bit ho-yayriffic. But since the character relationships are generally weak and built around taking a game far too seriously, that doesn't happen.

Areas of Improvement:

1. It would help to show the characters in more diverse situations. Not only could the relationship dynamics be stronger but it could also help flesh them out as characters in general.

2. Speed things up. We don't need ten minutes of crowd reactions for every "big play" and we don't need long pauses between plays. There is a degree of that that can help increase the tension but this anime takes that degree and multiplies it tenfold.

3. Sawamura shouldn't be as rubbish as he is. I understand what Terajima is going for. He wants to follow Sawamura's journey and show him overcoming adversity. I'm sure in series twenty of this he'll actually be amazing. The problem is that he makes him too bad considering he's on Seidou's main team.

Final Thoughts:

If you're a huge baseball fan and you really want something to watch when there aren't any actual baseball games on, this might just be the anime for you. For everyone else, it's far too slow and dull for me to recommend it. And I'm giving it a 3/10 because it's that much of a slog.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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