Skate-Leading☆Stars

Child figure skating prodigy Kensei Maeshima abruptly quits the sport after his one-sided rival, Reo Shinozaki, refuses to acknowledge his skill. Now, as a student at Inodai High School, Kensei uses his athletic skills to assist the other sports teams, but he never officially joins one. One day, Reo announces his switch from singles figure skating into team-based skate-leading and joins St. Clavis Gakuin High School—last year's Grand Prix champions. Hayato Sasugai, a classmate with a mysterious connection to Reo, convinces Kensei to switch to skate-leading in order to finally defeat his rival in a competition.

Kensei's sudden entry into the Inodai Skate-Leading Club is met with backlash from the current members. Although he is a very strong singles skater, Kensei lacks the teamwork skills required to perform well in skate-leading. Factoring in his hot-headed, impatient attitude, inconsistent skating performances, and a complicated history with some of the members, Kensei's teammates do not believe he is a good fit to be their "Lead." The team must work together to resolve these issues, however, if they wish to qualify for the Grand Prix Finals and even stand a chance at defeating St. Clavis Gakuin.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Sasugai, Hayato Main

Furukawa, Makoto Japanese

Maeshima, Kensei Main

Uchida, Yuuma Japanese

Shinozaki, Reo Supporting

Kamiya, Hiroshi Japanese

Mochizuki, Akimitsu Supporting

Tsuchida, Reiou Japanese

Mochizuki, Yukimitsu Supporting

Hanae, Natsuki Japanese

Kiriyama, Itsuki Supporting

Maeno, Tomoaki Japanese

Ishikawa, Susumu Supporting

Nojima, Kenji Japanese

Himekawa, Izumi Supporting

Umehara, Yuuichirou Japanese

Kuonji, Noa Supporting

Saitou, Souma Japanese

Kubota, Tomoyuki Supporting

Satou, Gen Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Okada, Kouji Producer

Shiraishi, Youko Producer

Endou, Naoko Producer

Reviews

Oct 11, 2024

Frogfrog_

Recommended

I really enjoyed watching it, the animation didn't get worse at any point despite not showing the skating scenes in their entirety, but it wasn't a bad thing, since it didn't just leave the skating animation raw (like in Yuri!!! On Ice, which is just the presentations, and that ended up making the animation kind of bad... But even so the anime is good). All the presentation scenes made me nervous, I was never sure when it was going to be a bad or good grade... There were a lot of sensations.

Original -

Gostei bastante de assistir, a animação não piorou em nenhum momento apesar de ... não mostrar as cenas da patinação por completo, mas não foi algo ruim, já que não deixava só a animação crua da patinação (tipo em Yuri!!! On Ice, que são só as apresentações, e isso acabou deixando meio ruim a animação..... Mas mesmo assim o anime é bom). Todas as cenas de apresentação me deixaram nervosa, eu nunca tinha certeza de quando ia ser uma nota ruim ou boa....... Foram muitas sensações.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jun 21, 2023

jaskayn

Mixed Feelings

A figure skating sports anime, with the premise of “skate-leading.” It’s basically what artistic swimming is to competitive swimming (juuust slightly, ik that example is a bit wonky). The animation for this anime was actually very good, I found no real issues. Many scenes did give me chills, mainly Shinozaki revealing his more competitive side and the music for the final performances.

Those were my pros. As for the cons, there is a bit to cover. One of the most frustrating issues about this anime is none other than our main character, Maeshima, who is your typical cut-out angry red-head who fails to understand any form ... of logic and resorts to screaming his lungs out if anyone were to ever argue against his weird reasoning for literally any decision he makes while he’s on the ice (he basically says it’s cooler, and that’s what matters most). Trust me when I say, he makes you want to scream and punch his face.

The entire plot is a rivalry between our MC and the #1 figure skater, Shinozaki, who looks like atsushi from BSD and khun from TOG combined. I don’t mind rivalry animes, but this one really did not hit the spot where I wanted it to. We get NO development at all from our rival. Even though Shinozaki is the target Maeshima wants to beat, you’d expect that we’d get more development on his side of the story, but no, he’s just some prodigy skater who has been undefeated for his entire childhood. You can argue the ending showed a different side of Shinozaki, but man, after wanting to question this direction story of this story, with how messy the rivalry was really shown (I mean it felt one sided the entire time, so I felt like I was watching a man scream at a wall in every episode), this different side of him was super generic and almost expected, given how he never had more than 2 expressions throughout the show. His looks are nice and all, but he is as black and white as it gets.

As for other characters, i didn’t mind then, but they were never really relevant to the plot. For a show to be centered around team figure skating, I expected there to be more build up between Maeshima and his other teammates, but many of them have no development whatsoever and remain the same throughout the entirety of the show. Even if the useless coach (sorry bro) said something about their flaws, they manage to correct it effortlessly without any struggles, unlike our MC. It’s very obvious who the anime cared enough to put some thought into the stories of certain characters and which characters to just slide in for the sake of the show to keep up its team figure skating plot.

I honestly thought this anime would have been better had it been single skating instead, especially since you could throw out any other side character in the show and still make it make sense on the larger spectrum of things (Maeshima vs Shinozaki). The idea of Shinozaki’s younger brother, Sasugai being the coach for Maeshima in order to beat Shinozaki would have been a good enough plot as it is, minus the team stuff.

Overall, this anime is decent, but nothing special. There were many moments that I loved the performances, but there were also a handful where I skipped scenes because they held no relevancy to the main plot and were overall bland.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Nov 5, 2021

chloegc

Not Recommended

I consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable about sports anime; I have seen a good number of them. And I can say with good conscience that Skate Leading Stars has to be one of the worst, if not the worst, sports anime out there. This was such a horrid ice sports anime it left me with more appreciation for Yuri!!! on Ice.

This show was absolutely terrible. Everything about it was horrible and screamed lazy. Something that honestly left me dumbfounded was the fact that, a majority of the time, the skating scenes were not even animated. Yes, an anime which focuses on the premise ... of a stunning team skating competition did not even take the time to animate skating scenes. The characters would go out on the ice, the music would start, the screen would fade to black, and then the show picks back up after they have finished their performance. Seriously, that is just the worst possible production choice I could ever imagine, who allowed that? The sole good aspect about this is the fact that I did not have to see horrendous CGI skating. I respect them for choosing the lesser evil, and not showing anything at all.

Basically the only episodes with any actual skating in them are the first and the last episodes. What happened the rest of the time? Well, I couldn’t tell you. Not a single scene has any significance to the overarching plot or character development. Nearly half the dialogue felt like it was rambling on about their training and practices, which we never even get to see. Skate Leading Stars legitimately has some of the worst script writing I have ever seen, anime or otherwise. This show had a pretty strong lineup of voice actors, but completely ignored that and had the characters talk about absolutely nothing for twelve episodes.

The script may have been horrible, but even if it had been exceptional that cannot change the fact that there was a very evident lack of character development, or even character personalities whatsoever. These characters offer absolutely nothing. They have no backstory, no motivations, and no personality outside of watered down classic anime tropes. The character aspects the creators did choose to focus on had no relevance to the core plot. There was time spent discussing side characters and teams, but not in a quality manner such as in Haikyuu!!, but in a way in which screen time was wasted on characters that obviously would not even matter in the final competition.

I keep referring back to some sort of main or core plot, but even I have trouble labeling anything as a “core plot”, as nothing in this show mattered. You know in elementary school when teachers would draw a mountain to represent the tension rising and falling in a story? Now imagine a straight line. That’s Skate Leading Stars. Writing this review, I cannot stress enough how little happened during this show. I invested time into watching twelve episodes that I could have better spent staring at a wall. In my reviews, I try to at least say one thing that I appreciated or enjoyed about the show, but in this case, I cannot. As a sports anime fan, Skate Leading Stars is locked in the deepest, darkest portion of my mind in an attempt to forget about this atrocity.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: Skate-Leading☆Stars Episode 12 Discussion KANLen09 - Mar 14, 2021	30 replies	by _MushiRock11_ »» Jul 11, 1:21 AM
	Poll: Skate-Leading☆Stars Episode 6 Discussion KANLen09 - Jan 31, 2021	8 replies	by shah7398 »» Mar 8, 4:43 AM
	Poll: Skate-Leading☆Stars Episode 11 Discussion KANLen09 - Mar 7, 2021	16 replies	by shah7398 »» Feb 1, 4:06 AM
	As a figure skating fan... Bell_cz - Mar 14, 2021	10 replies	by acrylic7 »» Mar 29, 2023 7:26 AM
	Is this BL tease fujoshi bait or is it a normal sports anime? FrozenDevilz - Jul 1, 2021	15 replies	by -Flaky- »» Sep 20, 2022 11:33 PM