Jun 17, 2020
I’ll be honest, I didn’t care about baseball at all going into this anime. I knew the rules of baseball and had seen a couple games before watching this anime, but I would not have even considered baseball a passing interest to me before starting Tamayomi. While I still am not entirely interested in watching nor playing actual baseball, it occurred to me while watching Tamayomi, baseball is the perfect sport for an anime to keep someone at the edge of their seat. The way baseball is structured with its three-strikes-and-you’re-out mechanic just makes it so easy for Tamayomi to build tension. Multiple times in
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Tamayomi a character is shown pitching or batting twice and we are introduced to their weaknesses during play. Then, there’s a pause on the third pitch that creates great tension: will the character overcome their previously shown weaknesses and arise victorious for their team or not? All Tamayomi needed to do was follow this model of creating tension through normal baseball play for the show to be entertaining, but for the show to truly stand out it needed to fit this mold with an amazing style, which it ultimately did not do.
The Good: Tamayomi starts off slow to introduce us to the cast and all of their former play before they joined the high school baseball team. This is where I think the show might lose some people, because most of the characters have run-of-the-mill personalities on their own and none of the show’s Cute Girls Doing Cute Things moments particularly interested me. Upon watching the later episodes of the show however, I noticed that these early episodes are a critical foundation for the tension created in the moment-to-moment baseball play presented in the later episodes. Instead of wasting time introducing us to each player’s backstory as they play, the back stories were already given to us so we can infer just how meaningful each pitch, catch, or swing of the bat is to every player on the field. These character moments presented through baseball plays are reinforced by the comradery of the team on the field. Each character’s inner monologues and cheering on of their teammates are rewarding as a viewer because of the character backstories that were established early on. The high personal stakes of each baseball moment coupled with the tension-building formula I mentioned earlier makes for extremely dramatic baseball gameplay that is not in the least bit boring, which is very commendable with how much apathy I had for the sport going into the anime.
The Bad: As I previously mentioned, none of the CGCDT moments really did anything for me, with one exception. At the end of most of the first five or six episodes, I was left thinking: “I could not give a single fuck about any of these characters.” The one character that did stand out to me was Yoshino, her love of the sport and everyone involved really sold me on the team as a whole and her encouraging messages given to the team during play help each game feel meaningful. As I said earlier though, these more forgettable moments in the early episodes are a necessary evil for making the baseball games later in the series more impactful, though the series probably could’ve done a better job of making me care about the characters as they’re being introduced.
The Ugly: There’s no way around it, Tamayomi is an extremely ugly anime. With an unfortunate reliance on robotic, 3D animation for many important scenes and some poorly drawn faces on the characters appearing sporadically throughout the series, it is hard to say Tamayomi is anything except ugly. Though the art did get slightly better towards the end, the art is still the biggest thing holding this anime back from being great. As Tamayomi aired during the COVID-19 pandemic when many anime had production issues, bad art might be given a pass, but when every shot is so poorly drawn and animated that it becomes the focus and distracts from what’s actually happening, it’s too big of an issue for me to ignore when scoring.
Verdict: Tamayomi starts off with forgettable character introductions but makes up for it with incredibly engaging baseball games later in the series whose characters’ love for baseball makes it easy to find enjoyment despite little interest in the sport itself. Though the baseball games are exciting, the awful art and animation hold the anime back from being something amazing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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