EXTREEEEEEME BASEBALL: Tribe Nine: AniTAY Early Impressions
This article is a part of AniTAY’s Winter 2022 Early Impressions series, where our authors offer their initial thoughts on the new, prominent, and exciting anime from this season!
Sports anime tend to leave me cold (unless you’re Stars Align and stuffed with child abuse, parental neglect and other dark teenage horrors), so it was with some trepidation I approached Tribe Nine, a baseball anime from the minds of Kazutaka Kodaka and Rui Komatsuzaki, both of whom are responsible for the Danganronpa videogame series I adore. They also collaborated on 2020’s stylish and entertaining Akudama Drive, which was one of my anime highlights of that year, so my fears were assuaged somewhat.
Unfortunately, Tribe Nine isn’t fit to lick the sneakers of either Danganronpa or Akudama Drive. I suppose warning sirens should have blared once I learned this was but the first volley in a proposed multimedia assault focusing on an upcoming mobile game. So this is a glorified advertisement, existing primarily to soften up the wallets of gacha-addicted anime baseball nerds. That Kodaka is credited only with creating the franchise and not writing the show, and Komatsuzaki is only co-designing the characters, turns said siren into a bowel-reverberating foghorn. It also doesn’t help that to me, baseball is essentially Even More Boring American Fake Cricket. And you couldn’t pay me to watch a cricket match. That shit’s like Chinese Water Torture but tediously dry.
I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt with the old “three-episode test” that I usually fail to employ. I usually end up finishing whatever I start watching each season, unless it’s egregiously offensive or just plain bad. (Saying that, I even managed to successfully hate-watch the unbelievably excremental EX-ARM to the bitter, pointless, excruciatingly poor end.) Most, more sensible, anime aficionados tend to know when to tap out if a show fails to entertain or to meet expectations. Tribe Nine is the show that convinced me of the wisdom of “three strikes and you’re out”.
Tribe Nine wastes no time in establishing its core premise — within the first couple of minutes we’re introduced to the frankly absurd idea that gang-related crime has been essentially eradicated by having would-be criminals battle over territory with “Extreme Baseball”. This seems to include no-holds-barred brawling, lightsaber-esque bats, robotic umpires and lots and lots of neon. It makes absolutely no sense, but that’s ok. It’s anime. We don’t always need to expect cogent logical discourses on the chaotic nature of game theory and its application to capitalistic neo-imperialism. What I would like, though, is something fun and crazy with characters I can root for.
Craziness is in no short supply, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Hell, even main grey-haired weirdo Sun Kamiya — “the destroyer” is a watered-down copy of Danganronpa 2’s Nagito Komaeda. Nominal protagonist Haru Shirokane is a deeply uninteresting and cowardly kid who Kamiya helps to bring out of his shell (yawn), and Taiga is basically a red-haired Kamina from Gurren Lagann, but inexplicably obsessed with tuna fish. Slightly scary blonde Saori Arisugawa is Best Girl, mainly because she is Only Girl.
There’s a couple of painfully generic anime villains — a Darth Vader-esque guy with a mechanical face mask who is ordered to take over Japan (somehow, using baseball) by his own cut-price elderly Emperor. For a show that’s meant to be “EXTREEEEEME” it’s disappointingly by-the-numbers. Some action sequences are admittedly kind of cool, and perhaps if this had been animated with the same style, flair and attention as Akudama Drive, it could have been good. Instead it looks cheap and static, with the character designs wasted on very simply drawn characters that hardly move.
So far, the story is barely interesting. Baseball league blah blah mysterious antagonist blah blah hidden strength blah blah improbable athleticism blah blah zzzzzzzzz. I can’t imagine a cyberpunk extreme baseball show was meant to be this boring. Even a late-game twist at the end of the third episode isn’t enough to ignite my interest. I really can’t find anything else to say about this nonentity of an anime. Don’t bother with this one, it was thrown out at first.
Tribe Nine
Franchise created by: Kazutaka Kodaka (Danganronpa, Akudama Drive)
Director: Yu Aoki
Writer: Michiko Yokote (The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated, Heaven’s Design Team)
Character designs: Rui Komatsuzaki (Danganronpa, Akudama Drive) and Simadoriru
Studio: Liden Films (Tokyo Revengers, Cells at Work! Code Black)
Streaming on: Funimation
Episodes watched: 1–3
