Ping-Pong – 01/02 Review

I guess, Peco has never heard of the infamous training-arcs shounen-anime so often like to use for everybody and his dog – talent or not.

Sports-animes weren’t always something I’ve enjoyed but over the years watching animes they really have grown on me as a genre. They are often quite straightforward and I would even say oftentimes deliver a better representation of the stereotypical shounen-genre-themes than fantastical battle shows like Naruto or Bleach do for example (mostly on account of not being forced to do bullshit-worldbuilding). Naturally this excludes Adachi’s work who mixed slice-of-life, romance and sports basically all the time in his series in various ways (often to the detriment of one particular element). It’s weird that this hasn’t become the standard-model for sports-series… well, then again all his series took multiple seasons to finish and nobody wants to commit to that these days… not even Adachi apparently whose last few series seem kinda meandering (Mix) or just plain absurd (Q & A). Well, enough about that, this is supposed to be about Ping Pong, a series I actually quite like.