The New Prince of Tennis: Hyoutei vs. Rikkai - Game of Future

I’m still in awe after watching this two-part ONA. I absolutely loved it and it really revived the passion I had for this series. Thank you to Funimation for getting the relicensing rights to the ENTIRE series. Without it, I would have been stuck trying to suffer through VPN-ing into Japan to try and watch it on U-NEXT. I’ll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible and be as objective as I can. The story is essentially written in a way to close out the entire TeniPuri and ShinTeni series. I’m glad that Komomi was the one writing/supervising the script’s direction. Objectively speaking, the premiseis pretty mid and it’s just your typical “this is the last time I get to play with my senpais” story that you see in every sports anime based in a middle/high school setting. In terms of the story relative to the rest of the TeniPuri/ShinTeni series, it was surprisingly better than I expected. If you knew the backstories to the Hyoutei and Rikkai players, this ONA would be a very exciting watch. If you’ve only recently gotten into the series and haven’t taken in much of the material, asides from the manga and the non-filler anime, this will be a confusing watch. The story itself is set after the events of ShinTeni, so I’m excited to see what direction the rest of the ShinTeni manga will take after the release of this ONA (at the time of airing, ShinTeni is still being serialized in Jump SQ). The visual metaphors for the new techniques were absolutely ridiculous. I knew a lot of it was just Konomi taking the piss out of everything and it was just trying to 1-up the other dumb supernatural techniques that were previously animated. I have to say, the visual metaphors were very well done and I was surprised that it looked this good. The rest of the animation is your standard Production I.G. anime. The CG usage wasn’t offensive. If you’re not looking hard, you wouldn’t even notice it, but there were some times where it bothered me slightly. It was pretty fanservice-y at times, which is fine if you’re into that. It’s pretty unfair of me to compare this ONA to its predecessors, since animation technology has developed a lot since the last OVA released (vs. Genius 10). That being said, if you’ve seen Kuroko’s Basketball and Haikyuu, it’s pretty comparable in terms of the animation. It’s very good for sports anime standards and it’s S-tier for TeniPuri standards. I love the new original character songs that were used for the OPs and EDs. The voice acting in it was probably the best I’ve seen out of all the anime in this franchise. I’ve watched a lot of the livestreams on the TeniPuri Anime channel on YouTube with the VAs discussing the ONA and they all seemed super excited about being able to work on something related to the series again. Suwabe and Nagai were especially good at Atobe and Yukimura, but I have to give my kudos to Morikubo and Iwasaki for their Kirihara and Hiyoshi performances. Overall, this is a great watch if you’re a fan of the TeniPuri series. If you want to get into this series, this might not be the best place to start, but it will give you a glimpse into how ridiculous one of the OG sports manga/anime actually is. Getting into this series will be a lot easier now, thanks to Funimation (and they’re going to redub everything too, which is going to be super interesting to see and I can’t wait to see who they’re going to cast). Hyoutei vs. Rikkai is a 9/10 in my heart.