Love All Play

Love All, No Play. Piss off. To wait more than a decade for a relatively unknown and underground work to get adapted, I really question who was in the right mind to green-light this project, given that there were already better alternatives like Liden Films's repertoire of badminton anime. This is novelist Asami Koseki's only work that was in Poplar Publishing (which publishes very old kids IPs from the 90s to the late 2000s) that was seralized from 2011 to 2014, and I'm just gonna assume that the sales figures for this were decent to OK (since it's "big" enough to get an anime adaptation), oris that some big shot wanted to see this come to fruition, and such is the case of Love All Play here. The only problem: Liden Films has redefined what to expect for badminton anime going forward with Hanebado! and Ryman's Club, and animation prowess certainly beats story elements to a point where the current trend has been stuck ever since. Love All Play presents itself as your sterotypical school sport, chock full of characters that are meant to grow on you as the series progressed from start to finish, and in the space of 24 episodes covering the entirety of the 4-volume novel (which is best assumed since this is a one-and-only job), it certainly has done that. The issue is that why is this only released now is just as baffling, as if it was released right at the tailgate of the novel's end in 2014 would be just about perfect to have an anime adaptation on it, but given how long this took to get one, I would assume that it's the connection to the recent Tokyo Olympics (which sure isn't the case) to then finally have a use case for this anime to come out, it sure was "years in the making" that got stale when it came out, and staying the same when it finishes this season. And even if it was released in the past, it would've been doomed from the start to be largely forgotten in time to come. Just about the only good part of the show was in its characters, which in their portrayal, were actually period-correct to the time when the novel came out: the bunch of newbies entering high school for the first time, being rookies at a sport for the first time, hanging out with friends and family, and especially the matches which help everyone progress a step further. And to be fair, this is old-school storytelling at its finest, though these days people (even myself) don't really care for the allure of the oldies and classics, unless if it's a well-regarded one (e.g. Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura (All Stars) next season). And here to tag the story is the new group of rookies with Ryo Mizushima, Shohei Sakaki, Koki Matsuda, Taichi and Yuji Higashiyama, and Akira Uchida, the 6 newbies who found themselves being chosen by their school Yokohama Minato's badminton team, going through the normal pacing of practice after practice to improve and make themselves useful in making their school a household name from the ashes of sunkenness. Oh, and also enjoy their youth. I do find that the badminton team seniors, mostly Kento Yusa and Yusuke Yokokawa are both an annoying dirtbag and a respectful Senpai respectively, though overtime they do show well of their camaraderie with one another that's been in the works since they joined the badminton team. But the whole love interest section of the boys being cheered on by their classmates which raises the aspects of romance, while that is also period-correct to the setting, it unfortunately becomes a sore sight that I'd wish the focus went onto the actual badminton instead of the slice-of-life elements. But then again, this is school life at its most humble, so it's there. And most certainly is the whole "school goddess" thing of Ryo's sister Rika being the flower worth only the attention of Yusa. Again, no faults there, it's just how everything is brought up in the dailyness of school life. If this anime came out in the mid-2010s, then Nippon Animation and OLM's Team Yoshioka's collab would've served a nice niche since there wasn't anything to compare to at the time. But this is the 2020s, and it looks awfully outdated by today's standards with such a lack of emphasis on the badminton segments, which is the core function of the show. Even the OST sounds unimpressive at best (though I loved the 1st Cour's OP, that was really nice coming from composers from sumika). It's all-in or go home. Wholesome camaraderie aside in a competitive sports show that exists only on the school level, there's just not much going for Love All Play now, and I'm willing to bet that this show would be easily forgotten, both in its source novel and the anime in time to come, which is never a shame. What's a shame is that I felt like I've wasted 6 months of time watching this mid-tier show that should've came out a pretty long time ago, and then only to be left in its forgotten state. It's just boring by today's standards, and I want my precious time back.