Tribe Nine

I was hyped for Tribe Nine since I heard about its release a few years ago now, and I can start by saying I am still excited for the game. I am writing this review fresh off the last episode, and I can say I am overall pretty satisfied with what we got. I wasn't expecting anything revolutionary, and they pretty much delivered where I wanted. Keeping out spoilers I can say this anime will leave you surprised at some of the plot developments which is somewhat expected of this team. The story wasn't anything special somewhat generic at times, and downright boring other times. Theplot can be summarized as bad guy does bad things for no real reason other than "power." With that being said the art, and sound are on par with expectations they did a good job in that department. The theme and sound will have you forgetting how silly some of the plot actually is. The characters make up for a somewhat lacking plot, but not to the same degree as the art and sound. The characters range from interesting to downright annoying. One notable example is one of the characters Santaro basically only serves the plot as a goofy character. Which is fine, but some of the other characters even part of the main cast in the Minato tribe have a significate lack of presence. Haru and Taiga are decent enough showing good growth throughout the running to balance things out a bit. Overall the characters are somewhat inconsistent with some of them having very little depth. In my opinion I can as most people see this work a lot better as a game since plot elements can be somewhat shrugged off. Despite my complaints I did actually enjoy this anime since I think the visuals where well done. The concept of extreme baseball, well somewhat inconsistent in the anime would be pretty cool if made into a game. The anime did what it was supposed to for me since it got me interested in the game. I don't know if they will continue the anime to any degree, but if they did I would hope they expand on the world of Tribe Nine, and perhaps flesh out more of the established characters. I could add a laundry list of plot holes, or unexplained story elements, but I will leave it at well at least it was fun. -Thanks for reading

Ask me anything; I'll be the first one to tell you I love danganronpa, for a long time now too, I wanted to make a Fanganronpa by the time 2 came out. BUT, if there's something I find redundant is excusing mediocrity trough legacy. Right of the bat, you can tell that everything here was created with a purpose: Promote a high budget game by a popular group. Because this anime is nothing more than a marketing campaign, to the point where they slap a QR code to their main site -front and center- in one of the first episodes. Anyone who hasseen the promotional material of tribe nine can easily tell a lot of budget is going into the game, and it's mobile nature will easily lend itself to monetization. This anime is only here to boost the game, because it doesn't compare in Visual or Written quality to anything realistically passable, and I can only hope they believe the game will do a better job at it all. Story: So, it's a story about a new Extreme baseball, right? It'd be logical that they explain what is still the same as in baseball, and what is new to this modality, but they never bother to. Suddenly you got people scoring points for touching first base, then next episode, the sides aren't changed once a team accumulates 4 outs, next episode, NOW they respect conventional rules. I don't know anything about baseball, couldn't name a single team, but if I can tell something is off from the most basic knowledge I got from Wii Sports, you've done something wrong with your sports anime. They never even tell you who's on first most of the time. But the story itself isn't especially bad, you're at least going to be entertained, and it's very consistent, so there's no parts that are especially good or bad. Note; that's just the bare minimum. There's no giant tonal shifts or unbelievable moments within the scope of the story, and nothing struck me as out of left field. That also means that it's mostly predictable, and the unpredictable parts are more often than not just the characters being dumb and doing illogical things for strange reasons... On that Note about characters. Characters: And the characters, they become smarter or dumber for whatever the plot finds accommodating. For example, one of the characters tells another that 1- They're terminally sick and need to drink their medicine for it, and 2- "I'm going to raise a death flag" then proceeding to give out a will... And yet this other character doesn't bother to do anything about it, it's like the dying character decided to die and the other one allowed them, because the plot would see it fitting. No insistence. The few characters that have arcs kinda work, but most of them don't have anything going for them, they are very inconsistent too with their personalities and ideas, but I'll let you decide weather or not that's a good thing or a bad thing. Sound: But you know what's INFINITELY more horrid? SOUND DESIGN. I swear to you, I can't recall a single anime with sound design so bad, it's actually adding difficulty when watching. I've seen some things like the damn Bible Black dub, which actively attempts to be bad, and yet it's still better than this. Masafumi Takada, composer of this soundtrack, IS A GOD, he makes the best music, but I don't understand what COMPELLED them to mix the music at the same volume as the vocals!! That's right! If the characters are having a big emotional moments, all you can hear is Takada's viper slamming on the table. Again, all the respect to the composer, but you actually have to tune your ears to listen to the japanese audio. WATCH THE DUB. If you value the ability to listen, avoid the japanese version at all costs. I'd regularly say "well, the seiju are [this] and [that]", but I can't properly listen to their work under the hellscape that is my brain during the watching experience. it's distracting and disrespectful to the voice actors, yet such a basic concept that it's unfathomable to mess it up. If people on youtube can slap a compressor on their background music, I don't see why an anime studio can't Art: Now, here's the commendable part, right? The designs are really good, right!? No, but also yes. Look, I can complain about the plethora of characters that look like danganronpa redesigns, in fact, I call most characters stuff like "Kaito 2" and "Chihiro 2", but that's not the anime's fault. If anything, I'm glad to see the character designer is actually making characters that don't look like "X 2". By themselves, they are probably the best part of this anime, colorful, memorable, one of them is just a chubby human pikachu guy! (later a moropeko) It's not anywhere near bad. If the animation was up to par, there would be no complaints, but of course, most art is very 2 dimensional. that's not to say the more ambitiously animated scenes look bad and have huge mistakes, but it's fair to say they are at least pretty jagged, so don't expect the prettiest animation. If the characters weren't as nicely designed, then there probably wouldn't be any saving grace for a lot of these visuals. There's a huge missed opportunity with these cyberpunky environments getting boring background art. I'm down to watch anything Tookyo puts out, I like the people working behind the projects, I know they have what it takes, they create amazing stories, but I'm sad to say this story is simply not one of them, go watch akudama drive instead if you're looking for something more on par with danganronpa. Overall it's very average, and it's bound to be better received trough it's legacy, but I personally see a lot of the things the show does that are inexcusable, and any positive review is probably attributed to the legacy of danganronpa, their creators, designers and writers. For it's own merits, the show does not stand as anything good, it's fun, but "fun" can be 300,000 different shows. This might not be worth your time if you're not interested in the game this serves to promote.

I am a huge fan of Chiharu Sawashiro, who plays Taiga. I’m mentioning this because, when it comes to anime, I tend to have an “I’ll watch it if Chiharu Sawashiro is in it” mentality. While it may have led me to watching some absolute gems like Tsukipro, I really need to stop having that mentality, because it also led me to watching Tribe Nine, which might just be the worst anime I have ever watched in my entire life. The worldbuilding makes no sense, I hate most of the characters, and it genuinely confuses me that someone looked at this monstrosity of a showand thought it was okay to subject the public to it. The main character, Haru, is… fine. He’s alright. Personally, I find him a bit annoying in his weird passiveness, but there’s nothing actively wrong with him, I guess. This can be said of the vast majority of characters, in fact, because barely anyone has anything going on besides being extremely basic, stock image character tropes (the newbie, the singular girl, the big guy, the little guy who’s a huge perv, the big bad villain who just wants power, etc.), with two exceptions that I’ll discuss in the next paragraph. That doesn’t mean they’re tolerable characters by any means, though. They all kinda suck. The two exceptions are Taiga, and the members of the Ota Tribe (so, technically, there’s six exceptions, I guess). Taiga is easily my favourite character (and it’s not just because he’s voiced by Chiharu Sawashiro, I swear), even if his character motivation kinda stopped making a ton of sense after episode 4 (no spoilers). He seemed to actually care about the things around him— both XB and the other characters— compared to the other members of his tribe who seem infuriatingly take-it-or-leave-it about everything. This is interesting considering that Taiga is a total newbie to both the sport and the area, being from “overseas” (the dub decided that he’s Irish?), and thus has every reason not to care. There was even a moment where something bad happens involving Saori, and he’s the only one who wants to help her, despite everyone else being theoretically her longtime friends. The show seriously treats him like a punching bag, calling him “arrogant” and “stupid” for wanting to do things that are the completely logical thing to do in the given situation. There’s also several moments in the show where he says to the other characters that he’s the only reason that they’re alive, and the show treats those moments as if he’s being dumb and overconfident, but if you follow the plot up to that point, it’s literally just the plain truth. It’s absurd, and my boy deserves better. The Ota Tribe are just funny, honestly. They’re so gimmicky but it’s in a genuinely enjoyable way (very #edgy and rawr XD if I’m being honest, but in a funny way). Sonoda is a delightful antagonist, all he wants is chaos, and that includes keeping a guy who’s constantly trying to murder him by his side. The puppet show sent me into actual hysterics. Episode 9 was the only good episode of this show and it left me wanting the Ota Tribe as the protagonists. The animation and art style are horrific. Most of the main characters have grey skin, the hairstyles completely change shape depending on the scene, and the limited colour palette makes my eyes hurt. The purpose of a limited colour palette is to make sure your colours look nice and cohesive in any scene, but they chose the absolute worst colours possible so there’s no point of making it limited in the first place. The shading also doesn’t make any sense in most scenes, neither does the lighting. It’s all godawful and I really shouldn’t have expected anything else from the people who made Danganronpa of all things. The voice acting isn’t terrible, but the mixing in the Japanese dub made it almost unwatchable at certain points, even if the casting and voice acting was good. The music was super loud and invasive, and the voices were stupidly quiet in most scenes. The English dub fixed a lot of the problems, even if there wasn’t much vocal diversity compared to the Japanese cast. I still don’t entirely understand why Taiga was Irish, but Phillip Sacramento was honestly phenomenal, so it’s hard to even care. It was nice that they made it clear where he was from, compared to the Japanese dub which just said “overseas.” The overall standout was probably Junta Terashima as Sonoda, though— he really captures how absolutely batshit the guy is, even when he’s saying stuff in an objectively calm manner, and especially when he was trying blow everything up for the sake of some “chaos.” Also, once again, the puppet show sent me into hysterics and I think about it regularly. Everyone in the dub was about equally good with no real standouts, with my only real complaint being, unfortunately, Ojiro’s casting. I don’t hate Corpse Husband or anything, but he wasn’t… um… acting. He just seemed to be reading the lines as himself, or something. A bit disappointing considering his voice is obviously very unique and I think he could bring something really cool to the dubbing industry, but he really dropped the ball here. Hopefully he’ll get better over time, though! Before I continue, I also really feel the need to mention all the misogyny in this show. It’s awful. Saori’s constantly getting sexualized (groping, getting walked in on, etc.), the main female villain’s gimmick at the end is just an excuse to draw her basically naked, and the only other female characters (Enoki and Minami) barely existed. Minami is basically just a prop to her male boss in most cases. It’s hard to say anything else without spoiling stuff, but please, if you’re going to watch this, be prepared to be practically assaulted with misogynistic bullshit. It’s very reminiscent of the humour of older, “haha they’re threatening to rape the girl, isn’t that HILARIOUS?”-type shounens, and it’s seriously uncomfortable to watch. Overall, holy shit, don’t watch this show unless you’re some kind of Danganronpa mega fan, though even those people seem to be disappointed judging by some of the other reviews. It’s a complete mess of a show with a bad plot, bad worldbuilding, bad art, bad characters, and bad development as a whole. If you want a show about a semi-post-apocalyptic Japan where a new government takes over and instates a law declaring that people have to fight with something extremely specific other than weapons, causing the 23 wards of Tokyo to form groups and essentially start a turf war, I would suggest Hypnosis Mic: Rhyme Anima, where it’s basically just Tribe Nine’s worldbuilding but with rapping and infinitely better. If you want “existing sport but EXTREME,” try Prince of Stride, which is about track racing but with added parkour. If you’re like me and will watch anything with Chiharu Sawashiro in it, try Cheer Boys, which is about male college cheerleading, or Tsukipro, an incredible chill and delightfully “nothing happens” idol anime. Alternatively, watch literally anything other than this.

Tribe Nine Review (6.1) Rip-off of the baseball game that has power.The story is boring.It's boring to watch because the animation and the effects are ugly but it was improved in the last episode.The character designs are not well done, not very detailed.The song is very nice which is my favorite song right now. STORY:5/10 This is a rip-off of baseball games that make the game of baseball ugly because they made it ugly,Baseball Bat,Pitcher and catcher have power and those rules are confusing especially the field is so big because they are playing in the city.Boring and corny to watch it would have been better if theproduction and storytelling were good ANIMATION:5/10 Episodes 1 to 3 are boring to watch because of the ugly animation because their work is not very detailed. But it got a little better later on. CHARACTER:5/10 The character designs are ugly,especially their hair,which is poorly made.They are not well introduced and the character development is like nothing,and they always get beaten up in the end. SOUND:9.5/10 The intro is my new favorite song.