Samurai Giants is possibly the best baseball anime out there. It has a classic TMS feel with Yatsuo Otsuka’s timeless animation, which is very energetic and lively in only so few frames. Banba Ban (hilarious name) is wild, fierce, and a bit rude and poor mannered, his friend on the team, Hatsuma, who’s more serious and mature (not really in a tsukkomi way though), helps him train. It’s not an amazing drama or anything like Dezaki would do at TMS but it is entertaining. Speaking of Dezaki, he boarded the first episode, and a number of famous staff have episode direction and storyboard work suchas Tomino, Satoshi Dezaki, and Noburo Ishiguro. But what most makes the anime is the art direction of Shichiro Kobayashi, with one of his first standout roles as art director. He has a very pencilly look at times here, a rough but calculated style. For a baseball anime, you might not expect there to be so many scenic locations, and while there is a lot of standard field practice and stadiums, there’s a surprising amount of miscellaneous travel. There are episodes where Banba and Hatsuma go to forests, a small isle, the mountains, and so on. For the training, it’s somewhat ridiculous, with Banba having a special move where he spins around in circles with his bat in a cartoony way. In one episode, they train by tying themselves to a rope and dangling from a cliff upside down while swinging to better their aim, aside from the typical games and rivals that’s some of what you can expect. The anime is available in high definition with only a fansub of the first episode.