Review of Hanebado!

Hanebado (or the badminton play of Ayano Hanesaki) follows the story about Ayano Hanesaki, a “prodigy” at badminton who have given up on the sport due to personal reasons, and Nagisa, the captain of the badminton club of Kitakomachi High who have been training day and night to become the best player in Japan. The first thing that drew me into watching this anime was the style animation and the realistic aspect that the anime take on the sport. The style of animation really shines through especially in the opening for the anime and also the amount of details and players movement in the badminton matches.The animation quality is, in my opinion, the best of the summer 2018 season and even a contender for best animation of the year.

The character development is also a strong point of this anime. Nagisa was a really good character with a lot of character developments in the first few episodes and the writer also did a great job in developing the side characters as well with most side characters given a small part in every episode or even an entire episode to develop their character without losing focus on the main characters.

However, this anime is not without it’s shortcoming. I know that the anime is also called “ the badminton play of Ayano Hanesaki” but don’t forget that Nagisa is also a main character in this anime. They put so much focus on Nagisa’s character development to push her to the side to become a supporting character in the middle part of the anime. This is the reason that most people don’t like the plot of this anime but they did rectify this later on in the TOURNAMENT ARC. One more other thing that I wished that the anime could have add more is Connie and Hanesaki interaction after the tournament arc.