Review of Haikyu!! To the Top
Preface: the review will likely be long and have a lot of grammar mistakes. Proofreading is too boring, so forgive me for that. Anyway, onto the review. Haikyuu!! was always that 'volleyball sports anime' for me and literally nothing more. It was just like every other sports anime with the exception of it being about volleyball. It hit the same notes as the rest, it had the same story beats, it had the same character arcs, and it had the same over-the-top animation that the rest of them do. Even still, it was extremely high in quality and consistent in its execution which is why Ialways thought of it as one of the better example of sports anime. This season, however, was awful. Absolutely, unapologetically awful. Even if my overall score doesn't reflect that sentiment, I will die by it. In vacuum, without previous seasons, this is likely by far the worst season of sports anime ever produced.
Not only did its high-quality animation drop considerably, every other aspect of sports anime was thrown into the gutters and kicked until it died. The show became the poster-boy for precisely what is wrong with the entire genre and it postered itself with pride.
Story beats are recycled to the point I wanna kill myself. How many times do I have to watch half a season of training sessions? Training is boring. It's boring when I do it and it's certainly boring when others do it. I swallowed it during the second season since it was the first major one, but at this point we're too deep in to be giving literal 8-9 episodes of a 13-episode long 'half-season' to Hinata learning the literal basics of volleyball. Have a time skip -- spend 10 seconds to show that he trained and that he's now better. I promise you, nobody would call you out on it.
Because of this, the pace of the story is garbage. I found myself skipping scene after scene after scene after scene in this desperate attempt to locate anything worthwhile. But there was nothing. Even the single match we got in this season was borderline unwatchable. Worse than the first practice match of the first season. Nothing hype about it, nothing exceptional, just... bleh.
One aspect I've always hated about Haikyuu!! - and generally every sports anime for the most part -- is the dreadful onslaught of flashbacks for the irrelevant, minor characters. I don't care about their struggles -- if you wanted me to care, you would have made them the main characters. It seems to me that the writers of sports anime/manga want to be all-inclusive with their nonsense and repeatedly recycle teams that the main characters have floored in this horrid attempt to keep it 'realistic'. Here's a flash for you: we're not here for realism. If we were, everyone would have dropped this nonsense at 2-3rd episode. We're here for a colorful cast of one-note characters doing sportsy things that no actual high-schooler short of a freak like LeBron James could pull off. What's the point of Tobio being a genius and one-of-a-kind setter if you keep introducing morons that are better than him? What's the point of hitting every single sports cliche in existence rather than just keeping it fast and fresh?
This season, too, drowns us in pointless flashbacks and pointless onslaught of side-side-side characters to the point that I just don't give a shit anymore. I genuinely couldn't care less even if I physically tried. To make matters worse, they suddenly invent some childhood friend for the baldy, and... what? I'm supposed to suddenly give a shit about his love life? Goddamn, that was awful. Absolutely awful.
Then, as though we haven't had enough cliches as it is, it was time to introduce a new Hinata -- but this one has gray hair and is basically what Hinata wishes he was. I... I just wanna ask... why? What's even the point? You just literally told me it would have been a billion times more fun if that guy was the main character instead of Hinata. You just told me I've wasted however-many-hours on watching the subpar version of someone else. 'It helps with Hinata's growth' -- no, it helps because it's an easy story beat to execute. It helps because it requires literally 0 brain cells to write. You know what would have been more fun? If this guy didn't exist.
Every single story beat in this season screams 'I don't care anymore I just wanna write cliche garbage so I can rake in all that sweet manga cash till my carpal tunnel goes whammy'. And, to be fair, I respect that. I really do. Doesn't mean I can't bitch and moan about it, though.
Every sports anime seems to misunderstand what the point of the sports anime is which is why they all tend to stumble and fall over time. Major fucked up, Diamond no Ace fucked up, Kuruko fucked up, heck, even Eyeshield fucked up. They promise us one thing, but then they flip us a middle finger and say 'nope'. Again, we are not here for realism -- specifically because there is none of it in literally any sports anime out there. We are here for fancy nonsense that defies the law of physics -- which is exactly why the first season of Haikyuu!! was so appealing. What about it is appealing now? Nothing. Just like in every other sports anime -- well, except Kuruko. That thing kept amping shit up until the end and I respect 'em for it.
Furthermore, one thing that always kept the boring and asenine story beats in check, the high-quality animation, is gone. The most impactful scene in the entire season was one random guy who got like 2 minutes of screen time yeeting the fucking ball into the sky as a serve. Even the ending scene, the one scene that should hype you up for the next season, with the main character elevating what supposedly made him special to begin with, is just... meh. Good. You can jump. Get at it.
Characters, similarly to the story, recycle their beast and we're at it again. Hinata is doing great. Oh, no, he's really insecure now. Tobio is no longer insecure about being called a 'King'. Oh, no, wait, he actually is--nevermind, let's get going!
The main problem with sports anime, from what I've gathered, is that they are hellbent on recycling the opponents. They've floored the 'blocking team' (because that's how teams are composited, of course) sometime in the first season, yet, here we are, in the fourth fucking season with that team still supposedly giving them a challenge. Come on dude, I don't care. This just makes it seem as though nobody from the main cast progressed at all, or minimally at best. It kills the pace of the story and we are left with... well... this.
Furthermore, I have a feeling that literally the entire point of Tobio going to that All-Japan or whatever national camp is just so we can introduce another metric-ton of 'rivals' for the future. And, I gotta be honest, I don't give a shit for any one of them. They're just recycled versions of the people we've already seen, and I absolutely cannot wait for when they face these recycled rejects so we can get another 50 flashbacks about how much they care for volleyball and winning and whatever.
The story is written in such a way that it is clear that the author doesn't want it to end. Which is precisely why it's so goddamn confusing to me why they're hellbent on keeping the pace so bizarrely slow. We're at, what, 50ish episodes now? My god, 50 episodes and not even a whole year had passed. Do people realize just how insanely slow that pace is? If you cut out all of the unnecessary flashbacks, all of the entirely boring and irrelevant 'training arcs', heart-to-heart, this show would be like 20 episodes tops -- and, you know what? It would have been a mile better off for it. And with 30 extra episodes, we could have had far more of what is actually fun -- matches. Matches against the increasingly better teams. Heck, our main cast could have even lost at the Nationals, and we could have had that emotional 'bye bye third-years' or whatever and could have injected some fresh blood into the show through organic means -- new first-years. But noooo, instead, let's have yet another training session in which Hinata realizes for 69th time that just jumping really high isn't really a volleyball skill.
Anyway, I ranted too much. I'm out of words and out of desire to sit on this any longer. This is usually the point where I drop the sports anime -- once they start recycling story beats, bringing back the already defeated opponents in some vain attempt to appear as though they aren't writing fantasy, and when they dumb down all characters for the sake of hollow comedy. To add insult to injury, this show went even a step further and introduced a character that's basically a carbon copy of our main character... except that he's like a billion times better. Yikes. Talk about wasted investment.
Anyway, I'm all of the potential defenders of the show to swarm me or whatever the expression is, and if you can enjoy the show despite its endless flaws -- all the power to you. I'm in no way trying to discourage other people from enjoying this, just venting my personal frustrations. Well... that's it. Review done. Bye bye.