Review of 2.43: Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Team

So, this is an anime that exists. When I first saw we were getting another volleyball anime I was almost expecting it to be just as amazing as Haikyuu. However the first episode made me realize that would likely not be the case for me and I'll admit I was being really unfair to 2.43 for expecting such things. Now, to break this down a bit: Story: 2.43 has essentially the same overall story you've seen in just about every other sports anime ever. It has a few details that stand out but the smaller ones are not really touched upon and the biggest one byfar is resolved in what I find to be a rather unsatisfying manner. Part of the reason for that might be the pacing which I find to be too fast. Things happen but there is barely any time to get to know the characters so whatever happens falls flat thanks to lack of emotional investment.

Characters:
Speaking of characters, they don't get fleshed out at all. I can barely name 3 to 4 characters out of 2 full teams worth simply because most of them don't seem to matter. There are 2 characters that get the most baseline character development while most of the others don't even get actual character traits. Now, I don't want to call the characters badly written, rather I feel like the writer forgot that the audience has no clue who any of them are and thus simply never established them in a way for the audience to get to know or relate to any of them. In a sense it might be more acurate to say a bunch of them aren't written at all but just thrown in there by gut feeling.

Art:
On to something better, the art. The art itself is fairly good for the most parts and the animation as well has moments that look great. That is until a) whatever is moving is further away from the camera or b) there's too many moving things at once. It's as if the quality is constantly swaying around sometimes being actually good, sometimes being all that isn't good and most the time just somewhere inbetween.

Sound:
I could not tell you anything about the sound. 2.43 has an opening, an ending and some soundtrack and regular sounds but they're not really noteworthy in any way.

Enjoyment:
In case you actually read up until this part and can't figure how my enjoyment of this anime was: it wasn't. I was constantly bored and didn't care about anything. At some point I genuinely did not want to continue watching it and only really finished it because I started it so I might as well see this through till the end. For all I care the best thing might have been the fact that most characters actually speak in a dialect that I'm just gonna assume is accurate to the region.

Should you watch 2.43 if you haven't yet? I wouldn't recommend it but if you want to feel free to do so and form your own opinion on it.