Review of Haikyu!! To the Top
Four seasons in and I still have no idea what the appeal of this show is supposed to be. And it’s getting worse. You see, to make a sports appealing, one of two choices needs to be taken most of the time. Either let the human drama be the focus and use the sport as the way to channel the conflict, or go over the top with the sport to make it blood-boiling exciting. Haikyuu has neither of those. It just a bunch of high school guys playing volleyball. Neither the characters and their interaction nor the game itself is interesting. You might even saythat it’s too realistic for it’s own good, as it really feels just like sitting on a bench in high school watching some randos play a match because you have nothing better to do.
And here comes this season’s special: training. Yep, most of the fourth season is training. Now I know some training is important as the most popular alternative to training is just straight out ass-pulls, but is most of the season really necessary? Watching the whole “Hinata accidentallies himself into the big boi training grounds” pretext is just painfully boring. I know the result will be “He got somewhat better at playing”, you know it, we all know it yet we’re all forced to watch a bunch of episodes to get the much predicted result. Nothing of interest happens during this part, though to be honest I couldn’t name you a single interesting scene in the whole season. I mean, stuff like “slice of life fans be like - bro the grocery store arc hit different” jokes become reality here as we get an episode that’s mostly about a dude forgetting his bag in a gym. This whole season could be condensed into 3 or 4 episodes and nothing of value would be lost.
The cast is pretty much basic action shounen cast just taken from battle and put into sport genre. Most of their personalities are “being really passionate about the game” and “causing 'humorous' scenes that will make the background simplified and everyone make a 'funny' face”. Some of them also possess the unique trait of shouting really loud. I’ve noticed that since this season offers nothing of interest anyway, the character designs were tweaked a bit so now almost everyone looks like the same person, just with a different haircut. Interesting artistic choice, but fitting.
The animation is still good, but not as good as the previous seasons. Considering the high quality animation was what made Haikyuu stand out and combined with the subpar plot of this season (even for Haikyuu standards) this easily makes it the worst season so far. One pet peeve I have about the animation through the whole franchise is the decision to make a hole in the volleyball net every time a character is standing behind it. Yeah, I get it, it’s so we can see the characters face, but really, would few lines of net hurt so much? Now it breaks any bit of immersion that could have been had every time it’s done.
The list ditch effort and simultaneously almost a sure-kill way to make a scene exciting is to throw in an epic soundtrack. You can make eating potato chips epic with the right choice of sound accompaniment. Yet, there’s no choosing from out of nothing and cool soundtrack didn’t really get an opportunity to show its qualities this round. Better luck next time.
Overall, this is just another dose of generic episodes of “fujoshi bait characters passionately slap sweaty balls, moaning about having to get better at it”.