Kuroko no basket

After all the praise I've read about Kuroko's Basketball, I was thinking how awesome this is going to be. But it wasn't. Kuroko was a pretty interesting character at first, and his partnership with Kagami was quite entertaining at first; it's just that even when Kagami was shining and Kuroko was a shadow, it just didn't sparkle much. It felt like a game where you progress from easier enemies to harder ones, leveling up and developing new techniques to defeat the enemy. I didn't feel any enjoyment from the game at all, although some of the characters claimed to enjoy basketball. I found it utterly moronic how former teammates kept appearing as time went on, I found this style terribly annoying. Add to that the constant chatter during the game, and I didn't really enjoy a single full game. Admittedly, some parts of the gameplay were fine, full of effects and emotion, but it got overdone early on. Unfortunately, Kuroko is not my cup of coffee. In the end, I wasn't even entertained anymore, I didn't care who wins; and that's kind of a bummer in a sports anime. A weak 3 stars. P.S.: It'll also be because I missed the joy of the game I felt with the Haikyu!! I saw before. (25.04.2019)

Over the years, I have noticed two basic creative approaches to sports anime. The first style is to create a more complex sports anime that focuses primarily on the development of team relationships, the development of a character’s internal struggles, and showing their psychological side, plus they are often slightly comedic, so even if sports or sports anime is not enough to grab the audience’s attention, they still have plenty of other things to get into, there is something for everyone. These anime include Big Windup!, Haikju!!, or Run with the Wind, for example. The second style is embodied by a kind of "purebred" sporting event which does not concern itself with what is happening in the outside world, only what is going on inside the hall, court, pitch, track or ring, etc, and tries to simply and easily offer the most interesting matches and opponents, clever tactics, a lot of twists and some essential suspense. Personally, the first style is more to my taste, because that type of anime is much more accessible to those who are not interested in sport or sports anime. However, if it is actually done well, I do not mind the second either. Kuroko’s Basketball is an example of the latter approach - and it must be said that it is, as much as it could be, a good high-quality example of that type of sports anime. There's almost always a guarantee of quality when studio Production I.G is behind a sports anime - the animation sometimes takes your breath away, the characters are charmingly written and drawn, the matches have the necessary flow and dynamics to captivate audiences, which is the main thing. From my point of view, however, Kuroko’s Basketball has one unpleasant drawback, and that is that it does not focus on the team aspect, but rather on only one or two players. Of course, even in real basketball, there are teams where one star player can far outperform his teammates and dominate the game completely, but when all the teams are presented like this in Kuroko’s Basketball, it gives the impression that basketball is just a game where the ball is passed to one superman who then battles another superman from the other team to see who scores the most points. Maybe I have been spoiled by other quality sports anime, but this completely killed off any of the supporting characters’ potential, and the superheroics of the main characters definitely did not win any plus points from me. Nevertheless, I gave it a likable 3 stars. (20.04.2021)