3-gatsu no Lion (March Comes In Like a Lion)

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: Sangatsu no Lion

Japanese: 3月のライオン

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Information

Type: TV

Episodes: 22

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Oct 8, 2016 to Mar 18, 2017

Premiered: Fall 2016

Broadcast: Saturdays at 23:00 (JST)

Producers: Aniplex, Dentsu, NHK, Hakusensha, Asmik Ace, Toy's Factory

Licensors: Aniplex of America

Studios: Shaft

Source: Manga

Genre: Drama

Themes: Childcare, Strategy Game

Demographic: Seinen

Duration: 25 min. per ep.

Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older

Statistics

Score: 8.38¹ (scored by 281,036 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #189²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #296

Members: 677,441

Favorites: 15,597

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@3lion_anime

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8.38

Ranked #189Popularity #296Members 677,441

Fall 2016TVShaft

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Episodes: /22

Trailer Aniplex US version

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Synopsis

Having reached professional status in middle school, Rei Kiriyama is one of the few elite in the world of shogi. Due to this, he faces an enormous amount of pressure, both from the shogi community and his adoptive family. Seeking independence from his tense home life, he moves into an apartment in Tokyo. As a 17-year-old living on his own, Rei tends to take poor care of himself, and his reclusive personality ostracizes him from his peers in school and at the shogi hall.

However, not long after his arrival in Tokyo, Rei meets Akari, Hinata, and Momo Kawamoto, a trio of sisters living with their grandfather who owns a traditional wagashi shop. Akari, the oldest of the three girls, is determined to combat Rei's loneliness and poorly sustained lifestyle with motherly hospitality. The Kawamoto sisters, coping with past tragedies, also share with Rei a unique familial bond that he has lacked for most of his life. As he struggles to maintain himself physically and mentally through his shogi career, Rei must learn how to interact with others and understand his own complex emotions.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Episode Videos

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Related Anime

Adaptation:	3-gatsu no Lion
Other:	3-gatsu no Lion meets Bump of Chicken, Answer (2016)
Summary:	3-gatsu no Lion Recap
Sequel:	3-gatsu no Lion 2nd Season
Spin-off:	3-gatsu no Lion: Ugoku! Nya Shogi

Ueda, Yuuji
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Ooshima, Miku

Assistant Producer

Oota, Kyouko

Assistant Producer, Publicity

Shinbou, Akiyuki

Director, Series Composition

Nakura, Yasuhiro

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard, Setting, Key Animation, Layout

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Opening Theme

	1: "Answer (アンサー)" by BUMP OF CHICKEN (eps 1-11)
	2: "Sayonara Bystander (さよならバイスタンダー)" by YUKI (eps 12-22)

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Ending Theme

	1: "Fighter (ファイター)" by BUMP OF CHICKEN (eps 1-6, 8-11, 22)
	2: "Nyaa Shougi Ondo (ニャー将棋音頭)" by Hinata (Kana Hanazawa), Akari (Ai Kayano), Momo (Misaki Kuno) (eps 7)
	3: "orion" by Kenshi Yonezu (米津玄師) (eps 12-21)

Reviews

Mar 18, 2017

Veronin

Recommended

Sangatsu no Lion's first five minutes contain a scene I might characterise as one of the best in animation. A boy listlessly wakens, drinking out of necessity, dressing out of obligation, and leaving his sterile apartment out of confusion, an existence so fragile it could perish with the wind. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't tell people about his problems. He just moves on with his life.

At first I did not understand why this scene had such an impact on me. I thought it could have been the beautiful music, or perhaps the captivating artwork so characteristic of Shaft. That wasn't it. What overwhelmed ...

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Jan 6, 2019

Lockensocke

Mixed Feelings

“Sangatsu no lion” is an anime with a focus all over the place. It isn’t really a good “drama” anime neither is it a good “seinen” anime, its shogi aspects is also sometimes rather forgotten and taken aside to have lots of slice of life comedy moments. Especially at the beginning there is probably 20% drama and 80% comedy. So if you came to see a mature take on a sports anime with drama and a lot of maturity, in the fashion of something like “Ping pong the animation”, “sangatsu no lion” isn’t really the show you were looking for. However it does create ... a very light hearted atmosphere and was easy to watch even for someone who didn’t really like the comedy all too much. And it gets progressively better.

The story focuses around a young high school student who became a professional shogi player. He lives alone in his apartment and has, at the start a very mysterious backstory, which is presented to be very tragic and we should feel sorry for him. The story starts of very one sided, with everything happening out of the perspective of the protagonist and many other character come around as rather one-dimensional because we know too little about them. This was fixed later on by adding backstories to side character as well to make them more interesting. There is also a clear distinction between characters, that are always in comedy scenes and character who mostly are involved in the drama part of the show. This approach is better than to just simply include every character in silly comedy to a point where you can’t take anything they do serious anymore (like in FMA brotherhood), but it still raises the question… why include both?

I don’t really think that drama and comedy work well together. One of the 2 has to suffer in order for the other one to succeed. This could really be seen in this anime.

The drama aspect of the show seemed to be just there to make the protagonist interesting, for me however it didn’t work and I found him rather bland with a backstory similar to so many other. That’s the main reason I really welcomed the later included focus on side character and their relationship to the protagonist.

The shogi aspect is merely a tool and not too deeply focused. It took them 8 episodes to introduce the basic rules of the game to the audience, but then again, if the show thinks you just learned about the game it is understandable that it doesn’t go into any deeper analysis into professional shogi games. That’s probably why it was missing completely in this anime. For me this was a bit disappointing to see. The anime also didnt really manage to build up much of a tension with their shogi games (espeically at the start), but it gets better the more episodes you watch.

The slice of life aspect seemed to be the most focused one, at least at the start. What they basically wanted to achieve was to take this introverted main character who only focuses on shogi and has a sad past and put him in a goofy environment with 3 sister who mainly function as comedic relieve. The reason for all of this is also very random, which sets it very much apart from everything else that happens in the show. I found none of these comedic relieve characters to be in any way relatable or interesting and the comedy felt very typical and unfunny (with a weird fetish around cats, which also didn’t do it for me). It tries to be self aware with characters constantly referencing how this and that looks like an anime or a manga, but this was just used to create cheap laughs and nothing more.
However the whole start is very light hearted and because you still have quite a bit of shogi story aspects is wasn’t too much of a chore to go through to reach the more interesting part of the story.

The sound design wasn’t really well done. The voice acting was ordinary, but the soundtrack was really not existent beyond forgettable background songs. There was one fine piano track at some point but it was very quickly forgotten.

The art style is very weird. The characters have huge mouths and often large eyes to make them look cute (a bit different from typical anime character eyes) , but they sometimes look like cgi characters. You will get used to the art style and not notice it too much but at first it kinda annoyed me. Backgrounds were nicely drawn and I found it nice that they depicted the real design of the shogi hall building in Tokyo.

For all the bad things I had to say about this anime I still have to add that I enjoyed watching it. Its story is engaging and grips you into it. It’s somewhat relatable and in many ways down to earth (at least compared to other anime). It could have been a lot better but for what it is worth it can introduce a lot of people in the fascinating world of shogi.

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Oct 17, 2018

SteekHutzee

Not Recommended

Sangatsu no Lion is a completely pointless series, revolving around a few more than flat characters.

I'll try to be as spoiler free as possible while pointing out what I think worked and what not.

Story: 3
In a few words, the story in Sangatsu no Lion is "playing shogi". For as much as I would like to say that it talks about a kid growing, fighting his fears, learning how to relate to other people, eventually understanding how to live one's life, all of this is just barely touched, focusing more on "what if I moved the pawn in A7 instead of B2?". In 22 episodes, absolutely ... nothing relevant happens. No epiphanies, no events, no change, or if something happens, it's brushed off in an incredibly simplistic way.
We could think that since this is a Slice of Life, it reflects reality as it is, and oh, it does it perfectly. But please don't tell me that your usual, every day, routine lives are worth a series. Mine, is not.

Art: 6
For as much as I love shaft, the style here is pretty different from their usual. The colour palette, the watercolour-ish style, the animation itself were really pleasant to watch, as they give a warm vibe when it's needed, but doesn't work so well in the more "cold" scenes. Also, the classic shaft antics recur here as well, and maybe, they weren't so needed. What really bothers me here is the character design. From the beginning to the end of the series, the characters lose more and more punchiness and details, starting from a very specific character design (those mouths, really?) ending with a generic character from any other series of the last decade.

Sound: 5
Not much to say here
OTs and EDs are not so bad, but also not memorable. I finished the series half an hour ago and I already forgot what they sound like. Same goes for the background sounds and music. About the voices, the cast is galactic, it worked pretty well.

Characters: 3
Let's say you try to give an honest vote to your completely normal neighbour, or the guy that used to sit on the left corner in your classroom. That would be pretty hard, I imagine. The same goes here. The characters are completely normal people, but instead of having those many hues a normal person would have, they are just parodies of their "IRL" counterparts.
The MC is the usual "kind of problematic" character. Introvert, social issues, no friends, focused only on shogi. You keep watching him doing nothing, saying a lot of "I will whatever", then going back doing nothing. Just stupidly thinking about shogi. So much to forget to drink for days! Can you imagine that?
The female cast is the "obliviously-incredibly-good-and-sweet-girl-that-oh-so-love-to-help-you-for-whatever-reason-and-obviously-loves-sweets". As too often, the women in Sangatsu are put in the kitchen or related domestic areas, and those are the only moments in which you see them. Since it's a shogi anime, you could think there are also female shogi players, but no, the only one that you can see doesn't play anymore.
Is the rest of the cast worth mentioning? the fat but passionate kiddo, the cold and invincible player, the mentor, the blonde with weird haircut guy?

Enjoyment 3/ Overall 4
I think I said everything I had to, with very bad grammar and vocabulary, though, but since this anime has been so hyped up, I could not keep it in.
Sangatsu no Lion fails on every front. It fails in narrating a story, even a slice of life story, introducing elements that will be lost in the next scene, breaking tragedy or tension with out of place comedy, but still failing with both of them. It fails with its characters, with too good or too bad people that could exist in other genres, or using cliched characters that, as usual, follow the flow with no question asked. It also fails with the art, lowering the quality episode after episode.

So, there are a lot of way better anime out there. Go see them.

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Poll: 3-gatsu no Lion Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Jan 7, 2017	149 replies	by little_raven »» Apr 9, 7:55 PM
Poll: 3-gatsu no Lion Episode 11 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Dec 24, 2016	90 replies	by little_raven »» Apr 8, 8:54 PM
Poll: 3-gatsu no Lion Episode 7 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) moodie - Nov 19, 2016	111 replies	by little_raven »» Mar 26, 11:11 AM
Poll: 3-gatsu no Lion Episode 20 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) Stark700 - Mar 4, 2017	104 replies	by blinddig »» Mar 13, 2:15 AM
Poll: 3-gatsu no Lion Episode 10 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) Stark700 - Dec 17, 2016	160 replies	by TraeKun »» Feb 18, 8:29 PM

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3-gatsu no Lion

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