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seriously man if you have soooo much complain about this episode just remake a episode yourself -_-''' then we will see if your "MUSIC" is the best for the scene

I don't mean to say shounen is bad, because when it's done well, it can be the perfect genre for telling great coming of age stories. But for depicting raw, unstylized violence, it's just not the right aim...for anime anyways, because you can get away with a lot more in a manga format because it's not in full motion and color.

You know something. Basically this is all bullshit. What it really comes down to it, is just that it isn't your kind of thing and i wonder why didn't you dropped it. Except if you didn't just so you can bury it in every episode with your comments as an amusement.

No, this isn't normally my kind of thing. But as I've said, I liked the first series, liked Miyata, and wanted to continue the story. How do I bury every episode with my comments when I only make a couple of posts, and if people care to discuss what I said (since this is a discussion forum) reply in kind?

I do agree with your opinion that this episode kinda sucked (relatively speaking), but you don't have to look at other anime to compare. Just ask yourself if this fight was even the best fight of the series. I for one know that this fight is the best fight in the manga so far. The fights in the first series have so much more impact than this one.

I'm not gonna add to the general criticisms about music and dialogue and whatnot, but I have to add something about the animation, which is pretty subpar. I'm not talking about quality, but the style used. One of the hallmarks of the first series is seeing the fights in the anime as actual boxing fights, not just an exchange of techniques. You could actually see how ippo begins the demspey roll, or vorg's white fang, or sendo's smash. There's more tracking shots, less closeups, and almost no shots of someone's back while fighting. In short, we could somewhat see the mechanics of the fight - we could actually see the punches thrown.

This, plus the music and the pacing, made the fights infinitely more exciting, like when ippo miraculously avoided vorg's white fang, and ippo's gazelle punch to sendo. Compare that to what was supposedly the image of this fight, when takamura countered hawk vertically - wasn't nearly as epic.

I only brought in other shows because someone said that this was the best that anime had to offer, and I, being baffled, disagreed and brought the comparison of direction. Maybe it was unneeded, but I think it sparked a pretty nice conversation between Tori and myself.

Your problems with the animation is all contingent on the director. That's why most of the energy is lost comparing this to the first season. I just don't think that the director had a handle on what was important, and the proper way to showcase pivotal moments in the fights.

I agree, and I think that this is also the reason why ippo has been reduced to a shonen series.

Also the pacing for the episodes was comically bad. I mean, the highlight of the fight was takamura finally snapping, and they show it right at the beginning? This completely destroyed all the excitement for the episode, a complete 180 from episode 23 when takamura was almost beaten down.

And while I really do feel for those who say that this is a good episode, I just don't know how could they say that this was the best or even that it was that great. There have been other fights in ippo already better than this!

The whole fight was like this. One episode Hawk is hands down winning, then the next Takamura is winning, the next he's loosing, the last he won. Director is focused on that comeback, one up vibe that he didn't really think about the flow between the episodes, so at the beginning of each episode we (or at least I) am thinking, "How is such a marked reversal happening at the beginning?"

^ Exactly. As for this particular episode, they also screwed up the mood when hawk can supposedly made a comeback. There was no tension at all, as if there was no way takamura could lose at that point. The music made it seem exciting, not ominous.

Also a small note - what happened to the green eyes of determination? Why the hell does takamura's eyes turn blue? I can't believe they could have forgotten such a thing, especially when they made the green eyes such a hallmark of the first series, ans especially when takamura had the green eyes at one point earlier.

Actually, I didn't say that, but I agree with fisher and you also. There is a difference between the coming of age shounen, character focused first series and the comeback obsessed second series.

Oh, and fisher, I don't know what happened to the green eyes either. I could have sworn that they were there in the Date fight, but I could be mistaken.

yeah they where there, on martinez though of all people :s

Hajime no Ippo has always been about the comebacks, always. They're just a lot more overdone now, in their new animated form. The manga's kept this constant as well, it's not like there's any clean victories because that would be pretty boring. Yes, the multiple comeback per fights is pretty silly but that's what the show has always offered. Perseverance, fighting spirit and guts. This is specially true when it comes to Ippo and the other guys (takamura was immune to this for a while until he fights hawk). Actually, the fights get even more ridiculous as it goes and there's even more comeback stuff as all the characters move up the ranks.

what I meant with the shonen comment was that one of the great things about the first series was that as ridiculous as the techniques are, you always get the feeling that you are seeing a boxing match.

I remember watching some of the fights and afterwards I'd be just itching to hit the sandbag and copy the smash and the flicker, that watching the episode just gets your blood boiling.

And I know that takamura doesn't really have a sunday punch, but at least it should have given me a sense of how takamura moves, and how he fights. What is it about takamura's rhythm that was so unique? Why was hawk so wild? How are takamura's punches so efficient and so dangerous? The anime never really showed us, they just told us these things.



I think they just copied the manga directly, which is retarded, since they had always used green eyes before.

Oh, and someone mentioned this before, but the slo-mo made it seem that takamura had such a long time to react while it probably took like one second. It really ruined the notion that takamura could have predicted the punch from hawk.

Oh and the concerto music at the end was the complete opposite of exciting, as if takamura winning the championship isn't the high point of the whole manga. They could have just used the opening song and it made that scene ten times as epic

Oh and they also ended the episode at the wrong point.

Black cat u mean? How does the atmosphere not engage? We can see his hard work, his support, his pride, and finally success. How can the atmosphere not be anything other than engaging after we have seen takamura travel his long journey and finally achieved his goal.

My bad, BlackCat. We did see all of his hard work and pride, and seeing him trying to loose weight was fine, but that tension evaporated when they spent a whole episode on the time right before the match and Ippo's fight. So by the time Takamura started fighting, what it degenerated to was a severely undeveloped and overexaggerated character in Hawk against one of the main characters of the show? We all knew how it was going to end.

Then you take the fact that the construction of the episodes is such that one episode one person is winning and the next episode, everything that the announcers, Aoki, Kimura and Ippo were saying were reversed, for four times, and dramatically, everything was eliminated for me by the 2nd or 3rd count at the end of this episode.

Maybe it's me, but atmosphere is almost completely dependent on the director and how he chooses to play with time, silence, and camera movement. As has been discussed, I think that he didn't bring anything to spark a highly charged atmosphere, and relied on source material only to do this. The problem is that he often got in the way of that by playing up inappropriate moments and not focusing on what was important.

That's for the fights. For the training and those inbetween episodes he did as good of a job as the first series (except for the passing the torch moment).

takamura ftw, holy shit that was awesome, should i give this an 10??? lol

damn this ep was epic hawk vs.takamura was one of my fav in manga and the anime made it epic*tear* overall 5/5 all hail takamura the new WBC junior middleweight champion^^

That was friggin epic! Finally one of the Kamogawa guys won a major battle.

And @ the people complaining , look at the poll. If you dont like THIS episode, you should really drop this show.