Love All Play

In junior high, Ryou Mizushima and his friends join the badminton club on a whim. As he grows fond of the sport, Ryou works tirelessly to improve his badminton skills until he qualifies in the prefectural tournament. Lacking a coach who can bring out his full potential, he does not consider entering a high school with a strong badminton team. Instead, he plans on attending a local high school where he can play badminton for fun.

However, Ryou's perspective changes when Yokohama Minato High School's badminton coach scouts him. Not only does the institution have one of the strongest badminton teams in the region, but it also has Kento Yusa, a player Ryou admires. Though hesitant at first, Ryou decides to enroll with the support of his sister. Possessing a firm ambition, he begins to gain experience with the proper guidance of a coach—all in hopes of surpassing Yusa one day.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Mizushima, Ryou Main

Hanae, Natsuki Japanese

Mizushima, Rika Supporting

Kotobuki, Minako Japanese

Matsuda, Kouki Supporting

Furukawa, Makoto Japanese

Yusa, Kento Supporting

Taniyama, Kishou Japanese

Uchida, Akira Supporting

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Sakaki, Shouhei Supporting

Azakami, Youhei Japanese

Watanabe, Yuta Supporting

Nakamura Supporting

Yokokawa, Yuusuke Supporting

Takahashi, Hiroki Japanese

Higashiyama, Youji Supporting

Kakihara, Tetsuya Japanese

Nakata, Hiroya Producer

Kama, Hideki Producer

Yamamoto, Heiseki Producer

Yoshioka, Daisuke Producer

Reviews

Sep 2, 2022

BiologicalStorm

Recommended

Preliminary (20/24 eps)

First of all, I don't think anyone who hasn't seen even half of the anime should even review it. I admit I was kind of indignant seeing "not recommended" and the person has seen 4/5 episodes of a 25-episode anime!

Second, THIS ANIME IS PERFECT! I think it's literally the most natural anime I've ever seen, their reactions are extremely realistic and you can clearly see how each character is in their own unique way. The colors are beautiful and nice to look at, the animation is also fluid enough. I think especially the expressions and the small details, help to make up the personality of ... the boys.

The positive point is that there is no pedophile character or sexualization of the girls and boys. And the friendship between the boys is beautiful, even with the ones who left the team or the girls who cheer for them, everyone has a good relationship.

The only negative point for me is that the matches could last longer, but even so I think they do a good job of showing us the before and after, so it fills in what we don't see during the matches.

So if you want to see a wholesome, cute anime with characters that look like real people, this is the anime for you.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Apr 28, 2022

Saffron_entity

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (4/24 eps)

I would be lying if I said this was a hidden gem or anything special at all. Love All Play is a pretty fun Badminton anime, that actually just discusses playing badminton at a somewhat competitive high school level. For a badminton fan like myself, this is actually quite special, considering the alternatives are the melodramatic Hanebado, and the utterly boring office/badminton Ryman's club.

The characters are quite charming and have fun, wholesome relationships with one another. There's some drama going on in the background with our edgy boi Matsuda, and Mizushima is clearly going to have some special awesome observation powers or whatever, but ... it's nothing unique and it's all fairly dull.

The art is really pretty, feels like a great throwback to 80-90s anime and I really like it. Animation is pretty disappointing though, with worse badminton matches than Ryman's club, and not holding a candle against Hanebado. In a fast-paced and strategic game like Badminton, this sort of bland animation is really detrimental. Overall, I would say that the presentation of badminton is just overall dreadfully boring, but at least the practice they do is pretty accurate.

I came here to watch a cool Badminton anime, but now I'm just staying for the wholesome high school club activities and competitiveness and I'm definitely enjoying it. But, in the end, I can't wholeheartedly recommend this anime to anyone, there's just nothing that particularly stands out in a good way.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Sep 24, 2022

KANLen09

Not Recommended

Love All, No Play. Piss off.

To wait more than a decade for a relatively unknown and underground work to get adapted, I really question who was in the right mind to green-light this project, given that there were already better alternatives like Liden Films's repertoire of badminton anime. This is novelist Asami Koseki's only work that was in Poplar Publishing (which publishes very old kids IPs from the 90s to the late 2000s) that was seralized from 2011 to 2014, and I'm just gonna assume that the sales figures for this were decent to OK (since it's "big" enough to get an anime adaptation), or ... is that some big shot wanted to see this come to fruition, and such is the case of Love All Play here. The only problem: Liden Films has redefined what to expect for badminton anime going forward with Hanebado! and Ryman's Club, and animation prowess certainly beats story elements to a point where the current trend has been stuck ever since.

Love All Play presents itself as your sterotypical school sport, chock full of characters that are meant to grow on you as the series progressed from start to finish, and in the space of 24 episodes covering the entirety of the 4-volume novel (which is best assumed since this is a one-and-only job), it certainly has done that. The issue is that why is this only released now is just as baffling, as if it was released right at the tailgate of the novel's end in 2014 would be just about perfect to have an anime adaptation on it, but given how long this took to get one, I would assume that it's the connection to the recent Tokyo Olympics (which sure isn't the case) to then finally have a use case for this anime to come out, it sure was "years in the making" that got stale when it came out, and staying the same when it finishes this season. And even if it was released in the past, it would've been doomed from the start to be largely forgotten in time to come.

Just about the only good part of the show was in its characters, which in their portrayal, were actually period-correct to the time when the novel came out: the bunch of newbies entering high school for the first time, being rookies at a sport for the first time, hanging out with friends and family, and especially the matches which help everyone progress a step further. And to be fair, this is old-school storytelling at its finest, though these days people (even myself) don't really care for the allure of the oldies and classics, unless if it's a well-regarded one (e.g. Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura (All Stars) next season). And here to tag the story is the new group of rookies with Ryo Mizushima, Shohei Sakaki, Koki Matsuda, Taichi and Yuji Higashiyama, and Akira Uchida, the 6 newbies who found themselves being chosen by their school Yokohama Minato's badminton team, going through the normal pacing of practice after practice to improve and make themselves useful in making their school a household name from the ashes of sunkenness. Oh, and also enjoy their youth. I do find that the badminton team seniors, mostly Kento Yusa and Yusuke Yokokawa are both an annoying dirtbag and a respectful Senpai respectively, though overtime they do show well of their camaraderie with one another that's been in the works since they joined the badminton team. But the whole love interest section of the boys being cheered on by their classmates which raises the aspects of romance, while that is also period-correct to the setting, it unfortunately becomes a sore sight that I'd wish the focus went onto the actual badminton instead of the slice-of-life elements. But then again, this is school life at its most humble, so it's there. And most certainly is the whole "school goddess" thing of Ryo's sister Rika being the flower worth only the attention of Yusa. Again, no faults there, it's just how everything is brought up in the dailyness of school life.

If this anime came out in the mid-2010s, then Nippon Animation and OLM's Team Yoshioka's collab would've served a nice niche since there wasn't anything to compare to at the time. But this is the 2020s, and it looks awfully outdated by today's standards with such a lack of emphasis on the badminton segments, which is the core function of the show. Even the OST sounds unimpressive at best (though I loved the 1st Cour's OP, that was really nice coming from composers from sumika).

It's all-in or go home. Wholesome camaraderie aside in a competitive sports show that exists only on the school level, there's just not much going for Love All Play now, and I'm willing to bet that this show would be easily forgotten, both in its source novel and the anime in time to come, which is never a shame. What's a shame is that I felt like I've wasted 6 months of time watching this mid-tier show that should've came out a pretty long time ago, and then only to be left in its forgotten state. It's just boring by today's standards, and I want my precious time back.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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	Poll: Love All Play Episode 17 Discussion KANLen09 - Jul 30, 2022	11 replies	by baahsu »» Apr 11, 7:51 PM
	Poll: Love All Play Episode 16 Discussion KANLen09 - Jul 23, 2022	9 replies	by baahsu »» Apr 11, 7:44 PM
	Poll: Love All Play Episode 11 Discussion KANLen09 - Jun 11, 2022	15 replies	by baahsu »» Apr 11, 7:37 PM
	Poll: Love All Play Episode 6 Discussion KANLen09 - May 7, 2022	11 replies	by Patovec »» May 3, 2023 10:00 AM
	Poll: Love All Play Episode 23 Discussion KANLen09 - Sep 17, 2022	12 replies	by The_Wicker_Man »» Feb 15, 2023 3:44 PM