As much as I enjoyed Cross Game, Touch had already alerted me to Adachi's two most bothersome flaws, and he failed to change his ways, 20+ years later. Also, watching Touch first made me see the earliness of Wakaba's exit as another flaw to add on top.
I hoped he'd have matured as a writer with the passage of time - and CG's opening episode set-up suggested he had - but it turned out nothing had changed. He still avoided allowing the main pairing to enter into a relationship until the very end to increase the drama, rather than taking his work in a direction more suited for older/more mature readers. And he still ended it in an unsatisfying way; not showing the matches at Koushien and not showing much/anything of the post-baseball lives of the characters. He's great in many ways, for sure, but he's 100% far better at starting stories than he is at seeing them through to conclusion - that's what my experiences with the two most popular adaptations (both very faithful, afaik) of his work tell me.
The difference between CG and Touch that makes me care far more about Touch, in spite of the frustrating amount of post-26/27 filler, is simple: Adachi put his heart and soul into developing his characters, and the relationship of the main three, BEFORE getting into baseball. In the case of CG, 1/17th of the manga focused on the build-up to its tragedy. In comparison, Touch had around 1/4th of 26 or so volumes focused on the build-up to its tragedy. And the ages of the characters involved, as well as the increased depth that resulted from the maturity of their relationship, meant the difference between the emotions I felt with regard to the two tragedies was night and day.
Kou suffered from the lack of time spent building up to Wakaba's exit, too. He had the same basic character type as Tatsuya - Touch's lead - but wasn't shown to suffer, or think of others, anywhere near the same amount. Where as Tatsuya had to deal with people seeing his twin brother instead of him, as well as an inferiority complex that prevented him from liking Minami back, all Kou had to deal with was losing his tween beloved. His easy-going, expressive basic personality was all he had to offer, and his childish exchanges with Aoba didn't help him out.
It wasn't far into CG when I started being bothered, rather than moved, by Wakaba's scenes getting repeated and adding nothing. And, even though TatsuyaxMinami was drawn out for no good reason after awhile, there was NOTHING stopping Kou and Aoba getting together LONG before the 50th episode. The fact that there weren't any romantic developments between the two prior to Kou's 'lie' confession near the end highlighted that Adachi simply wanted to leave everything until the last minute so as to not have to deal with covering the evolution of his characters from children into adults.
Tying into the total lack of romantic progression throughout the series, the characters introduced to fill space throughout were very noticeable. As mentioned by me a few times in my other posts, Mizuki's character served no purpose whatsoever, other than extending the length by a few episodes. The same is true of the Risa character. And Wakaba coming as close to being reincarnated as possible, just so that Kou could be allowed to pick Aoba over her, was weak-writing on Adachi's part - showing backward thinking, instead of the forward variety - and it's no coincidence that Akane's introduction happened to coincide with the the 30-41/42 fillerish stretch.
Too little happened throughout the series, and that displeased me since I expected there to be less time wasting than in Touch. In fairness, Touch did have a lot more fillerish content, but it also had 51 more episodes, and its opening 26/27 episodes of 9/10 greatness covered half of CG's length.
...I'm probably showing a little bit too much 'tough love', as ever - I DID actually derive a lot of enjoyment out of CG. Heck, even I was moved by the baseball finale, combined with Kou's huggle, in spite of the predictability of it all. I loved Kou's emotional + poker face friendship with Azuma, and a number of scenes made me laugh - such as Junpei's WTF ("Will you grow a garden called happiness with me!?" proposal. It was definitely a series that scored high on enjoyment, and that's why I stayed with it for 50 episodes; going on a number of 10+ episode marathons. It's just a matter of it having a lot of annoying flaws and not turning out to be the perfected version of Touch I hoped it would be, going into it.
Due to it having less bothersome filler than Touch, looking lovely (/720P), and being a pleasure to watch, I'll give it 7.5/10 - the same score I gave Touch. But I'll definitely think far more fondly of Touch in the future; when my memories of both start to fade. |