Cross Game Episode 1 Discussion

brandough said:
"I see. It was simple. I should just cry."
SAME. KOU.

I knew this show would make me cry at some point, because a lot of anime does (especially sports ones for some reason), but I didn't expect it to make me cry during the first episode. Wow. That was really emotional.

Jacut said:
Alright, I was expecting this series to be at least very good since the manga is created by one of my fav mangakas, Adachi-sama, the master of narration and character development, but it seems I overestimated Synergy SP. I don't understand how a studio can screw up a work like this, especially an Adachi one, since the storyboard is basically already done in the manga, you just have to animate it and put some colors, not hard to do eh?

This episode summed up very, very, very briefly a WHOLE volume of the manga (yes, 10 chapters, 200 pages, 1200 drawings!) like if Synergy SP wanted to rush it and just didn't care about the childhood of Wakaba and Koh. I understand that their budget must be very slim because of the economical crisis and the bad state of animation in Japan, so they probably want to speed everything up and finish in 13 episodes for 13 volumes of the manga. Alright, for any other title, I would have found that utterly silly, but it's even worse here, we're talking about an Adachi adaptation ! Fuck, just to get to the point of Wakaba's death, they should have done at least 3 episodes (I would have done 4 personally), but with the infernal rythm they put in this "introduction" episode, the horrible direction and structure of the scenario they displayed here, we miss two thirds of the developments, all the introduction of the characters, all the emotional impact of Wakaba's death and most of the themes that Adachi put in the beginning of his manga as well as the overall concept and introduction of the title.

In the first volume of the manga, Adachi introduces very carefully the 4 sisters, Koh, their parents and also to some extent Koh's baseball teammates (and future teammates), the city, the places where they live and much more, since Adachi does SLICE OF LIFE/romance/baseball mangas (I'm speaking about Touch/H2/Cross Game). Here, we just miss the slice of life part, the cement of the Adachi style, the very characteristic that makes his works so different from every other sports mangas, nothing less ! This simple fact KILLS this series, cleanly and quickly. We're not watching an action series here, we're watching a freaking Adachi adaptation !

On top of that, we understand nothing since it's just too fast to be interesting, the design is just terrible and looks nothing like that of the original work, the animation is extremely limited and suffers from the comparison to Ookiku Furikabutte for example (THE masterpiece of sports animes in the last 20 years). No, nothing is right in this first episode, it was an instant drop for me, and I kindly suggest every reader in this thread to do the same and read the manga instead, this series just doesn't do it justice in the least. It’s a slaughter of the original work and an insult to Adachi, and I officially declare that there’s no Cross Game adaptation released as of now. Oh, but watch Touch and H2 (even if the manga is better too, it's not as bas as the Cross Game anime) these are great animes.