In any case, ro-kyu-bu! is a serviceable ecchi-loli-harem-sports show. The novelty of that combination, combined with a really catchy opening and ending theme, was what hooked me, and I wasn't disappointed. It's cute enough, the characters are endearing if typical, and though I haven't watched any other sports animes (although you could call this a harem show that uses sports as a motif, I guess) the show makes watching basketball interesting enough. Watching the girls and their initially-reluctant coach bond though the medium of sport was touching, and woven though all the shower and beach scenes there's a sort of nice story about friends overcoming trials together and fighting for each other.
The characters were very cute, which is a big selling point. This is harem on easy-mode, so there's no real tension between the characters (besides the tsundere, of course) and everyone gets at least an episode or two of 'me' time. My favorite was probably Hinata, as the loli-est loli she's pretty weird, and Maho's pretty great as the genki girl. Tomoko as the lead girl and sweet basketball prodigy is very cute, and really, there's enough here for everyone who likes basketball playing loli harems.
What dragged this down to a six for me was the sense that, even with the novelty, there was a lot here making this show an uphill battle. The art is pretty rough on the eyes and the animators sometimes have trouble understanding proportions beyond the general huge-eyes-small-mouth character design. Some of the humor was pretty good, but a lot of the ecchi jokes were pretty tired - by the end we've been treated to enough 'you pervert!' high-kick-panty-shots that it felt like they were just phoning it in. Except with basketballs.
Big ups for all the basketball-related innuendo, though? There's also a bit of self-awareness of all this when a character asks, before an intense game of poolside bikini basketball, 'why are we all in swimsuits?'. Why indeed.
The dramatic elements, too, were pretty thin - I didn't mind the breakneck cycle of crisis-resolution-crisis-resolution-beach episode-etc. - trying to juggle five sort of main characters plus one in a twelve-episode harem show is, I'm sure, difficult. But what this results in is a sort of stubbornly shallow show without too much room to explore the space.
Anyway fingers crossed for the second season!
