I have never watched any sports anime before but I heard a lot about this particular anime and decided to give it a shot. I have nothing but my time to lose, so why the hell not? I am pretty good at that already.
After the first episode I was not impressed at all and dropped this anime because characters were very poor and plot was nothing but a big nuisance. Nothing made any sense, all I saw was some gay looking guys with poor, unoriginal personalities. But when I finally decided to get back to Free!, I finished it in a couple of days. Don't get me wrong, I still was not enjoying it that much, actually, I was just looking for some plot and common sense in this gay anime (I like yaoi, so maybe that gayish atmosphere kept me there).
I could not go with this anime just because of one particular character - Rin Matsuoka. I could not believe how anyone could be so stupid and arrogant to fuck up a nice friendship and it just had to take another innocent character to put everyone in their minds and give some common sense. That is the most unoriginal thing someone could come up with. I still don't understand why Rin had to do they way he did, though everthing was finally explained in some twisted logic (is logic a good word here?).
Though Free! has poor protagonists, the art is really nice and eye-catching. I really enjoyed animation and sound quality. I cannot say anything bad about it (muscles are really pretty nice, girls c;).
In overall, people who love sports anime will definitely love this one too but the ones who like philosophy, logic and fine reasoning won't be satisfied with plost and whole storyline at all.
