First thing's first - I'll go over what I enjoy about the show first:
- It is an insanely pretty show but that's to be expected from the gloss kings themselves: Brain's Base. The animation is very nice, I will give it that. It's colourful, it's eye-catching and energetic which really fits the tone of the show and is used to its advantaged. Brain's Base know how to make shows look nice and Cheer Danshi looks amazing
- Secondly the voice cast is really good - I'll give particularly props to Okamoto Nobuhiko who does an excellent job as Kazuma (honestly what is it with this guy and playing excited sports fanatics). The rest of the cast do an excellent job in giving their respective characters the voices that look as though they would fit but it doesn't quite save the characters - but I'll come back to that later.
- Finally the story is not that half bad, it's nothing ground breaking other than it's about an all male cheerleading squad. The whole 'characters must come together to create a team and overcome obstacles which may come their way' has been done loads of times before. But I can forgive it because it's hard to do any other way and to be perfectly honest, it is done well. You can get wrapped up in the concept and that's perfectly passable.
Now onto the less enjoyable bit - where does the series fall flat?
- I said before that I liked the voice actors but it didn't save the characters and what I mean by this is that I feel like the characters are not defined enough. This is going to be a show with a large cast, you can see it in the opening, but I have a hard time remembering the characters names besides Haru, Kazuma and Ton. That's not good for a show with lots of characters - you need your characters to stand out but for some reason the characters in Cheer Danshi all seem to fold together with the exception of - like I said before - Haru, Kazuma and Ton. But that's just who I remember. I understand that it's still the beginning and there's time for the characters to progress and gain their own identities - as such I will wait and see.
- The pacing of the show feels a little rushed which is leading me to believe that it will be a 1 cours series with only 12/13 episodes - and that's not good. Unless it gets a second season, I feel like the show will end up being horribly rushed and not enough expanded on. Sometimes a fast pace can be good but when you have to introduce characters gradually, then it can be a downfall. Again I do understand that it is still the beginning of the series and it's yet to be announced how many episodes the series will have but it's just a guess. Perhaps the pacing issues will be resolved later but right now events all seem to collide and it pushes the pacing along at too fast a rate. Hopefully it will be a 2 cours show with 25/26 episodes or multiple seasons because fast pacing can be excused.
Over all, I do like the show. It might seem like I don't but I feel like there are flaws with it. I don't think it's really anything new or groundbreaking but it's a nice change from other sports series that don't rely on off the wall plot twists (Kuroko, I'm looking at you). I won't say it's got quite the heart that Haikyuu has or the character likeability that Free has - but there is still time and perhaps my opinion will change.
And to that I say - we have to wait and see!
