That's the end of Hinata's middle school sports career. When next we see him, he's at his new high school, which has an actual volleyball team, and Hinata is chuffed But guess who else is there? Right, Kageyama, and the rivalry is promptly renewed. I should probably say that this rivalry is pretty much solely driven by Hinata; Kageyama really doesn't get what he is on about, he just doesn't want to take his shit. Which leads to conflict with the new team whose captain quickly has enough of the incessant bickering and kicks the two out.
Story: simple enough -- a loser team with a more illustrious past, who doesn't even have a coach, and whose supervising teacher has no clue about volleyball, with various characters who have issues, comes together to form a real team and start winning tournaments. If you've seen it once you've seen it a hundred times; it's shounen sports anime.
Art: overall pleasing with distinct character design for those that matter. Hinata was super cute, and Kageyama's facial expressions were choice. A couple of things bothered me: necks too long, especially for Oikawa from Aoba Johsei, and really rough hatches for shadows under the chin onto the neck, which really stood out. The animation, as usual from Production I.G. was good, though some corners were cut (considering the cost of anime, I tend to be forgiving of that. The only real problem were the walk cycles. What the heck is it that almost no studio does those well? It's probably another cost cutting measure, but people do not walk with such short steps, especially not athletes.
Sound: Very good, especially as regards the music. I kept myself from forwarding through OP and ED for the first half of the show and just about had the lyrics down when they swapped them out for inferior ones. Voice talent is good, with a couple of standouts -- Ishikawa Kaito as Kageyama and Namikawa Daisuke as Oikawa Tooru.
Character: After "Baby Steps" the character development here is minuscule, but instead of just one character whom we get to know in great detail, here we find out a little about nearly everyone on the team plus a couple from each rival school team, so that's a whole lot of character development, even though it's mostly sports-related and therefore rather thin. Kageyama experiences the most growth, but Hinata falls a little short (ha ha). I really enjoyed the addition of another short and enthusiastic one, Ninomiya the libero; he and Hinata together were fun to watch. The two women who play any role at all -- the beautiful, cold manager (who's shy but competent) and the captain of the girls' volleyball team don't get much play, but at least they're not annoying. In fact the show is blessedly free of annoying female characters, only at tournaments do we get the screaming fans (Oikawa's) and the dumb adoring ones who need to be tutored on volleyball. No fan service, no romance, just some mild humour about certain team members who feel honoured to be pointedly ignored by the manager.
Enjoyment: way more than I expected. I basically binge-watched my way through this in no time flat and the only thing that's keeping from from seguing straight into the sequel is that I want to stretch the enjoyment out. While everything is kind of cliché, it's exceptionally well executed cliché. There are a lot of annoying things that stand out -- by their absence. No supernatural abilities, and while I wouldn't call this realistic volleyball it's a reasonable facsimile thereof. I gotta find out whether Japanese volleyball is significantly different from what I used to play in high school (some decades ago), because a lot of this seemed unusual to me, including their rotations, lack of detailed communication with the setter, and the kind of stuff a genius setter should have known but Kageyama was ignorant of; like dumps. But I didn't care. The pacing was near perfect; it would build up slowly to a crescendo and then slow down, build up again, and so on. The matches weren't too long. The banter, which often annoys me in shounen, was actually pretty funny. Hinata's rivalry with Kageyama, which had seemed so stupid and artificial, transformed itself magically into instant bromance in one shining moment when Hinata caught Kageyama's "reckless" toss. I knew people would be shipping those two like there is no tomorrow; it was perfection, and the gift kept on giving; the trust those two had was remarkable; they were becoming real friends right under our eyes. There were also existing real friendships here, and people encouraging each other when it mattered. Where so often melodrama is created with stupid misunderstandings, there was none of that here, not anymore (there was clearly much of that in the past). Yup, I loved it.
