This review will mainly be a critique of what I consider to be Slam Dunk's main weaknesses: its characters, its dialogues and the way its basketball games are structured. I will however start by mentioning the manga's visual representation of the sport, which I found to be its main quality.
Inoue's art, which is already above average at the start of the manga, consistently gets better and successfully brings the basketball games to life in a both realistic and striking manner. Along with the masterful way in which the panels are laid out, it effectively displays the difficulty of the moves it depicts and equally contributes to bringing suspense and strong payoffs to the games. The few text-less scenes are especially impressive, I found them breathtaking.
Apart from those strictly technical aspects, several other elements pertain to the ambition of the manga to rely on pure and realistic basketball: the rules and main moves are progressively explained to the reader at the same time as the protagonist is learning them, and many of those moves are as well-described as they are impressively showcased. Furthermore, legitimate tactics play a major role in the games. Even though the characters can be extremely talented at using some techniques, they don't have any of the nearly magical secret powers one can often find in shounen manga.
This being said, it doesn't mean that Slam Dunk is free of the usual shounen sports manga framework, as its main storyline is as typical as it gets: there is a steady escalation of stakes and powers, simplistic -though sometimes touching- flashbacks are regularly used to give scenes more emotional impact, and the humor, which is very typical of its time, sometimes works well but sometimes feels very heavy. More importantly, almost all characters often act, think and speak in a simplistic or even silly manner, which I find to be the one of the major weaknesses of the series.
The main character Sakuragi is extremely dense, hot-tempered and a bit of a delinquent, as a lot of shounen protagonists were in the nineties, but he is so naturally talented and has such an incredible learning speed that he quickly becomes a key player in his high school's basketball team. Rukawa, who is the ace of the team and another one of the most important characters, is rather boring and flat, other than the fact that he has a rivalry with Sakuragi which most likely inspired that of Naruto and Sasuke: the red-haired, hot-tempered guy with amazing potential wants to catch up to the apathetic, dark-haired genius. And that's about the extent of this manga's character writing. The characters mostly stay as they are for the entirety of the long story.
That is to say, Slam Dunk's character writing is quite weak. Even though Sakuragi and his teammates steadily grow as basketball players, they only ever change as persons on occasions that are so rare and sudden that they lack impact and feel artificial. The measly amount of character development the manga has to offer is therefore neither significant nor realistic. Where other shounen manga often rely on their characters to carry them in the long run, Slam Dunk's main cast lacks complexity and is not believable enough to stay interesting for 31 volumes. Some of the other characters like Akagi and to a lesser extent Kogure, Ryouta and Mitsui are much more likeable than Sakuragi and Rukawa, though they are also quite simplistic. The one thing that best managed to draw my empathy was actually the abstract but omnipresent entity of Shohoku (the name of the character's high school and team), which concentrates the passion and dreams of many, and thus has enough emotional weight to occasionally move a reader. As for the antagonists, when they are not ridiculously caricatural, they are about average. Not a single one of them is really interesting.
Slam Dunk's subpar characters, strong art and rather realistic depiction of basketball logically lead the reader to focus on the action, which thus constitutes the main interest of the manga. Regrettably, the weakness of the characters often bleeds onto the action itself. For instance, the way they speak during basketball games is quite unpleasant: they frequently shout across to their opponents and provoke them brashly, and their monologues are full of annoying ramblings about the importance of victory and their desire to be stronger. This kind of speech is fairly common in shounen manga, as the opponents are supposed to represent the inner obstacles that the characters have to overcome in order to grow, and as it further contextualizes the action, thereby raising its stakes. In Slam Dunk however, the caricatural personalities of the characters, the paucity and redundancy of the words they use and the recurrence of those passages make them feel tedious.
Another problem with the manga's action is the unnatural rhythm of its basketball games. They are almost systematically divided in sections in which one team tries to overcome a problem posed by the other team's way of playing. In order to do so, they need to implement a specific strategy that will either quickly succeed -in which case the section is generally entertaining-, or require a given player to surpass himself by mastering a new move or by managing to overwhelm his seemingly superior opponent. These moments, which can be found in most shounen battle series, are very frequent in Slam Dunk and extremely annoying, because they often include the aforementioned weak dialogues or flashbacks that interrupt the game and break its flow.
This unnatural rhythm strongly undermines the realism of the manga for the sake of cheap clichés and power-ups. Even worse, in order to create tension, several of those drastic changes in players' abilities often occur in the course of a single game and they are always accompanied by significant score gaps that are alternately bridged and widened by both teams.
Slam Dunk's length is its last weakness: the characters are not good enough for the emotional connection the reader builds with them over time to counterbalance the manga's repetitiveness; it makes elements that were funny, believable or dramatic in the beginning lose their effectiveness and ultimately feel unimpressive.
The ending of the manga is average, and so are the majority of the secondary characters such as Haruko, Ayako, Aota and the coaches: they are decent but basic, semi-effective in their role as comic reliefs, and are ultimately bound to stay underdeveloped spectators.
To put it in a nutshell, Slam Dunk is neither awful nor outstanding. It relies mostly on being purely about sports at the detriment of the characters, but despite its strong art, it doesn't really manage to excel in this domain due to a lack of realism that sometimes makes it hard to take seriously. Watching a real basketball game with real stakes, more consistent tension and actually interesting players is in my opinion a more interesting activity than reading this manga.
