Positives:
+ Doesn't do much that's new, but effectively harnesses the uplifting sports movie vibe. It's sweet and heartwarming and you'll be rooting for the girls. Unlike many shows of this type, Subaru (the main character) isn't a loser or weirdo, he's a cool and nice guy, so it doesn't have to indulge in the usual harem shenanigans (though it sometimes does anyway, much to my chagrin).
+ Characters have varied personalities and all get individual focus at different times to develop their characters. When they actually play basketball games, it's thematically tied into the challenges that different characters face in practice and their personal lives, allowing them to overcome them in a satisfying way.
+ Nice use of background music and the OPs and EDs are all pretty catchy. Hanazawa Kana does her usual good work as Tomoka's VA.
+ Despite the weirdly romantic vibe that it often takes, Subaru and Tomoka's relationship is nice and more wholesome than you'd expect. While it's clear in the subtext that Tomoka has a huge crush on Subaru, the series is never tasteless enough to have Subaru openly reciprocate those feelings, and instead he simply respects her as a basketball prodigy and as a person.
Negatives:
- Creepy amount of loli fanservice. Many completely unnecessary scenes of the girls, who are 6th graders, in the bath, grabbing each other's breasts, etc...
- Cringeworthy and unoriginal ecchi bullshit. They even recycle the same "joke" multiple times, where Subaru discovers the panties of one of the girls on the floor while they're bathing and goes to drastic lengths to try to return them without being seen. I would've rolled my eyes at this in normal circumstances, but the fact that the girls are in elementary school makes everything worse and more uncomfortable.
- Aoi is an underutilized character. A few times she gets moments to do something, like when she coaches up a timid Airi on how to get over her fears, but she gets forgotten for long stretches and her crush on Subaru goes nowhere. Mihoshi, the basketball club advisor, feels similarly wasted and rarely even gets fun moments as a side character.
- The humor in general isn't funny and is overly reliant on Aoi or Mihoshi seeing a sexual misunderstanding involving Subaru and the girls and assaulting him like violent tsunderes.
- Basketball action is occasionally well animated, but is often reduced to being a literal slideshow. It's not like it looks terrible, and it actually looks nice when they put work into a particular scene, but they clearly didn't have the budget to animate this series properly. The overly cutesy "every female character, even the adults, is a loli with a fang" art style is also not ideal.
- The subtitles translate "scoop shot" as "floater", which, first of all, are not the same thing, and more importantly, neither would correctly describe the actual shot, which is in fact a finger roll. As a basketball fan, this bothers me greatly.
