Those were my pros. As for the cons, there is a bit to cover. One of the most frustrating issues about this anime is none other than our main character, Maeshima, who is your typical cut-out angry red-head who fails to understand any form of logic and resorts to screaming his lungs out if anyone were to ever argue against his weird reasoning for literally any decision he makes while he’s on the ice (he basically says it’s cooler, and that’s what matters most). Trust me when I say, he makes you want to scream and punch his face.
The entire plot is a rivalry between our MC and the #1 figure skater, Shinozaki, who looks like atsushi from BSD and khun from TOG combined. I don’t mind rivalry animes, but this one really did not hit the spot where I wanted it to. We get NO development at all from our rival. Even though Shinozaki is the target Maeshima wants to beat, you’d expect that we’d get more development on his side of the story, but no, he’s just some prodigy skater who has been undefeated for his entire childhood. You can argue the ending showed a different side of Shinozaki, but man, after wanting to question this direction story of this story, with how messy the rivalry was really shown (I mean it felt one sided the entire time, so I felt like I was watching a man scream at a wall in every episode), this different side of him was super generic and almost expected, given how he never had more than 2 expressions throughout the show. His looks are nice and all, but he is as black and white as it gets.
As for other characters, i didn’t mind then, but they were never really relevant to the plot. For a show to be centered around team figure skating, I expected there to be more build up between Maeshima and his other teammates, but many of them have no development whatsoever and remain the same throughout the entirety of the show. Even if the useless coach (sorry bro) said something about their flaws, they manage to correct it effortlessly without any struggles, unlike our MC. It’s very obvious who the anime cared enough to put some thought into the stories of certain characters and which characters to just slide in for the sake of the show to keep up its team figure skating plot.
I honestly thought this anime would have been better had it been single skating instead, especially since you could throw out any other side character in the show and still make it make sense on the larger spectrum of things (Maeshima vs Shinozaki). The idea of Shinozaki’s younger brother, Sasugai being the coach for Maeshima in order to beat Shinozaki would have been a good enough plot as it is, minus the team stuff.
Overall, this anime is decent, but nothing special. There were many moments that I loved the performances, but there were also a handful where I skipped scenes because they held no relevancy to the main plot and were overall bland.
