Try Knights

kyozaii Oct 25, 2019

0.5

This show fails massively as a sports anime and its disappointing because I had great expectations for it. The manga has a cool art style/concept and is apparently better, GONZO just failed to deliver a good adaptation. The animation was very low budgeted and painfully noticeable... it threw me off from the very first episode. The storyline and characters were pretty much mundane and I hoped for a redeeming quality in any way or form but I couldn’t move past the 3rd episode... if you’re a lover of sports anime don't bother watching!

Sabure Nov 2, 2019

1

Even though this series is based off of a manga, realisitically Try Knights was created solely to capitalized on Japan hosting the 2019 Rugby World Cup. So in a way it felt like a 12-episode advertisement for the sporting event. The effort used in the making of Try Knights pretty much proves this. The main story focuses on a pair of rugby-playing brothers with different attitudes and career paths. The older brother has a superiority complex and views the younger brother as unfit to play the sport. The older brother prefers atleticism while the younger brother favors a more tactical approach to the sport (which was explained by his chess background midway into the series). The younger brother builds a team at his new school with a bunch of raw, rowdy players - some are actually very skilled in the sport - to take down the more prestigious powerhouse school the older brother and his band of "knights" attend (they even sit in a round table like in medieval times) during the high school tournament. It's a very cliched, uninteresting story which seems to progress very slowly and was hard to watch. The animation was by far the worse part of the series. At times I couldn't tell if the players were playing rugby union or rugby sevens (the shorter version of the game) because the characters were too spaced out on the pitch, and there wasn't much physical contact in a sport known for being pretty brutal. The scenes of the actual gameplay were hard to watch, and most of the time it looked like still-motion animation; there was no fluidity or continuity in the animation, which was very disappointing. I'm led to believe that there was a very small or tight budget set on this series, and the quality showed. It also didn't help that the series was the almagination of a once-strong studio that has seen better days (GONZO) and a studio mostly know for producing hentai (Seven). The characters were pretty cookie-cutter and cliched, typical of any average sports anime. As someone that values character relationships and development, there was none to be found in this series. I coudn't find any character to really root for or support. The OP and ED songs were okay, but nothing special or memorable. The only positive that I can draw out of this series is that they did give out good explanations of some of the basic rules of rugby. So even someone who's new to the sport or has never seen a rugby match can get a decent understanding on how the game works. Rugby is starting to gain popularity in Japan, and this is the second rugby-specific anime out there that I watched (the other is the vastly superior All Out!!). But as far as sports anime goes in general, Try Knights is one of the worst you'll watch.

kieras Apr 2, 2020

6

it wasn't bad but really cliche and something i could get from watching an episode of free. also just little inconsistencies with the animation when people fell and it sort seemed like the ground fell away too only for the fall to continue in the next frame. then the whole 3D look it sometimes had when they panned out when people were running.