Positive
*If you saw my Summer 2017 preview that I did 3 months ago, you remember that I described the, than upcoming, Summer season as a season of new concepts. There were a lot of anime’s coming out with concepts that I hadn’t seen before. And NMSB was one of those. I personally had not seen an anime before where quizzing was the main theme. Anime’s about card games that I had seen before but pure quizzing was something new. So, you will hear this again in some upcoming reviews, I will always give extra credit to anime’s who go outside the “comfort zone”, who go away from the “normal” anime themes and try something new.
For a video review, check out my Youtube channel. Link on my profile page.
*And going further on that, they didn’t choose the easiest theme with quizzing. Actual physical sports contain way more excitement of their own and are therefor easier to adapt into an anime.
*A second positive point was that , as I pointed out in my First Impressions of this anime, I could immediately guess that this was a TMS Entertainment anime. It had the same atmosphere, the same use of inner monologues and the same decent animation that I’ve seen in other TMS anime’s. NMSB had very solid animation, nothing too spectacular but the animation was very clean and solid. I didn’t notice a single mistake or roughness in this anime.
Negative
*Now the main issue with this anime was that it was way too short to reach its full potential. Competitive based anime like NMSB need way more time than 12 episodes to grow. Look at other sports anime’s: Yowamushi Pedal going into season 4, Haikyuu 3 seasons, Kuroko no Basket 3 seasons. All these anime’s got lots of time and a sports anime needs that to make the characters grow.
Now, especially Koshiyama, hasn’t had real development. He grew slightly in the understanding of the sport quiz bowl but he still has so much hidden potential. Maybe we will get to see that in a second season, that will depend on the popularity of NMSB cause look where YowaPeda is now.
*Something that I briefly touched earlier was the excitement. I did feel that NMSB was way less exciting than other sports anime. With an anime like YowaPeda I could sit on the tip of my seat of anticipation because it was so exciting. True, that’s also partially because I’m a cycling freak, but there was so much more adrenaline flowing in that anime while NMSB was a very composed anime. There was never a real thrill imo.
*And a final thing that I want to mention, I don’t know if this was ever a goal of the anime so I’m just going to throw this out. One of the things that is key to quizzing is that you learn stuff, before and during the quiz. In NMSB you didn’t have the chance to do that. Questions were racing by so fast that picking anything up was really hard. But this is pure personal statement of mine since it could perfectly be that that was never even a goal of the story.
Conclusion
So as a conclusion, NMSB was a new take to the competitive anime genre but it missed a bit of excitement and adrenaline. Also it was way too short to give any proper development to our characters. This is an anime that would need, at least, another one or two seasons to really reach its full potential. So that’s why I rating Nana Maru San Batsu at 3 stars. If TMS makes a continuation of this anime, I would happily follow it and who knows if it will become a new hit anime. I don’t think anyone expected YowaPeda to become as big as it is today.
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