Winter 2022 First Impressions – Tribe Nine

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Mixed media (also includes a smartphone game and webtoon)

Episode Summary: In Neo Tokyo, battles between youth gangs steadily got out of hand until in the sport of Extreme Baseball was instilled as the official conflict resolution method of record. Now these gangs, called “tribes,” battle out their differences on the baseball diamond (and the surrounding city, usually). Haru is a bullied kid who doesn’t feel like he has the strength to fight back against his tormenters, but a chance meeting with Taiga, a tuna fisherman with a desire to play Extreme Baseball, and Shun Kamiya, considered to be the Minato Tribe’s ace player, changes the course of Haru’s destiny.

When the Minato Tribe is approached by representatives of a rival group and challenged to a game, the laid-back Shun volunteers both newbies to help represent them on the team. Haru is terrified by the sort of power on display – Extreme Baseball allows the use of various enhancements to provide players with superhuman strength, and their current opponents are heavily invested in these sorts of tools. Haru is scared to step up to the plate, but some advice from Shun and the fact that his eyesight and reflexes are much better than most allows Haru to survive the inning while Shun cleans things up. Haru feels a change in himself, and decides to remain a member of the Minato Tribe (and its team) after all.

Impressions: Anime has several stories in which conflicts both personal and international and fought out in some sort of proxy battle. The nation-based mecha battles of Gigantic Formula and G Gundam fulfill the fantasy that governments might actually abide by some less-bloody form of warfare, whereas the government in 86 simply hides the reality of its conflict behind self-soothing propaganda. Most of your basic card-game anime is the same sort of idea, only portrayed in microcosm between a few characters, and the rap battles of Hypnosis Mic are nothing if not iconic. Tribe Nine takes the familiar sport of baseball and twists it to this same purpose, in the process turning what some people (me, it’s me) might call a pretty boring game into something absolutely ridiculous and fun.

Readers might recall that I recently criticized Futsal Boys!!!!! for being too over-the-top in the way that its characters seemed to have occasional access to shounen anime special sports moves. The reason why those moments tend to take on an air of falsehood in a series like that is because its narrative and its emotional content are mostly based in reality, thus goofy power moves don’t fit well within that framework. On the other hand, if a series is absolutely ridiculous from square one… well, I’m sure you can fill in the rest. Having been conceived by Kazutaka Kodaka of the Dangan Ronpa game series and one of my favorite recent series Akudama Drive, it seems only natural that this very unique sports series would be destined to go off the rails in creative ways almost immediately, as with its predecessors. And yes, the ridiculous technology, the goofy super moves, and the huge character personalities fit this show like a glove.

While I often use too many words to talk about the anime that I’m watching, there are moments where words simply can’t do the experience justice. While Tribe Nine is neither highbrow nor complex, its gleeful, blunt force treatment of its themes (which for now, seem to amount to “you should stick up for yourself” and “don’t sell yourself short”) has a certain charm all its own. I had a wide, goofy grin plastered on my face throughout the second half of this episode, and that might serve as my best recommendation.

Pros: The series exhibits a certain visual through-line that appropriately recalls elements of Akudama Drive and Dangan Ronpa. The series shares its character designer with those other two properties, while the glowing neon and larger-than-life scale of the city feels somewhat indebted to Akudama (though admittedly somewhat less cohesive and refined). Yet, as much as it has in common with its cousins, it also draws some of its movement style from mecha series like Gurren Lagann and its spiritual predecessors, at least when it comes to some of the very mecha-like transformations that take place later in the episode. It’s a mish-mash of different things that are just fun to look at, so it make sense that the package deal retains this trait.

Cons: While it’s not nearly the most egregious I’ve seen, there’s a dumb moment of fanservice-y material partway through the episode that doesn’t appear to serve a real purpose (do they ever?). Haru trips and falls into Saori’s thighs, resulting in a moment of embarrassment for both. Saori is roughly unscathed, but I gather that the suggestion is that Haru’s generally skittish nature also implies a certain sexual inexperience or lack of sexual prowess? I feel as though there’s some odd mixed messaging going on in just that brief moment that doesn’t really do much to actually speak to the reality of Haru’s character.

Content Warnings: Fanservice (mild). Cartoonish violence (this basically encompasses the entirety of the baseball games, from what I can tell). Bullying.

Would I Watch More? – Overall I was pretty impressed by this premiere, and was really getting into it by the end of the episode. There are a couple of hurdles for it to navigate, but the creative visuals and the gleeful twist on baseball were a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to more.