I’m going to start this review by saying that I am not good at this, but this manga was just too good I had to try, and that I’m going to be 100% biased so don’t expect “objectivity”.

Keijo!!!!!!!! Hip Whip Girl is an action sport shounen manga about a fictional sport called Keijo where girls fight each other using only their breasts and butts, if they use her limbs, fall into the water, or fall to the ground they lose. Of course, they all do this wearing swimsuits. Sounds like a great ecchi concept, right?
On paper, yes.
The thing is, Keijo’s sex appeal is pretty much only there as bait, it worked on me after all. The girls are hot, and they got nice swimsuits, but it really focuses on the action and character motivations that there’s no room for ecchi besides some comedy scenes. Don’t go in expecting that it’ll focus on showing how hot they are.

I want to talk about 3 aspects: plot, characters and setting. There’s probably going to be spoilers here so be careful.

The story is about Nozomi Kaminashi, a girl who falls in love with the sport Keijo and wants to become a pro to earn a lot of money so that she and her family won’t be poor anymore. She meets a girl named Sayaka Miyata, who will become her rival and main motivation to keep getting stronger.
Both of them enroll in the Setouchi Academy to learn how to play properly and graduate so they can be real players. They eventually get to their graduation event, which is a competition against East Japan’s Suruga Academy, where they are victorious and become B-class players (rather than starting at C-class).
Nozomi realizes during her first official match that out there in the real world it’s not going to be easy if she wants to get promoted to A-class. After a lot of practice with her new senpai, she gets to A-class and gets involved in a series of problems that end up with Nozomi saying she’ll beat the top 5 players in Japan: The Goketsu.
This is a pretty simplified version of the story, but it’s quite nice in my opinion. Might be the standard shounen formula, but it has more than enough to compensate for that. The last third does feel rushed, but that’s what I’ll talk about later.

Next is the characters. The main characters are, as previously mentioned, Nozomi Kaminashi and Sayaka Miyata, with more focus on the former. Those 2 aside, there are plenty of supporting characters (of course some more important than others, like Maya Sakashiro or Sumire Sakuragi) who are all relevant to Nozomi and Sayaka’s growth as players, and they all play an important part in their respective arcs.
There’s not much for me to say here besides mentioning that most if not all of them are pretty likable in their own ways and that the author doesn’t forget them later on like what happens with a lot of manga.
Nozomi Kaminashi is one of my favorite protagonists of all time.

Then comes the setting. Keijo!!!!!!!! is set during 2003 Japan, where Keijo is legalized as a gambling sport like horse races. Most of the action happens on the “Lands”, which are the floating platforms in the Keijo stadiums. There’s a nice variety, some of them got environmental hazards and others are the standard flat land, but the most exciting races happen in the lands that have special qualities.
The stadiums always get filled with people cheering on the players, I wish I could be there. As for the sport itself, I really love the bizarre and ridiculous aspect it has. The players’ techniques are quite fun to see, and they are crazy as if magic was real.
I never got bored with this setting.

The bad thing about Keijo!!!!!!!! is that it wasn’t popular, so it had low sales. This eventually caused the anime to flop (+ the bad advertising), resulting on Sorayomi’s editor telling him it had to get cancelled. Add that Sorayomi had asked for more assistants multiple times since he had one, and Shogakukan denying them, it ended up in the story getting rushed at the end since the manga got axed.
I think it had a lot of potential to continue, especially with the final race, but it just didn’t happen.

In the end, I can only be grateful to Sorayomi-sensei for creating such a masterpiece.