Thank you for being clickbaited into reading this review. I do hope you understand just what you have let yourself in for with Tribe Nine.

Realistically you probably know all that there is to know about this title simply by reading the summary, so the remainder of this review is going to be nothing but a collosal waste of time. What I will say to preface this is that I hope you don't want me to talk about the show Tribe Nine in this review because I could not tell you a thing that happens in this show.

Anyway, here's a clip from the show.
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Many things come to mind when watching this clip. A great many things. The first however is probably something similar to what I and many other fools brave enough to venture into this show experienced. A character in the show itself expertly puts it like this.
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Yes, often the very first thing that is noted about Tribe Nine is the complete and perfect inability to process any of the dialogue due to the student rave occurring just off-camera at all times. One might assume that this was an editing mistake - an outtake perhaps, accidentally looked over in the editing room. Worse production issues have happened in anime before. By episode 5, this thought process could only have been held on to by a viewer absolutely off their mind on copium. However, I am pleased to report that the sound mixing does indeed make you feel like you are being pelted across the face by a flaming metal baseball travelling at one hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, so if this was the intention then congratulations.

You may be wondering how I know what this feels like - well, according to the show the idea of having your jaw unwillingly relocated to the back of your skull appears to be nothing more than a mild inconvenience; the kind one brushes off with a laugh and smile before jovially moving on with one's day. You will see many such situations including a character that gets shot in the abdomen at point blank range, a character that gets run over by a train, and a character that detonates a high-powered explosive device less than two metres away from them which then causes the highway to crumble to pieces and cover them in debris (don't worry - they're fine two episodes later).

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There are no stakes in this story. There are no characters in this story. There are no places in this story. There are, however, many elements that try very hard to pretend to be characters and places. Take this one for example.

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This story element is ostensibly a "character" named Haru. He's pretty cute. Has a nice hat. At the beginning of the story he is a bit of a crybaby and a wimp, however by the end he has found the strength to have confidence in himself, thanks to his new friends at the Minato Tribe. This is perhaps everything I could possibly tell you about him. Let's check his anilist.co page in order to find out some more about him.
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Well... we learned some new information at least. He is apparently "boring" and born on January the 20th.

Many other replicants performing the best "human" impressions that their programming is capable of suffer similar fates. Kamiya Shun is very good at baseball and used to be violent but isn't anymore. Taiga is a tuna fisherman who is very strong but he isn't very smart. Saori is a girl. Kamiki is a girl who can kick things. The judge robots are...

Actually, let's talk about the main conceit of the show, which is the baseball. Keen readers may have spotted that thus far we have made very little mention of the baseball in this show, and there is a good reason for that. It is because this show is not about baseball - it is about Extreme Baseball, which is actually just street fights but one of the people doing the fighting has a baseball in their hand the whole time. Also there are some other rules that don't matter because every team just breaks the rules all the time and there are zero consequences for their actions. That is, every team except the good guys, whose main philosophy is that Extreme Baseball is a pure, fun sport that should be played by everyone (image unrelated).

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``Actions that are legal in Extreme Baseball. ``Actions that are not legal in Extreme Baseball.

There are many different kinds of superpowers present, just like in real baseball. For example, the leader of the biker gang tribe uses the special technique of covering the ball with gasoline and lighting it on fire, before launching it at his opponent using his bare hands. I believe this was the same move used by top Google result when you type in "famous Japanese baseball player" Ichiro Suzuki in the 1995 playoffs against the S.O.S Brigade. Other superpowers include missing the ball so wildly that the bat forms its own gravitational field - redirecting the ball in the direction of the swing, punching/kicking the ball with such force that the bat will explode upon impact, and of course the greatest superpower of them all: the ability to cheat by turning off the judge robots. Perhaps somebody should have thought of that before allowing them to be deployed to mediate all Extreme Baseball matches throughout the entirety of Neo Tokyo.

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``Oh yeah by the way Extreme Baseball was initially enacted as a law because gang warfare had grown too rampant and violent to be contained so the government just decided to make them all play baseball instead.

There are many aspects that I have had to gloss over for the sake of brevity such as the infrastructure of Neo Tokyo, who apparently have commonplace and unremarkable anti-gravity technology, and the numerous times a female character responds to being touched/groped/walked in on with all of the fiery fury of a 200W microwave oven. There is a lot to unpack in this wild, unfocused mess of a show that sort of belies itself with its visual and audio presentation (the actual mixing of the tracks left aside). Anyway, the real meat of the review is here. We all knew that this question had to be asked eventually.

``What is the AMQ value of Tribe Nine?
An age-old question for any show, and this show's instance, the answer is... mixed. All of the songs are very good (in particular the ED - I am quite a big fan of this song).

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There are also a whopping six insert songs in the last two episodes alone, which is incredibly great value for a 12-episode show. However, on the other side of the coin, these songs are instantly recognisable as Tribe Nine. A wonderful feature for a soundtrack to have, and yet hinders more than it helps on the anarchic battleground of the AMQ lobby. It may be worth watching just the final two episodes in order to really get familiar with each tribe's unique theme song.

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Pictured: the planning room seventy-eight minutes before Tribe Nine episode one airs.

This is not a particularly good television show. But it is very funny in places. In other places it is really boring. In most places it seems intent on making the viewer ask "um... i-is that allowed...?" every five seconds. But was it worth watching?

No. Watch Gamers! instead.