- Love All Play Analysis -

This analysis contains spoilers

"If you want to go quick go alone, but to go far one must go together."

A sports anime that ambitiously attempts to crush two years of high school badminton into 24 episodes. As you'd expect it's rushed and matches don't have much weight to them. Part of what makes an enjoyable sports anime is seeing the matches play out with strategy with good buildup between the players in the match. Love All Play doesn't have that impact, it's hollow.

Same can be stated for the characters, outside of their initial introductions, nobody stands out in particular as interesting. There are twins, they are super happy and energetic, as you'd expect they love playing doubles, that's their strength. Halfway into the series one of the twins becomes conflicted wondering if his passion in badminton is real, but he gets over it fast and the twins don't change personality wise.

There's the straightforward Sakaki who relies on power and isn't the smartest tool in the shed, yeah as you can tell all these characters are just troupes. He plays doubles with the MC of Love All Play Ryou, who is exactly what you'd picture of when thinking of a shonen sports anime MC, so I'm skipping over him on purpose. What's there to say? Ryou's biggest strength is his love for badminton and works the hardest to make his dreams come true, yeah we've seen this play a million times folks. Back to Sakaki, he has lots of siblings and works at his families western-style restaurant, as such he's a caring, considerate person, he teams up with Ryou simply because he loves the way he plays. As a team they're not a great match, but they have fun playing.

Alright we need a kuudere as everyone else is cheerful, oh perfect here comes Matsuda. As you'd expect he goes through the same character arc that each and every kuudere embarks on, but hey that's better than the majority of the other characters. He starts off cold and distant believing that everything needs to be done by himself. He's like this because his father (Matsuda's only real family member) is always working so he's always been alone and did everything solo. Yes, the lone wolf troupe. Over the series Matsuda learns being with friends is valuable. This does breed my favorite quote in the series let me paraphrase. "If you want to go quick go alone, but to go far one must go together." Through the power of friendship he wins his final match, wowie.

The final character of note is team ace Yusa, a player when first joining the team was told by his coach to never lose again. As his driving force to never falter, plus his ambition to date Rika, (MC Ryou's sister) Yusa cannot lose again and has to become a triple crown winner in nationals. Yeah, this dude has some major expectations put onto his shoulders. I liked his VA work him saying "Come On!" always got a laugh out of me with the weird pitch it was at. In the beginning of the anime he's presented as a total asshole but he was like that to push his team to be better. During the final match between Yusa and Ryou, (which dang the animation was pretty good!) Yusa kept his promise and we get to see Yusa with Rika a year later in the aftermath, how cute. Imagine playing hard to get so badly and still getting the ace, only Yusa the simp would follow that pussy to that extent...

Love All Play isn't worth much of a watch. Even from a sports simps pov it's mediocre at best and was difficult to watch most of the time cause I was bored. It didn't help that the OST was cheesy and generic, wish I could turn it off at times. In contrast the sound design of the badminton being played was exceptional, give whoever did the sound design a raise!

In all, the lesson to learn is, don't force 2 years of high school sports into 24 episodes you're setting yourself up for failure, simping does work if you're a generational talent, and of course friendship is magic, good riddance, don't need to have this series in my head space no more.