This anime is incredible yet plain. Going into this anime, I had little to no interest in Baseball. However, I seemed to enjoy this more and more as I watched. In essence, Catch Me at the Ballpark is a really entertaining slice of life show. Following Ruriko, a beer vendor at Motorsuns Ballpark.
Catch Me at the Ballpark! does a great job blending its comedy into the plot of each episode. The jokes never seem distracting and sometimes even help the plot. While there aren’t too many characters, they still fill out the cast with a diverse number of tropes that all fit around the Ballpark theme. Though admittedly If I hadn’t slowly developed a few inside jokes between my friends, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the comedy as much. I got lucky with none of the reoccurring gags being something I didn’t like.
What bothers me the most about this anime is the way it portrays itself in it's marketing. It tries to sell you into this Idea that it’s a new entry into the “teasing genre” which it does seem like for a while. But the focus is more on this episodic showcase of different happenings in the ballpark. In no way is this romance between Ruriko and the Salaryman Murata the actual selling point of the story.
Ruriko: As the main character, her cute yet childish behavior is incredibly entertaining. The perfect vehicle to move the story along, having the ability to interact with both Motorsuns employees and Fans watching the game. Her tendency to spot Murata and immediately try to talk to him and tease Is a bit distracting, but it isn’t a dealbreaker for her character.
Dennis Young: The unfortunate main victim of my own personal inside jokes surrounding this series. As a foreigner type character, he is pretty good. Dennis was basically the focus of my attention whenever an episode had him in it. The main gag that he has in this anime is that he spots Ruriko once and develops a small crush, causing him to get distracted in many scenarios sometimes messing up the team’s chance to win innings. The foreigner voice acting was pretty alright whenever him or Brian (the other foreigner) spoke.
Both of these greatly compliment this anime and it's baseball theme. You typically see anime with weirdly generic or unrelated openings but both the OP and the ED fit well within the baseball theme. The ending is a bit flashy but I warmed up to it after a while.
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This about wraps up what I wanted to talk about with this series. I’m not that great of a reviewer but I just thought it would be nice to start putting my voice out there on my thoughts for some anime that I watch.
8.5 out of 11 users liked this review
