HANEBADO!

The person you see across the net is nothing but but a reflection of yourself. Your opponent has put the same work and effort to reach till this stage. And he won't back down easily, and neither will you. That's what Hanebado! was about.....I guess. Or that is what it was hoping to be but it failed miserably.

So Hanebado starts strongly with a match between the two protagonists leaving the viewers with the question "Why do i work so hard for something". It was a match between Hanesaki Ayano and Aragaki Nagisa where the technically gifted Ayano just steams over Nagisa winning the second set 21-0. Nagisa was hugely effected by this result as she had started questioning her abilities. And to make matters more interesting, When Nagisa is in her second year of high school she gets a new junior player who enters her badminton club. And guess who? It's Ayano. Though Ayano didn't want to get into the Badminton club but was forced by her friend and the new club coach who saw a lot of potential in her. Ayano had left Badminton after the tournament in which She and Nagisa had a match due to some personal reasons. Reason which traumatized her till date and made her wonder "What do I play Badminton for". Now Hanebado continues from here to the journey for both Nagisa and Ayano to get over their traumas and find the answer to why they play badminton.

The Plot looked promising and was well portrayed at the start of the anime. A bit overdramatic but it looked like Hanebado was going to be the dark horse of this season. But then as the story progressed and we got to know more about Ayano's past , the plot started to feel overexaggerated. And then we got the Dark Ayano and though i liked that character of her, from a story stand point Hanebado was going downhill.

Though the story was pretty mediocre I still enjoyed Hanebado for i have played interschool Badminton and an anime based on the game would ofcourse arouse my interest and for the most part as far as badminton is considered hanebado was good. It sometimes went into the details of how to deal with a stronger opponent by playing at your tempo and being unpredictable. And it also showed the reality of that most of the times technique does win over passion. The Art Styles was great and I would recommend people to check out this anime just because of that too. The creators put in a lot of effort making many frames for a single scene because the matches looked fluid and smooth and were a treat to watch. The music was fine. The OP was good but nothing worth noticing. Though i would say the music did play part in overdramatizing the show.

So Overall Hanebado was an Anime for which I had high hopes for after the first few episodes but it didn't live up to them. It was Enjoyable I'll give it that but sports anime usually are enjoyable. But I might still recommend it because of the amazing work done in the match scenes where the staff must have worked their ass off to keep up such a high frames per second ratio.