madilyn32 - 2016-12-23 08:47:41

One of my favorite sports anime so far. Echizen Ryoma is one badass kid who makes tennis look awesome and fun to watch at. I just love his personality. “made made dane” when u hear this u know some shit is about to go down.

jordi.lynch - 2016-06-17 21:22:13

Probably the most popular tennis anime to date. With its reserved, talented and very charming protagonist Echizen Ryouma, Prince of Tennis attempts to deliver a fairly unique approach on the usual 'from nobody to legend' shõnen recipe. What exactly there is to expect from this anime will be further elaborated in the following paragraphs.

Characters:
To begin with, it is absolutely important to note that the main focus of a sports anime is not the realistic mental development of characters, including their interactions with others or the impact events leave on said characters. However, it is undeniably saddening to see such one-dimensional characters being redundantly depicted in the same fashion throughout roughly 170 episodes. A viewer should be able to expect at the very least a minimal amount of consistency or attempts of development, apart from physical training in order to gain fancy superhero moves, which, unfortunately, is definitely not fulfilled in Prince of Tennis. Ironically, it seems the filler episodes had a profounder (please note that I am using 'profound' in a mocking manner) level of psychological development than the main series since, during the Invitational Arc, the main character was partly forced to rediscover his desire and drive for improvement, which might not be the Holy Grail of character developing techniques, but still an attempt. And even this tiny 'issue' was quickly solved by having the protagonist 'coincidentally' see the filler arc villain aggressively beat one of the main character's former enemies in a tennis match. For the sake of not turning this into a overly long 'rant', I won't go into further details when it comes to the side characters, as they are obviously nothing more than completely plain 'living' stereotypes.

Development:  3/10
Complexity:  1/5
Authenticity:  0/5

Total:  4/20

Story:

As I have taken the filler episodes into consideration during my critique on the characters, I will have to do the same for the story. Unfortunately this ultimately results in a good number of plot holes, badly written 'coincidences' and boring repetitions without any story progress. Just to give a tiny example, during Seigaku's training camp, Inui mentions not having brought any of his 'terrifying' juice and in the next episode, he magically has the juice ready to 'beat a bear' quite literally. Obviously this has absolutely nothing to do with tennis and yet it's a plot hole, which undeniably is the result of bad writing. It is not difficult at all to find all sorts of these throughout the whole anime, which is why I won't go into too much details. As for the complexity of the story, it is fairly simple and yet so irregular due to its twisting nature of having it change its course so often, which inevitably results in a tremendous and confusing lack of overview. To me, it appears the author or studio had multiple ideas and never could really decide what to do next, which leads to inconsistencies and overall confusion at times. All in all, the main plot is somewhat open in the air (young Japanese tennis prodigy goes back to Japan for seemingly no reason and joins the tennis club of a Junior High, stays there for roughly a year and goes back to the US again). How much sense all of these events have? Practically none as most of the tennis matches are decided by who owns the stronger or most unbeatable power moves, which obviously has nothing to do with real tennis. It is much more comparable to DBZ on a tennis court. Funnily enough, the matches sometimes feel just as long as the battles in DBZ. Overall, somewhat entertaining, but definitely not satisfying.

Complexity:  1/5
Captivity:  3/5
Plausibility:  0/5

Total:  4/15

Harmony:

Fortunately, this is Prince of Tennis' clearest strong point. With catchy music, appropriately fitting animations and an overall captivating competitive atmosphere, it becomes clear that this anime very well fulfills its role as an entertainer. Despite the relatively outdated, quirky and repetitive scenes, the animations are very enjoyable.

Music:  5/5
Animations:  3/5

Total:  8/10

Bonus:

As there aren't that many tennis anime and especially with Prince of Tennis being one of the first one's out there, it can be considered relatively original. Obviously it's still the same old sport/shõnen formula with some small tweaks and variations, which is why I'll give Prince of Tennis 3 out of 5 originality points.

Conclusion:

Overall rating:  4/10   OR   2 out of 5 possible stars.

(Calculation:  19 (out of possible 50 points) / 5 = 3,8 (out of possible 10 points))

ghickle - 2013-11-15 22:31:09

"The series revolves around a 12-year-old tennis prodigy named Ryoma Echizen, who moves back to his native Japan in order to attend his father's alma mater Seishun Academy, a private middle school famous for its strong tennis team." Prince of Tennis grows on you yekno? As an anime fan, I have came across various sports anime and this is probably in my top 3, if not my favorite. Story is interesting and intense at certain moments, and even the filler is quite comical. Like I said, Prince of Tennis grows on you, give it a chance.