This Week in Anime

How Does Kuroko's Basketball Keep it Fresh?

Jean-Karlo
Hey Steve, wouldn't it be crazy if we practiced basketball so much we started dating hahaha unless....?

Netflix has recently started airing Kuroko's Basketball, complete with an English dub. Today, Steve and I will be going over the first seven episodes of this shonen sports series. And I gotta say, for someone who doesn't give a rip about sports at large, Kuroko's Basketball is pretty good at selling the game as a fun time!

So, here's the rundown: Taiga—that's the big redhead up there—joins Seiren High School's basketball club after having studied in America for a few years. He's automatically one of the most gifted students in the team thanks to his height, strength, and seemingly limitless potential for growth. But in joining the team, he meets the meek and unimpressive Kuroko. It turns out, Kuroko was the ghost member of a Middle-school Dream Team: the Generation of Miracles, a legendary team of middle school players who have gone on to major acclaim in youth basketball.

Kuroko is, at first glance, pretty unimpressive at basketball. He's not very fast or strong, and has horrible aim. But he excels at support play, using clever misdirection to keep the ball out of the opposing team's hands—and once he gets the ball, it's a snap to put it into Taiga's capable hands...

Watching Kuroko's Basketball made me think of FFXIV, particularly since I've picked it up a few weeks ago--shout out to my Cream guildies in Cactuar! See, FFXIV suffers from a pretty terrible lack of Healers. Everyone wants to play the cool DPS characters, but good healers like me are rare as gold. And sure, the reasoning why is simple: playing a healer solo is dull, and being DPS is fun and flashy. But every team needs a support. Kuroko helps illustrate that: it's not that Kuroko's team is necessarily garbage without Kuroko, but once he gets onto the floor he makes good plays better, and makes great teammates like Taiga greater.

The resulting dynamic is fascinating, particularly since it helps Kuroko's Basketball stand out from that other classic Shonen Jump basketball manga, Slam Dunk. There, the powerful Sakuragi had to learn to swallow his ego and practice the basics; all the raw dunking ability was worthless if he couldn't even do a layup, because the opposing team wasn't just gonna let him dunk. Here, the emphasis is emphatically the opposite: it's not Taiga's keen eye that wins the day, nor is it Kuroko being the ultimate support player. It's the dynamic between both themselves as individuals and as teammates, plus the rest of the team having their back, that makes them such a powerful team.

It also helps that he's backed by Taiga, who's a very refreshing shonen protagonist. He won my heart early on with his outlook on playing with tougher opponents--it's impossible to psyche Taiga out with the threat of losing a game, because he openly invites it as a learning experience. He's gung-ho about basketball, but confident enough in his ability that he can accept a loss and learn from it. IRL adults lack that kind of insight!

A lot of readers warmed up to Taiga as well. Taiga/Kuroko became a titanic ship for a reason!

Girls love them some sweaty, sweaty boys, even if they don't have any nipples.

I also appreciate that the team's coach, Riko, isn't blatantly thirsty like Gou was in Free!. Not that there's anything wrong with thirst, it just feels a little too much like a piss take when your show is laying on the hunks so hard. Here, Riko just really likes cultivating talent; her father helped perfect training regimens, so she likes min-maxing her teammates.

Our first seven episodes lets us see two games: the first against one of Kuroko's ex-teammates, Ryota Kise. It covers the Shonen archetype of "the guy that totally underestimates the newbie and has to eat humble pie through a straw".

That first game does a lot to establish important things. For starters, we learn Kuroko can only really keep up his misdirection for less than 40 minutes—he can't keep his shtick up for a whole game. For another, the non-Kuroko/non-Taiga players aren't slouches, and they can hold their own if one or the other are indisposed.

It gets reinforced even further in their second game, where they go up against a team with a foreign player from Senegal. And, sure, Papa Mbaye Siki is huge, but the show takes time to illustrate that without a team that rises up to meet him he's just one big guy on the floor, and Kuroko can make his team dance circles around him.

The most important bit is having characters you want to root for that don't feel like they've been done to death—we have that immediately with Kuroko and Taiga. Theirs is a refreshing, entertaining dynamic and it'll be fun to see them grow together as friends and teammates as the series goes on.

The remaining Generation of Miracles teammates are also a delight to look forward to, if only because it'll be nice to see what their more off-kilter shticks will be, or what their defining traits are as players. So yeah, Kuroko's Basketball is a great sports anime; don't let the subject matter push you away.

It's just the sports anime equivalent of dudes in Fist of the North Star having several gallons of blood in just their pinkies. We'll be seeing scores way higher than that come the championship!