First Impression – Haikyuu!!

I am beginning to believe that a certain blog group, is secretly a cult to recruit it’s members to praise and share the love of Haikyuu!! All joking on my part aside, Haikyuu!! is an anime I have put off watching for a long time. Which is strange when I think about it. Anime Youtubers and Anibloggers have sung it’s praises for years now and that might have been part of the reason I avoided it. Nearly every time I have gone into a hyped up praised anime over the last few years a lot of the time I have found myself disappointed.

It also seems a lot of the stuff I do find myself really loving there never really seems to be a big audience for it. I’m not saying I hate mainstream anime titles, but I must confess there are a lot of big name mainstream series I don’t like. Back when I was younger it was anime like Bleach and Inuyasha that all my acquaintances that watched anime were talking about. Meanwhile I found myself loving anime like Serial Experiment Lain and Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 and truth be told I don’t see too many people talking about the second, Lain seems to have a cult following on the net these days. Now it is series like Sword Art Online, Re: Zero and Erased that I find myself unable to get into, so the question is this. Have a jumped upon the band wagon that is Haikyuu!!? Or is this another popular series I will walk past and continue watching something else?

Right off the bat I can see the appeal of this series. It is a classic under dog story with an interesting twist with the character of Hinata. He is a character with the drive and the talent to take himself to the top of the sport he loves, which in the case of this series is volleyball. He just lacks two things, height and experience, both of which seem to cause many of those around him to under estimate his potential and I love characters like this! The under estimated under dog is one of my favourite kinds of characters in the sports genre of anime. Characters like Ippo in Hajime no Ippo or Kuroko from Kuroko no Basket are the kind I love because they are just so full of surprises.

I have only seen the first five episodes of this series and so far I am loving what I have seen, so I can definietely say it. Yes I am going to keep watching this series. In fact chances are that when this is posted I will watch a few more eps of this awesome sports anime and I am kicking myself for not watching this sooner!