As I've already confessed in a previous review, my favorite sport is baseball.
Of all different sorts of baseball, Japanese "yakyuu" is my favorite (in a nutshell: no doping - or at least much much less than in the MLB; less muscles and more brains; nobody munching tobacco and spitting it on the field, etc. etc.).
And of all different types of Japanese "yakyuu", my favorite is precisely high school baseball.
Why? Because it's poetic, pure, epic...it's Sport with a capital "s", sport as it *should* be.
Now, the Japanese have a whole genre dedicated to sports-related stories, called "supokon", and since baseball is (one of) the national sport(s), you can guess that the vast majority of "supokon" are about baseball, and particularly about high school baseball, 'cause Japanese *love* it and the Koushien's final game is basically the Japanese equivalent of the Superbowl in the States!
So does all that mean that there's nothing really new in this story? Could be, yeah.
Does that make it any less fabulous? Hell no!
A good recipe doesn't necessarily need any fancy ingredients to make for a delicious dish; more often than not, it's precisely the simple, good old ones that are the best of the lot!
As is the case with this "Gekokujo Kyuji": all the tropes of the genre are there, but still, you can't help but enjoying *every single minute* of it! Marvelously written, acted, directed. Production value reached Himalayan heights. The message conveyed was simply beautiful.
Jeez, I finished watching it before Christmas, but I'm still getting goosebumps thinking about it now, so good it was!!! ^______^;;;
Highly and wholeheartedly recommended! Perfect 10 all the way!!!