Ookiku Furikabutte 26: Fanservice Extra???

The woes of the well-endowed women of baseball...

I managed to watch less than half of the chinese subs for this DVD only episode when it first came out (my combined Japanese and Chinese comprehension obviously being way below subpar). Seleria's post on it gave the impression that the only thing worth watching in the episode was 'sexeh bodeh' so I left it on the backburner for a while... Almost forgetting about it till Central Anime released English subs (Thankfully, or there'd be a bunch of dialogue that would've blown past my head, like the following:)

Thank God Central Anime for subs!

The episode is really a peek into the Musashino baseball team, from the perspective of one of the team members who feels that their team has no chance in advancing past the first round in Koshien, hence it would be 'embarrassing' for them to train as seriously as Haruna does. In the end, Haruna uses some psychological trickery to show the guy the power of GIVING IT ALL YOU'VE GOT and inspires the team captain and the rest of their team to GIVE IT ALL THEY'VE GOT as well, which leads to the team's victory in their first game of the season. Huzzah. To me what was interesting to see was the lengths the characters would go in order to advance themselves in baseball, especially in selecting the schools they want to enter based on the school's team/grounds, etc. (this was touched upon in the previous ep as well) I suppose the concept is rather foreign to someone who was never that into sports and dreaded Physical Education in school as a chore like me =P

It doesn't matter if you win or lose... as long as YOU GIVE IT ALL YOU'VE GOT!!

They managed to introduce some of the Musashino team members, but being a one-off episode (unless Musashino faces off against Nishiura later on in a future season... Oh wait, better not get ahead of myself there...) my brain hardly registered any of their names (it's hard enough keeping track of the Nishiura's!) save for Haruna (duh) and Suzune, the manager. Thankfully, like Momokan, she has a personality to match her, uh, assets (If Shinooka followed this trend, it's would give the impressions that OoFuri's all about the balls and boobs *swt*). As for Haruna, watching his crush on Suzune being, well crushed by the revelation that she's dating the team captain (whom he doesn't get along with!), was well worth watching the episode for :P

~USO~DA?

Haruna chanelling Mihashi??? Priceless XD

Though we never got to see a MihashiVSHaruna showdown in the anime (has it or will it happen in the manga? Should I consider reading it???), the above scene totally made up for it XD

All in all, a nice epilogue of sorts to an already awesome series, and thankfully I didn't find it a disappointment like Seleria did (well, I did have the advantage of being informed that there was no Mihashi, Abe or Tajima in the episode, so my expectations were suitably adjusted =P) as Haruna-centric the episode was (my blood still boils remembering the scene where he smugly thinks he's 'won' against Abe when he first meets Mihashi in all his flightiness in the bathroom. Grrr...). I'm still crossing fingers for another season some time in the future though... (Then again, said fingers have been crossed a LONG time for another installment of Ouran amongst other things...)