Basquash – Gorgeous but Flat

Author: nova

Seems to me that everyone and their grandmother is GAR for Basquash and since there was a vacancy after I decided to drop Saki, I thought it would be a good idea to check it out given some hype I ran across to. This is essentially a crossbreed of Air Gear and Gurren Lagann with just as little depth as the former, half the GAR of the latter and twice the boobs of both. Oh, and the fact that Nike is among the sponsors suggests that the show’s budget probably isn’t too slim either. I don’t know if I should go as far as saying that Basquash is an anime bought with money, but the reality can’t be too far from that scenario. But who cares right? Anime isn’t made out of pure artistic passion – there’s no business like showbusiness.

And so Basquash looks pretty much as good as an anime show can. The CGI work is not Macross Zero-level but certainly fluent and detailed – and above all plenty. Character animation is likewise top of the line and backgrounds are pretty much excellent as well. No problem with music either, it fits right in the youthful atmosphere of the show. Overall whatever problem there may be with Basquash, it does not lie in the audiovisual execution.

The story setting is simple: Mechas called Bigfoots play basketball. The main character Dan hates Bigfoot basketball due to some nasty happening in the past involving his now wheelchair-bound little sister. When the Bigfoot basketball league arrives in town, Dan decides to take it down whatever the cost. Borrowing a Bigfoot from his big-boobed childhood sweetheart and mechanical genius Miyuki he storms the first match, expectedly kicks everyone’s ass and pretty much destroys the arena until cops bust him. After a year in the brig Dan returns home confident that at least the Bigfoot basketball league is dealt with but soon realizes that his plan has backfired – now everyone is crazy for Bigfoot basketball.

That pretty much summarizes the first episode. Now let me get to the part where I start the complaining. Cutting it short, Basquash is flat. It’s an impulsive barrage of gorgeous graphics and funky happenings but it lacks substance which I found annoyingly apparent. It may be for the fact that although the idea of mechas playing basketball sounds original, you can hardly say that the show is pulling off anything really fresh. Like I stated in the very first paragraph, Basquash is essentially Air Gear mixed with Gurren Lagann. It looks awesome, it sounds great, but in the end the whole thing has the depth of an A4 sheet and doesn’t really bring anything new to the scene. If you have read my post on K-ON! you no doubt think by this point that once again silly Nova is contradicting with himself. K-ON! was another example of simply recycling old stuff with just some new paint splashed on. But the difference is that nevertheless K-ON! is pleasant and fun to watch, while I found Basquash mostly quite boring. In K-ON!’s case the cast of adorable girls is working wonders but as a shounen-focused sports show Basquash cannot claim this as its saving grace. Yes, Miyuki has big boobs and they appear on the screen more than enough but aside from her chest topography the show is just simply flat, and not even the delicious kind.

Guess it would’ve worked better back in the day.

TL;DR: Like your average Finnish female linguistics student: Beautiful but dull. And thus Basquash is dropped at least until a batch release is out. If you’re a fan of sports/shounen anime and/or if basketball is close to your heart then to you Basquash will probably be the best thing since the cheese slicer. As I have grown quite tired of the shounen genre, sports have never been among my interests and to me basketball was merely one of the reasons for skipping PE classes in high school, Basquash was definitely a miss in my case.

But okay, maybe I was a bit too biased here. I apologize. So as a form of compensation let me post some boobs so we’ll be over and done with this.

Shit, now I feel like Sankaku Complex.