Manga 35243 Haikyuu Reviews Filter Check 2

Haikyuu is like one of those porcelain dolls that can surely be found at your grandma’s place – it might look nice, but ultimately it lacks point and only takes up space.

Haikyuu is a bit of unusual sports series, though not in a good way. You see, the major driving factor of most of sports anime and manga in terms of both plot progression and drawing the audience attention is either human drama, or insane over the top action, frequently one that non-drawn media could not hope to fully convey. Haikyuu does neither of those – it only has relatively regular matches. And that’s it. ... Practically speaking there is no story in Haikyuu, it’s just a string of matches with brief breaks in between mostly dedicated to training that is even less interesting as no matches. As someone who doesn’t care about volleyball at all, all of the matches felt the same. To be fair, there’s not much of a variety to volleyball unless you spice its fictional version a bit, but that is exactly what the author should have done, as the 45 volumes of unchanged formula with no points of interest are a drag to read.

At this point some might object that the reason that I didn’t like Haikyuu is because I don’t like volleyball and therefore it’s my fault, not the authors. I object – a good sports manga or anime makes you like it even if you do not care about the sport itself – as mentioned the sport is used as a medium for either a good story or adrenaline-filled action, preferably both. I think real life boxing is stupid, but I greatly enjoyed Ashita no Joe, Hajime no Ippo and Megalobox. I couldn’t care less about ballroom dancing but Welcome to the Ballroom got my eyes glued to the screen. I still don’t understand how people think climbing mountains is a good way to spend their free time, but Kokou no Hito was amazing and unique experience. In comparison, Haikyuu felt just like watching regular real life matches and as it would bore me in real life, so it did while I was reading this manga. The structure of Haikyuu reminded me of fanservice-driven manga, just instead of nudity and pantyshots there are ball shots – the lack of overall plot stays the same.

The art is nice and the best part of this manga, though the animation of the adaptation is actually better than the art of the manga. And it too can get a bit stale as you can only make so much various angle shots of Hinata jumping up before it gets repetitive.

The characters are amazingly shallow. The personalities of cast are just (not so much) various takes on “I love volleyball!”. There is no character development in Haikyuu, any development the characters go through is directly tied to their sport skills and how they play volleyball. At one point it did get my hopes up with the time-skip – even though time-skip is usually just a lazier way to shoe in character progress without actually having to show how said progress happened, at least there would be some development, right? For a change it had me actually reading instead of just consuming the text and the pictures. But no, soon enough it turned into another undistinguishable match and then and. The final chapter really felt like those ending credits of the final episode of an old tv series where the fates of various characters was briefly mentioned as this was much budget friendly than actually showing those fates, which was kinda laughable. While the previous plot off Haikyuu could be summarized as “Haha volleyball ball goes WHOOOSH”, the final arc is more like “Now that years have passed I am now stronger than I was before. Haha volleyball ball goes WHOOOSH”.

Overall, I cannot find any reason to read this and I’d go as far as to say this is just a waste of time, but I understand that it might catch the interest of sport nerds and sport players (let’s ignore the fujoshi that make up a huge chunk of the fanbase and it is since it caught the attention of those people that Haikyuu spiked up in popularity), so while my enjoyment of reading this manga was much lower, to be more fair my final rating is 5 out 10.

If you, like me, are considering starting to read the manga of Haikyuu because you are tired of waiting for the anime to conclude or you are concerned that the movies won't adapt it correctly, I would suggest that you wait. I haven't seen the movies, but I can assure you that without the music and the animations, you will lose a significant part of the epicness of the story, and that's a shame. Also the pace is slower when you read, which also doesn't help to maintain the same level of emotional intensity.

Nonetheless, it's still alright; you won't be too disappointed if you read ... the manga, but if I could go back, I would definitely wait.