Kuroko’s Basketball Episode 38
What They Say:
Kagami had left his teammates to train under his master from his time in America, and the Winter Cup finally begins. After the opening ceremony, former captain of the Generation of Miracles and Rakuzan High School’s current member Akashi calls the Generation of Miracles, including Kuroko, together for a meeting.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With some decent downtime and minor character exploration as of late, Kuroko’s Basketball is going with a little something different that definitely makes sense. With Kagami really figuring that he needs to grow and improve in a significant way in order to deal with the upcoming games that will feature a lot of the Generation of Miracles players, and knowing just how amazing they are, he’s gone off to America in order to get some specialty training from his former teacher there. That’s pretty surprising for most everyone else and you can see it’s kind of ticking off Riko sinec the first years aren’t quite as engaged in events as they should be. But it’s the kind of thing that allows her to run them hard, using her father as the main coach now, and spending time with some endurance training.
Playing this off against what Kagami is doing in America works well. Particularly since Kagami’s material has them all speaking English and speaking it rather well, making it a lot of fun to watch while giving it a truly international feel. And still subtitling the English, which I definitely appreciate. The training side is mostly just a bit of a montage and it doesn’t go on as long as you’d think it would, but it gets the job done nicely as the whole thing comes together for the Winter Cup segment. In a way, I’ll admit that I would like to have a lot more of the actual practice and training side, particularly from Kagami in America. But it’s just before the halfway mark that we see the players starting to arrive for the Winter cup itself and that means a number of different teams filtering in and jockeying with each other over their skill just by their presence and intensity as people. It’s a kind of competitive aspect that’s really neat to watch since it is mostly kept in the realm of reality but still giving us a few nut jobs.
As everything starts to get underway way though as the forming of the event itself begins, we get some decent flashback bits since it brings Kagami back from America and we see the way that he and Kuroko have really come together as a solid team unto themselves in order to help lift all boats. Both are highly intent on winning this time and making it through and you can see how that confidence is coming from them and getting other opponents they’ve faced in the past all riled up and eager to go against them again. Which is good to see since there isn’t any kind of outright dismissiveness about it but rather an anticipation about skill. While the majority of it isn’t about the game, when we do get to it it’s also something that just sets the tone well as we see how they’re all so intent on winning in a way that I don’t think they have been before.
In Summary:
While we only get to the game in the last couple of minutes of the episode, having a down episode in terms of that material isn’t a bad thing. I love that the show is focused entirely on basketball itself and not all the usual character drama, romances or personal issues. Everyone here is here to play the game and that’s it. We’ve got them going through a bit of a montage before the Winter Cup in order to get focused and refine their moves before we get to all the personal interplay between the various teams and those from the Generation of Miracles, which is as always intriguing. The smooth movement between it all that leads to the Winter Cup getting underway makes this a very fast moving episode and one that’s simply a delight to watch and leaves you eager to see how the game will unfold in the next episode as Aomine realizes Seirin isn’t the same as before.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.