This was a really good episode of Burning Kabaddi – the best in at least a month or so for me.  But at this point it’s hard to look at this series and not focus in on how ridiculously curtailed it is.  All of the stuff that’s a traditional component of a sports anime – and Kabaddi has done most of it – is really about setup at this stage of the game.  The result is a disturbing amount of setups with no payoff.  “Read the manga” is fine for what it is, but it has limits.  Sports anime really, really shouldn’t be one cour (and this show is not the only recent corroborating evidence).

A good example of this is Hitomi.  He’s a stock character type in a sports series, but most are – it really comes down to execution.  Normally we’d see Hitomi do the holding the water bottle bit for a while, struggle to improve in practice, agonize over his uselessness to the team, and eventually get into a match.  Some of those guys are better characters than others, and with the good ones that moment always feels incredibly good.  But we’re never going to get that moment with Hitomi – all we’ll see is the water bottles.  So is he a good character?  Truthfully, we’ll never know.

Tatsuya is a good character, that’s for sure.  He’s the spine and engine of Shakunetsu Kabaddi and more than up to the challenge.  As physically talented as he is, what really makes Tatsuya special is his sporting brain.  He “thinks like a coach” as the captain says, but that’s really just the start of it.  He has the intelligence to understand the subtleties of seemingly any sport and the relentless drive to excel, a rare combination that usually defines a “star”.  The most powerful driver for these guys is using hating to lose, and Tatsuya has that.  He’s just a little too mercurial and obsessive for his own good, but there’s still time for him to grow out of that.  Just not in the anime.

Sakura is already there in kabaddi terms.  He’s a one-man wrecking crew, racking up no less than seven points on one raid which had Misumi so beaten he was trying to push Sakura back to his own territory before he could rack up even more points.  Only Tatsuya evaded him on this occasion, and on his own turn to raid Tatsuya tries a “back” – a skill where he plows deep into enemy territory and relies on speed and feinting to make it back.  Unfortunately for him, all these change of direction attacks Tatsuya is employing are murder on his legs, and by the final moments of the match that strain is showing.

So next week is the finale, then.  And that’s yet another reminder of where we stand – Shakunetsu Kabaddi will end on a practice match.  Someone (forgive me, I’ve forgotten who) noted it in the comments already but how often have we seen a sports series end with the protagonists never participating in an official match, never mind a tournament?  The only upside for me is curiosity over what the series will do for an ending with so little to work with – I genuinely have no idea.