I must confess, I’ve yet to find a rugby anime that I’ve liked.  I’m still in the market – rugby may not be my favorite sport, but there can never be too many good sports anime in the world.  I suppose it makes sense that we’d have a rush of rugby series with the World Cup coming to Japan last fall, but a few months after that ended seems like an odd time for an original rugby series to hit the airwaves.

number24 is not the one to break the spell, unfortunately.  At least not based on one episode.  It’s certainly better than the truly execrable Try Knights, but that’s a very low bar.  I don’t think it’s as good as All Out!!, which was fine for what it was even if it ultimately didn’t do much for me.  At the very least that series (from Madhouse) had pretty solid production values.  number24 is visibly cheap, which doesn’t help when the story itself needs all the help it can get.

For plot, we have a budding star college rugby player named Natsusa who’s injured in a motorcycle crash, which lays him up for six months and seemingly ends not just his career but that of the guy driving the bike, who quits out of guilt.  There’s a caring but stoic childhood friend, and a whole raft of team members who each check off a stereotype box or two. Eventually Natsusa decides to become a team manager to try and stay close to the sport, and becomes a sort of mentor to the first-year club members.

This wasn’t awful or anything, but just kind of a big nothingburger.  And the relatively shameless suggestiveness doesn’t help either.  I mean, it’s clear the production committee knows which sports anime have been really profitable lately and is trying to leech into that market, but it all feels very forced so far.  The premise is fine – overcoming the sort of adversity the protagonist is facing is a good basis for a story, and honestly Natsusa is likeable enough.  But number24 as a whole is very flat and seems to lack any sense of authenticity.  I’ll watch one more episode but you don’t see new series crawl out of a hole this deep too often.