Suzuka

Information of Anime

Yamato Akitsuki moves into his aunt's public ladies bath house in Tokyo.  He came to Tokyo to attend high school.  On his way, he sees a short haired girl practicing high jump in a school field & is captured by her charm & grace.  When he moved into his aunt's place, he discovers that the girl he saw in the field is Suzuka Asahina & lives next door to him.  He also discovers that they go to the same school & are in the same class together.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

At the beginning of the story, Asahina doesn't accept Akitsuki because she views him as a lazy carefree person.  But as the story progress, she accepts him little by little.  As Akitsuki falls for her & asks for love advice from his friend, Yasunobu Hattori, another girl named Honoka Sakurai falls for Akitsuki.  She met him during their early childhood years when he repaired the shine bell for her.

As the story progress with Akitsuki & Asahina being good friends, he confesses his love for her at a amusement park.  However, she rejects him & creates a distance between the two.  In order to get close to her, Akitsuki decides to join the school's track team.  He struggles a lot due to the team's intense training & Asahina scolds him for it.  Later, Akitsuki works hard & achieves amazing record results from 100m running.  Because he's a rocket starter, he's compared to a old track member that had past away.

After finding out that he's compared to that late track member, Akitsuki thinks that Asahina is treating him as a replacement to that person.  This mistake created more distance between the two.  As a result, Akitsuki skips track practice for three days believing it's useless to do what he planned to do when he joined.  At a Tokyo track tournament, Akitsuki appears to defend Asahina from the #1 100m runner & challenges him without know that fact.  Losing miserably, Asahina starts to have feelings for him again.

As the relationship between Akitsuki & Asahina goes on, Sakurai thought that the two are a couple since they are so close.  After asking Asahina if she likes Akitsuki after telling her that she will confess her love for him, Asahina said no as Akitsuki appears to the scene.  This put Asahina in a shock state.  Although he still has feelings for her, he knows that Asahina doesn't like him & tells her so.

Because of that, Sakurai takes the chance of getting Akitsuki to love her at the Inter High tournament.  During this time, Akitsuki still has feelings for Asahina.  As the story progress, Sakurai manages to get Akitsuki to think about her more than Asahina when she suddenly kissed him.  Believing he feels more at ease with Sakurai, he sees her differently now.  So the story progresses as Sakurai & Akitsuki start dating.  However it doesn't last long.

Sakurai gets concern about Akitsuki still have feelings for Asahina as the two of them tend to do things together in some situations, such as missing the train back home during their tournament.  He even tells Asahina about their relationship.  What ends the relationship between Akitsuki & Sakurai is how she saw him with Asahina helping him buying a birthday gift for her.  When Akitsuki give Sakurai the gift at her home, she refuses as he tells her how Asahina helped him get the gift for her.  Relationships go sour here.  At times, Sakurai would call her friend Nana, who is a famous high school idol, for relationship advice.  Akitsuki & Sakurai keep a lot of distance from each other until they finally agree to break up since he realizes that he knows nothing about her & only thinks for himself.  Plus, he still has feelings for Asahina.  When Asahina asks how he & Sakurai managed to get back together when he goes back to his room, he tells her a lie.  To avoid telling her that she was the cause of their breakup, Akituski tells Asahina how annoying Sakurai was & decided to dump her.  This causes Asahina to think badly of Akituski & the relationship between the two goes bad.

Akitsuki is confused about what he wants to do at this point since he's always thinking about himself.  This problem causes him to lose concentration during his track practices when he thinks about how Asahina thinks badly of him.  At the same time, Sakurai decides to get back with Akitsuki again.  But this time, the distance between the two of them is getting farther & farther.  Seeing his problems & unsure about the breakup between Akitsuki & Sakurai, Miki Hashiba gets the truth from Akitsuki & why he lied to Asahina about the breakup.  Hashiba decides to help Akitsuki with his track problems as well by practicing together in the park.  After talking to Hashiba, Akitsuki finally sets a goal for himself.

At the Interhigh tournament, Akitsuki sees the top high school runner again & hopes to compete against him.  Akitsuki is determined to become the #1 runner in Japan & tell Asahina about his feelings when he gets that position.  At the end of the tournament, Asahina congratulates Akitsuki for his performance.  However, he's not happy since he came in second & tells Asahina that second & third places are meaningless.  Asahina is confused in the sudden change in him.

Back at the track practice in preparation for the next tournament, Asahina, Sakurai, & Hashiba are worried as Akitsuki is starting to become a different person who's serious in becoming the top.  Every time that Asahina & Akitsuki talk about his running form, she puts him down & this upsets him.  This continues for quite some time until Akitsuki had enough.  After telling her why she doesn't like him, Asahina stops Akitsuki from walking away from him & tells him that she didn't mean to say those things & wishes him the best.  Although he receives some encouragement from her, he knows he doesn't need to be told that since he's already determined to get that #1 position.

At the tournament, it was determined that Akitsuki's new running form will result in slower times for him.  He's at his best when he uses his rocket starter form.  As a result, he loses the race & failed to enter into the qualifying round.  Because of this, Akitsuki loses confidence about himself in becoming the #1 runner in Japan & confessing to Asahina.  Time passes & Akitsuki continues to be depressed.  One night, Asahina decides to cook dinner for him at his room since he didn't attend dinner as usual.  Akitsuki is confused by her actions, but later makes up his mind & tells her that he still loves her; shocking Asahina.  What shocks her even more is how Akitsuki tells her that when he becomes #1 in Japan, he'll confess his love for her & that he'll wait for her answer.  The words he said it is exactly the same as how Tsuda Kazuki said it & Asahina tells Akitsuki to stop & runs away.  Confused, he chases her.

We find Asahina sitting on the steps leading to the shrine.  Here, we see a flashback of how she felt about Kazuki after his funeral.  Later, Sakurai finds Asahina & starts talking to her which leads to a argument.  It involved how Sakurai doesn't know how Asahina feels about not loving a person who is no longer alive & how Asahina doesn't know her attitude is troubling everyone around her & how Akitsuki have been loving her for a long time.  The conversation ends as Asahina runs to the park.  With Sakurai's help, Akitsuki helps Asahina there.  Here, Asahina tells Akitsuki to stop being kind to her or else she may fall for him.  She also tells him that she'll never love again after what happened, which triggers his mind about Kazuki.  Akitsuki tells Asahina that there was no way she would know that would happen, but she counters back at him for not understanding her.  Suddenly, Akitsuki forces a kiss on her & Asahina slaps him a number of times calling him the worse.  After she leaves the park, Akitsuki figures that he blew his chance now & is done.

Although Asahina ignores him, Akitsuki refuses to apologize to her since he doesn't want to agree with the words she said to him at the park.  He even tells her that in front of her face.  Meanwhile, Asahina is in confusion on what to do by asking Kazuki for advice.  After talking to Sakurai again who plans to quit the track team, Asahina makes up her mind.

The next day when Akitsuki learns that Asahina is visiting Kazuki's grave again, he tries to stop her by telling her to stop going or else she'll just keep doing it forever.  To his surprise, she invites him to come with her.  At the grave, Akitsuki waits as Asahina prays in front of Kazuki's grave for a long time.  Finally, she makes a decision & tells Kazuki that she likes someone else.

The show ends with Akitsuki & Asahina being couples.  However, it's a just a starting relationship.

My Personal Review

Suzuka is really a surprisingly good anime.  From my understanding, the anime series came out when the manga was new.  I've heard that the anime & manga came out at the same time, but I'm not sure if it's true.  I'm not really into sports anime, but this one really caught my attention.

Animation

The drawings aren't too bad.  They are pretty average.  Sometimes the character designs look funny & there are times they look okay.  In scenes that have the characters viewed from a distance to the viewers, they aren't drawn too well.

The animation flow is ok.  The running & jumping movements don't seem natural, but it is acceptable.  For an anime that deals with a sports track theme, one would expect some good animation movement.

The background wasn't too bad.  Soft colours which blended well with the hard solid colours on the characters.

Sound

The sound effect is average.  Nothing too fancy & nothing too weird.

The music was ok in my view.  It fitted the mood well in some scenes, but they weren't too memorable.  The first ending theme song is catchy & fits the show's theme well.  But it doesn't really stick to my head.  The second one is good too, but like the first, it's not sticking.

Story

Suzuka is quite a good story.  Even though it has sports involved, it doesn't really touch that aspect much.  It's heavily on love.  Which is probably why I'm attracted to this series.  The track stuff seems to act as a element to the story.  Although, it gets more focused on it near the end, a good chuck of the show was on love relationships.

The characters are quite realistic; meaning I could related to them as real life people.  We have Asahina as a stubborn girl would doesn't really want to express her feelings & Sakurai trying to find ways to get Akitsuki to notice her.  In the beginning. Akitsuki was a solid character that I liked.  But when he began chasing Asahina to be his girlfriend, he started to get too weak.  Although he never had relationships, it frustrated me at times.  However, that is actually good character development as I saw how he was doing thinks without thinking ahead.  As the story progress, I started to like his character again as he understood more about himself.  However, he tends to go up & down on it like a stock market ticker.

As for the ending, it was satisfying.  It wasn't very good, but it wasn't bad.  Considering that the manga & anime pretty much started at the same time, the ending is reasonable.  I assume the manga will pick up where the anime left off.

Overall Conclusion

Suzuka is really a surprising series to come out this year.  Initially, I didn't know what it was when I was watching it.  When I heard it was about sports, I was a bit turned off from it.  But now, I'm hooked.

Suzuka receives an 8.5/10 mark.  It's surprisingly a good series.  Although it's got poor animation movements for a sports anime, it doesn't really go into that field much.  It's the off the track field stuff that made it a good romance drama.  Another bad part about it would be the ending.  It's an opening ending, but it's considered good since the manga premiere around the same time as the anime. 

I strongly recommend this anime even if you aren't into sports anime.  You will like it for it's romance drama mainly.

Last updated on January 16, 2008