Haikyuu!! To the Top offered more of what made the series shine back in its release. It delivered traditional shounen sports with decent character development and a welcome change of pace from the exciting final match against Shiratorizawa. It had its downfalls though, especially when it took an approach to cut the season short when it just started getting momentum. The focus on Shouyou also had its share of problems, relegating the more interesting events around Tobio to the sidelines and basically forcing another problem into this second part.

The characters

Understand this: Tobio’s arc in the previous season was filled with the more interesting and important side-characters that Karasuno was about to face. If we wanted the upcoming matches to gain emotion and investment, it would be wise to give us information about those forthcoming opponents. The fact that the previous season instead focused on Shouyou forced the show to deliver this information right in the middle of the match against Inarizaki. The result is terrible.

The pace

You never know how an episode starts in this season. It may pick up from where it left in the last episode, or it may randomly jump through time and space to give us background information about Inarizaki’s players or even present new events about Karasuno that were omitted (or more likely forgotten) in the previous season.

This jumping around severely hurts the pace of the match, and eye-rolling becomes common as you have the background of a Inarizaki’s player smacked in your face right as the match gets into an interesting part. Although this trick was used in previous seasons of Haikyuu!!, here it’s _everywhere_ and can get extremely annoying.

It’s still Haikyuu!! though

Regardless of the crackled pace, when it matters Haikyuu!! still delivers an exciting match that no other sports series is capable of right now. There are no absurd super-powers yet, everybody from Karasuno gets some time to shine and, even though it is hammered on your face, the background from Inarizaki’s players ends up working to make you gain empathy for a few of them. It’s a poor job compared to previous matches, but still high on quality.

It’s still building up

This time around we have a decent moment to close up the season, as one of the most anticipated matches of the series looms on the horizon. The build up is also helped by the great soundtrack and sound direction, as well as the consistent animation work by Production I.G, which does see a few rushed frames, but overall offers tremendous quality for this genre.

Once again, Haikyuu!! makes me want for more. Once again, however, it took too much time to get back on its feet, especially because in the first half it suffers a LOT with the “memories scenes” that constantly pop in the middle of the match. The show basically builds momentum in the match just to punch your stomach with unnecessarily long and disrupting attempts at character development.

Everything done to flesh out Inarizaki’s players would be better placed in the previous season, or at least BEFORE the damn match. Finally, after we get information about every player by the second half, the match becomes more of a focus and Haikyuu!! shines brightly as it did before.

Pace problems and the length of matches may become a problem in the future though. I hope the next arcs will be more about the players and Karasuno as a whole instead of just the matches, otherwise the formula may get a bit annoying.