First Impression: Oblivion Battery

Haruka Kiyomine and Kei Kaname are the strongest battery in middle school baseball. With Kiyomine’s prodigious pitches and Kaname’s precision catches, this duo once had ambitions of shutting down anyone who dared step up to the plate, including the rather plain Taro Yamada, who lost at the hands of the duo and swore off baseball forever upon entering high school. In fact, Taro-Bro specifically picked a high school that did not have a baseball team. However, as it turns out, Haruka and Kei enrolled in the same school, and it seems as though Kei has become a goofy, joke-cracking, baseball-hating idiot—quite the contrast from the disciplined, organized, hyper-focused ball player of the past. Haruka explains that after an off-camera plot-convenient bout of amnesia, Kei has seemingly lost all the knowledge, drive, and ambition that made him a brilliant catcher, leaving behind the goofy idiot we see here. However, Haruka is determined to get the other part of his battery back, even if that means signing up for the school’s fledgling baseball team. Cue the Baseball Shenanigans!

Okay, so I’m gonna keep it 100 with you guys…I’m not one for sports anime. In fact, I only have two on my anime shelf right now—Big Windup and Bamboo Blade. For as many times as I’ve tried and failed to get into the genre, I can’t seem to get with it (even though I did promise Laura that I would attempt to get into Haikyuu one of these days…). Oblivion Battery, sadly, continues this trend. I mean, the premise of a guy having to rediscover his love and talent for baseball is intriguing, but the whole thing is blown to pieces with how ABSOLUTELY annoying Kei is after his amnesia. I mean, I like goofy characters as much as anyone, but Kei just blows it out of the water, and it’s frankly hard to watch. I’m no neurospecialist by any means, but I don’t know if amnesia works the way this anime is trying to make it, and the fact that we never find out what the cause is really makes this an eye-roll moment. It would be one thing if Kei got injured really badly and swore off playing baseball or if he really lost his memories and had to relearn EVERYTHING about the game, but the way this anime handles it just makes little to no sense to me. There is a moment where you think Kei is probably getting some of his memory back; he gets back in the pads and assumes the position…but eventually, he reverts to that annoying mode. I mean, I get it if you wanna have a character be a jokester with amnesia, then do that and stick with it. But don’t do the cliché “Oh, he’s getting flashes of revelations now that he sees someone else playing!” And with regards to Haruka…good grief. Could you PLEASE give this dude some personality other than being the stoic straight man to Kei’s antics?

From a production standpoint, this is a Studio MAPPA production, kiddos, and it shows through and through. The animation is fluid, the character designs are cool, and the OP, both from a music and a visual standpoint is award-worthy. I just hope that the crew in charge of this one don’t overexert themselves or hold themselves to unreasonable deadlines!

So where does that leave us with Oblivion Battery? This is an EASY pass from me. This just does not feel like a show that I want to stick around with. I’m sure that if you’re a sports anime fan, specifically a baseball fan, you’ll no doubt get some enjoyment out of this. On my end, I just think that Post-Amnesia Kaname and his antics are TOO annoying to suffer through, and frankly, I think Studio MAPPA should’ve used their prodigious talents to adapt something better.

You can stream Oblivion Battery (if you want to) on Crunchyroll.

Josh
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5 thoughts on “First Impression: Oblivion Battery”

  2. Hmm, I know nothing about baseball so even if it were great I would still pass it up. But if you want to try a sports animé that isn’t a *sports* sports animé then try Chihayafuru. Or try Yuuri on Ice which also has many of the criteria of a sports story but a very different slant to the drama. And I didn’t hate Tsurune either (at least not season 1, not seen the movie or S2 yet).

  4. I enjoy sports anime to some extent, be they a bit more grounded like Ace of the Diamond/Haikyuu or a little crazy like Eyeshield 21, but the key for me to like a sports anime is likable characters and a solid story with good pacing. Yowamushi Pedal was a series I enjoyed a lot and the characters were great with a great story, but the last season’s pacing just slowed to a crawl and it was just episode after episode of padded filler with no real impact. So far with the first two episodes of Oblivion Battery I found the pacing to be decent, but holy moly, Kei it utterly insufferable and extremely annoying. I get it, he basically reverted to a childhood state because of the amnesia, but the personality that resulted is annoying and whiny. And yet, they left in teenage personality too with his desire to watch porn and get a girlfriend, which seems like a misstep because you want him to not like baseball, but he has been in baseball since childhood, but you still want him to be a teenager to make those jokes too. In the end the story is a bit weird (oblivion battery because apparently they are so good people lose their will to play baseball after facing them??), and Kei’s character needs to seriously mellow out, but after two episodes I am out.

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