Ace of Diamond Season 2

Season 2 is a continuation of season 1 and there are 51 episodes. This season begins rather slowly with the first 3 episodes are just recap of season 1 but once the recap is over, we go straight into Fall Tournament. For Fall Tournament, there is no division between west and east Tokyo so there are new opponents with different styles which make the matches remain interesting and not repetitive. Unfortunately the match gets a bit boring for the semi final and while the final is still very exciting (despite knowing spoiler that Seido will win, my heart was still beating very fast when watching the episodes 49-50), the final episode is quite anti-climatic.

With the 3rd years graduating, there are new faces to make up the 20 members of the team. I feel that the transition is quite abrupt because from the first season, we do not even know about some of these faces. I feel that perhaps the author does not expect the series to run that long and hence does not really care about the "others" during the first season. It feels quite awkward to suddenly see some of these new faces when they are not really introduced as the second stringer or something.

Finally Eijun gets more spot light as the main character. He gets to learn new throws, he overcomes his yips, and he even pitches for 1 full match. Despite this, season 2 does not neglect the other characters for development. We also get to see how Miyuki has to step up as the new captain, how the team transition goes rocky at the start, and different players have their own spotlights. Kudos because really it is not easy to balance so many characters. Sadly Eijun's childhood friends seem to be forgotten. They came to support him during summer qualifiers where Seido lost in final and Eijun made a blunder but only Wakana appeared for this fall final match. Not to mention that there is not direct interaction between Eijun and her. Sigh..

One thing that irritates me the most is the use of injury plot point. It seems that Furuya has to be injured so that Eijun and Nori get the chance to pitch during official match. Miyuki has to be injured in the final to have him missed a few chances and that makes the match go very close. I mean seriously.. why is it only Seido team members are so unlucky to get all these injuries while the opponents seem to be all healthy. Recall that in season 1, Tanba is also injured so that Furuya and Eijun get the chance to pitch.

There are 2 OVAs which concludes this second season with the graduation of the year 3s. It is quite bittersweet to see them graduate as they play quite a huge role in the series. Nonetheless, Ace of Diamond is really a diamond among sports titles. It shows the struggle of the main character (instead of the usual noob turning into ace or a super ace main character), it is able to share the spotlight among so many members of the team, it is able to carry the story even after the year 3s are no longer playing (usually story will just end after the current match season ends), and finally the main character is able to reach that Koshien dream.

The OP and ED songs are still great and at the end of each episode, the cute illustrations are still there. I definitely will try to find the titles for the insert songs used in the anime because they never fail to make me feel emotional. I know the manga continues with act II and I definitely cannot wait for it to be made to season 3 of the anime (if it will ever happen).

I have a bit of regret of following Ace of Diamond late only after the manga is translated to Indonesian. Now I grow to like the characters and their figures are already out of stock. Haiz.. at least I still bought Eijun's one.

When I was writing for the first season, I could not find any of group pictures showing a lot of characters at the same time. Surprisingly there are a lot of group pictures for this second season. These are actually stills from the OP and ED songs.