Harukana Receive First Impressions

“There are two types of sports in this world, individual and team sports. And among team sports, there’s a sport that you can only play with two team members. And that’s beach volleyball.”

Harukana Receive is one of those series where my instinctive reaction would be to pass it by and not give it a second thought. However, given my surprise enjoyment of Hanebado! at the beginning of the season, it only seems fair to afford this series a chance to surprise me as well. So, was it a bolt from the blue series that completely upended my expectations? No, not really. It isn’t bad though. In all likelihood, this is one of the many series that I won’t be returning to after the initial episode but, for all the fanservicey camera angles that come practically baked into the premise, there is still a solid, if not particularly original, sports anime here. When it comes to the list of factors a sports anime must possess so as to be decent, Harukana Receive checks most of the boxes, but doesn’t go beyond in any appreciable way. I guess the show’s hook could just be the promise of seeing more female characters in swimsuits, but there are countless titles that cater to the ecchi audience and I don’t think Harukana Receive has the approach necessary to draw in that crowd. I don’t know that you’ll regret any time that you devote to this series, but I also doubt it will leave a strong impact with those who decide to stick with it.

There is a specific challenge that comes with presenting a narrative about a lesser explored sport. This is the obstacle of making the audience take the sport and its rules seriously. This season, Hanebado! did a decent job of that by focusing on the impact that the game had on its players. Harukana Receive’s approach is more direct and, in my opinion, less successful. Essentially, it berates you for taking it lightly. Our main character is Ozora Haruka, a high school sophomore who transfers to Okinawa to live with her grandparents and cousin after her mother is needed to travel overseas for work. Haruka is delighted by the prospect of living near the beach, and, immediately upon reaching her destination, sets out to explore and stumbles across a pair of beach volleyball players in the process. This is where the show’s approach to educating the audience about beach volleyball hits a bit of a snag. Haruka, with her bubbly nature, either says or attempts something relating to beach volleyball, and the show, usually via circumstance or one of the characters, slaps her down and she is informed why her assumptions were wrong. This presents two notable problems. The first is that the show can’t build up momentum since it is constantly being forced to stop and provide information. The second is that, because Haruka is constantly being educated and disciplined, the episode fails to sell the game as being fun. We also have a plotline about Haruka’s diminutive cousin, Higa Kanata (Get it? Haruka + Kanata = Harukana. Meh.), having apparently been the former partner of one of the two players that Haruka meets on the beach. It has to do with Kanata apparently having given up on beach volleyball after her parents died, but this is a pretty generic backstory and the episode only touches upon it.

So, to recap the show’s handling of its central sport, Harukana Receive is too serious in its presentation of beach volleyball as it chooses to rigidly explain rules and factors that differentiate it from normal volleyball rather than sell the audience on the idea that the sport is even fun. It makes it seem like a chore, and this does extend to at least one aspect of the production. The music for this first episode is oddly noticeable in the moments where the game is being played. From an oddly brisk and overpowering pop track that plays through an opening in medias res scene to the peculiar battle track that plays in the match between Haruka, Kanata and the two other players, I was consistently being pulled out of the proceedings by the soundtrack. The visuals also face some stumbling blocks. The studio, C2C, has been around for over a decade, but their library of work is pretty limited. From a pure design standpoint, they do a decent enough job of making each of the characters recognizable, but their technicals can be a limited as they have some issues with lighting and sand. I’m also not a big fan of the way eyes are colored in this series. The colors are too busy as they don’t make the pupil black, instead filling it in with a muted version of the iris’s color, and the iris is also given a gradient so that the colors shifts from top to bottom as well. While the animation is generally crisper and more lively than what I saw in the likes of this season’s Shichisei no Subaru or last year’s Two Car, there is noticeable room for improvement.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• This may be an odd question, but is there any significant downside to wearing a shirt while playing beach volleyball? I’m unsure of how much to criticize the fanservice as unnecessary given the sport in question. Mind you, even if there is a significant issue that would make wearing a shirt during a casual practice match unheard of, that doesn’t explain why the shots are so commonly framed to include the character’s butt.
• Alternatively (No, I can’t believe I’m still on this topic), I didn’t notice a single “jiggle shot.” Maybe I’m just comparing it to How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, but that seems rather restrained for an episode where its cast is in bikinis for more than half its runtime.
• I did enjoy the first few minutes of relatives awkwardly reuniting. It was silly, there was some fun imagery and the backgrounds did a good job of establishing the environment.
• I touched upon it briefly up above, but I absolutely hated the opening in medias res minute of this show. The song playing in the background distracted from the dialogue. I think they amped up the volume to distract from the number of stills they were using. The dialogue itself is a pretentious mission statement on why beach volleyball is so spectacular. I was having none of it.
• I apparently cannot type “receive” correctly. I constantly had to go back and swap the “e” and the “i.”