You can be away from home for only so long. What They Say:
Baby Steps centers on an honor student named Eiichiro Maruo who becomes frustrated with his life and decides to join the tennis club. Despite lacking experience and physical strength, he utilizes his studious nature to develop a strategic approach to playing tennis. Taking notes of his opponents’ habits and tendencies, he is able to predict their next move before they even react. He also meets Natsu Takasaki, a beautiful girl with a passion for tennis. With her help, he aims to become a professional tennis player.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Baby Steps has had a lot of fun in basically continuing on from the first season as if there was no break as we got the first four episodes on Florida without any sort of real re-introduction or lead-in to it. While it may have made it less accessible for new viewers, it worked well for the ongoing watchers and hopefully nudged some new fans to check out the first season. The Florida episodes were a lot of fun to see Eiichiro being put into new situations, new friendships that will circle back someday, and some good growth for him as a player as well. It’s small moments but solid ones that help him overall, but seeing him deal with such a difficult situation for a lot of people in going to another country in a whole other language to train showed the kinds of “giant strides” he’s making as a person.
But now that he’s back in Japan with all those he’s worked with, the payoff is definitely there as his coaches watch him. He’s grown stronger, more confident and more controlled as well, proving the venture to be right. With the junior tournament coming up in a few months, everyone that’s involved are getting back on track with the training in order to be ready for the qualifier and a lot of things get set quickly because of that. But it’s the small moments that are fun to watch, with others realizing that he’s definitely a changed player, but also just getting to see him and Natsu walk home together again and to spend time together. The two of them catching up on events is very nicely done and helps to bring them back together on the same page after some playful jabbing on her part with him. Eiichiro even feels more relaxed around her than ever before and that’s welcome to see, even as they deal with the kind of silly thing of her being Soichiro’s fiancée. Which naturally gets interrupted by Takuma in an absolutely hilarious way.
With a little more background provided about Takuma and Natsu, and his surprise at how fast Eiichiro is moving, that has him confronting Eiichiro about it later on. Well, not confronting particularly, but just trying to figure out what he’s really going. The series doesn’t spend much time on the personal side of the characters, which works well so that it’s not a romcom, but these interludes are well done. The two young men end up not really resolving anything here, though you know Takuma’s likely just looking out for both of them in his own way, and it instead shifts to Eiichiro trying to get a match off of Takuma as he feels as though he’s ready for it. Since Eiichiro has waffled a bit with Natsu, Takuma’s feeling particularly ready to crush someone and it’s hilarious to see all of Eiichiro’s enthusiasm drain from his face.
The match the two play in the second half is well done and definitely shows Eiichiro’s growth overall and that he has some level of confidence, even knowing how Takuma is ranked and having seen so much of his play before. But as it goes on, Eiichiro’s rhythm is definitely off and his attempts to improve his serve for a bit practically has Takuma standing around waiting for something to happen that he can play against. The match has a lot of really good moments to it as we see it from Eiichiro’s perspective and the struggle he has, but also with what Takuma thinks along the way as well since Eiichiro is someone who surprised him very early on in the first season. The two do get only so far here with a little interference from the coaches, playing it off as though Eiichiro may end up hurting himself, and that gives us a delay until the future when the two can really compete.
In Summary:
Baby Steps is back on familiar grounds and familiar issues to be sure, but it works well in moving it all forward a little bit. Eiichiro and Natsu’s time together is pretty fun overall and knowing there’s more there in regards to her and Takuma, though not the obvious triangle that one may think, makes you want to see more of this fully explored this season so we can get on a new page with it. I’m obviously in the Eiichiro/Natsu camp and am glad we got some good time between them after our four episode arc in Florida. With that given a good bit of time here, the focus is going to shift hard into the training phase and even more so now that we’ve had the on-hold match between Eiichiro and Takuma go as it did. There’s a lot of growth ahead for Eiichiro that should be exciting to watch across the board.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
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