Swing And A Miss – ‘Cinderella Nine’ Episode 10 Review

This is a part of a collaboration review between myself and Irina (of I Drink And Watch Anime) with my parts represented by bold text and Irina’s in regular.

Oh hey look, this show is still going… I don’t know about you Irina but there’s something somewhat depressing about the fact that this show was delayed by 2 weeks and therefore we’ll be still watching this show when everyone else will be watching all of next season’s new shows! Not to say that this episode (or any of them) are depressing just very ordinary… We’re special that way. If it makes you feel any better, I’m pretty sure we were the only ones watching his show anyway, so nothing will change.

Pay no attention to the derp faces on the foreground characters!

Probably… anyway, we get an episode almost entirely devoted to a full game of baseball! Fancy that, baseball in a baseball anime… and it’s kinda good? Maybe? I don’t know, I’ve never watched a game of baseball in my life but I could at least understand what was going on for the most part! The only other baseball I’ve watched was Ace of Diamond. They also used balls and stick thingies so everything tracks so far! I believe this was, in fact, supposed to be baseball. YAY Matt, we did it, we talked sport…

That said, it’s a shame this show didn’t have a bigger budget (I’m assuming its budgetary that the show looks as mediocre as it does–I could be wrong) because the “action” is pretty limited–it hardly makes for the most exciting experience. There was even a moment where Tsubasa scores a home-run and it was so poorly animated you don’t even see the bat connect with the ball–I don’t know if you caught that, it was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ kinda thing. I did not catch that. Good eye Matt! I mean it was a cute game generally speaking. I think if we had seen this episode at the beginning of the series before we got so over it, we would have genuinely enjoyed it… maybe.

I even bothered to make a gif of the “home run” hit. They bother to animate her feet taking a stance but not the ball hitting the bat? Lame…

Oh I guess I should probably talk about the plot of the episode, our girls are challenged to a baseball match by the “ace” of one of the top high-school baseball teams in Japan! So they accept only to find out they’ll be versing the school’s third-tier players–not the cream of the crop they were assuming! Also the aforementioned “ace” [I can’t remember her name, I’ll add it in later–maybe] is kind of an interesting character? She’s got a big ego and treats her players harshly and it’s almost something to break the boredom. What’d you think of her and her “evil” lollipop sucking ways? She seems kinda like a fanservice archetype? For a long time, I thought it was the girl from the previous episodes with the long blonde hair that had just put it up and I was wondering why she was so mean all the sudden. I may have had a drink before the show…

I like this bitch. Too bad we’ll probably never see her again!

Oh oh the super fragile girl had a moment in the spotlight. You like her no? I like her yeah but her “moment” was kind of ordinary and easily resolved–par for the course really!

Anyway our girls win and it’s all happy and I just hope the production has saved some money for the final two episodes so that even if it’s not a ‘great’ episode there’s hopefully something worth looking at… Like I said, I think we are just completely jaded by this show. The episode itself was actually not bad at all but I won’t lie, I’m looking forward to putting this series behind me. Ping Pong Girls remains my favourite moe sports mashup to date. Agreed, Cinderella Nine needs more sweat! Wait, that’s what you meant right?!