In the first place, I’m under no illusions that if I cover Rising Impact, it’ll draw much of a following. Being a golf anime is a pretty big hole to start with, but when you add the Netflix factor that’s a pretty big double whammy. Ooi! Tonbo has managed to be a pretty decent draw at LiA but it beat the odds by being really superb – Rising Impact may wind up being that good, but it’s a high bar. And it didn’t have the Netflix dump effect to contend with.
Make no mistake, I really am enjoying this one. I just don’t expect the substance – or realism – here that I get with Ooi Tonbo. As a golf fan that does matter to me, but I’m not immune to a good sports fantasy – they can work for me as long as there’s at least a modicum of restraint. This is a shounen – a Weekly Jump title (one of the few that was cancelled and came back). One can’t expect the same approach as you get from a manga published in a golf magazine. And until pretty recently WSJ sports series were hardly legendary for their realism.
With Rising Impact I think you just have the embrace the silliness and treat it as a boy’s adventure tale with a driver instead of a sword or a magical staff. Gawain is at the center of it all, and he’s a force of nature. I find Gawain to be really funny (Kuno Misaki doing nice work here) and that’s a good thing, because otherwise the show would be a lot to take. As we pick things up here Gawain has arrived in Tokyo – yes, a third-graded from beyond Bufu Egypt alone in Tokyo armed only with an address (and people who live in Tokyo their whole lives can’t find anything from an address).
Is this a good idea? My first reaction was to wonder how the hell Kiria could let that happen, but as it turned out Gawain didn’t mail the letter from his Grandpa until the morning of the day he came to Tokyo. Somehow Gawain survives long enough to run across a kid with a golf bag, who he follows to the local driving range. Of course for him (I was dead certain this was a girl at first) it’s more of a putting range, but Gawain only has eyes for the big stick. Eventually the kid shows Gawain where Kiria’s (motherloving huge) house is.
Kiria is presumably rich, though whether that’s from her pro golf winnings (she’s only 21) or a family fortune I don’t know. She lives with her little sister Kurumi, who’s about Gawain’s age or a bit older, and immediately assumes Gawain to be her sister’s (first) boyfriend, which is a bit of an odd joke. Gawain has brought with him a bank book from his gramps which apparently has a lot of money attached to it, and Kiria decides she’ll take him in (which I suspect she would have done anyway. She takes him back to the range to hit a few (hundred) balls, and can see quite clearly that this little man is a freak of nature with a golf club in his hand.
Gawain is back at the range the next day, having left Kiria in the dust on a training run, and winds up coming to the defense of a 6th grader being bullied by two of his club teammates (who I would have guessed were about 18, ROFL). I’m not sure I’ve ever seen golf bullying to be honest, but Gawain has a sense of honor and quickly intercedes. Eventually the bullies challenge Gawain and the victim to a driving contest (that ends predictably). Then the kid from the day before shows up, and introduces himself as Lancelot(!). He’s the captain of the school golf team and while he’s suitably impressed that a chibi can drive a ball 300-plus yards without knowing what a yard is, challenges Gawain to a putting contest. And he’s right about one thing – they don’t say “drive for show, putt for dough” for nothing.
The silliness factor is pretty high here, but not as much as the sense of fun. Gawain is infectious, and so is Rising Impact – it’s a show that begs to be enjoyed without being taken too seriously (at least for now). There are some interesting plot points still to be explained – like why Gawain looks like a foreigner and has no idea, and what happened to his parents. But I’m not in any hurry for answers – I think the journey is more important than the destination with this one.
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