Hey, remember the Lacrosse arc of Muv Luv Extra? The one involving a somewhat reluctant lead coaching a team of girls to sporting success and that is usually regarded as the draggy middle of that VN? What if we had a take that was just that?
Er… it’s way better than I just made it sound.
So, Aokana. Aokana is a Visual Novel based sort of sports/school anime that takes place in a world where “Grav-shoes”, shoes that enable anyone to fly, are the latest and greatest invention. Perhaps the most realistic thing about this near-future science fiction affair is that as soon as that tech became viable for the consumer level, someone was going to invent one or more aerial sports. Enter Flying Circus, or FC, the fictional sport of this sports anime.
In FC, matches are 1v1 and players can score points by either tagging buoys in the correct sequence or tagging the back of their opponent. The buoys are all in the same plane (above water for unrealistic soft landings in the event of some manner of accident, which isn’t very likely since Grav-shoes are supposed to be incredibly safe), but that doesn’t mean the players have to stay on it, leading to the sport being a mix of sprinting and aerial dogfights. It’s best to get this out of the way at the start, because Aokana is extremely dedicated to its sport theme, and basically everything in the show is going to be predicated on the rules and strategy of FC and how the characters relate to their situation.
The show stars… actually, that’s hard to say. The obvious player character of the original VN is Masaya Hinata, a boy who was once a prodigal ace at FC but who gave it up (and flying in general, being the one guy who actually walks to school) for reasons that aren’t disclosed for quite some time. However, the anime is much more focused on one of the girls, Asuka Kurashina. She’s an avid airhead who just transferred into school and, because general acceptance is only regional now, is totally new to all things flight and FC related. She loves the idea and the experience, though, and quickly gets embroiled in all manner of FC-based exploits. To her story as told here, Masaya is an auxiliary character at best, so that you probably wouldn’t guess this was based on something where he was the lead and could even focus on other girls.
Also relevant to mention here at the start, because her introduction is a little sneaky, is Aoi Kagami. She’s this world-line’s Yuuko Kouzuki – purple hair, sharp eyes, dress code that’s a lab coat over midriff-revealing base combo, and a teacher at the local school who has hobbies of trolling/advising her plot relevant students and collecting blackmail through an undisclosed intelligence web. She’s mostly relevant in that years ago she was also an ace FC player, and she has a connection to Masaya from that time that she abuses to convince him to act as a coach and trainer.
Asuka’s adventure begins in earnest when she comes across a scene of the vice captain of another school’s FC team bullying the token dude and lone member of her school’s team. She challenges the girl to avenge her school’s honor, and her opponent, recognizing the disparity in their levels, proposes a lopsided challenge where Asuka wins if she scores even a single point. Naturally she does, and by executing a top-level maneuver called the Air-kick turn (not that she knows anything about that), which involves making an abrupt turn with a burst of speed by kicking off from, what else, thin air. Like most of the other tricks in this show, it’s not complicated to understand but you believe it’s hard to pull off.
From there, Asuka is convinced to join the school’s pretty much non-existent FC club. A couple of her classmates are also convinced to join up. One is Misaki Tobisawa, a girl who like seemingly everyone else is a lapsed player, along with Misaki’s admiring kouhai, Mashiro Arisaka. Together they bond, go to training camp, and otherwise get ready for doing an actual tournament meet.
Overall, the lay of the character land is this: Masaya is just kind of there. He relates to most of the girls passing well, but I guess the creators didn’t want there to be a “canon route” in the romantic sense, so his general sidelining includes any hints of chemistry being just that – hints. With Asuka and especially Misaki they’re good hints, but they’re still just hints.
Asuka is the main character, but when it comes to personality, she’s one of the more static. She’s an idiot, but also very hard to keep down, and someone who has fun. In a sense, she’s a perfect foil to all the characters in this who are giving FC their all in order to win, and having no fun in the process. She does at least progress in one sense: she gets better at FC, learning at a rate that most of the other characters find quite dramatic.
Misaki, though a secondary, is the character with probably the best thought-out arc. Though she starts her existence as a gag (being the one who’s impossible to wake up in the morning), we find out that she’s actually quite competitive, and have to deal with her issues in the arc that fills the emotional midpoint of the story, between the two tournament sequences.
Between Masaya, Asuka, and Misaki there’s also a very amusing circle of accidental influence that the characters aren’t aware of. When Masaya was a prodigal flier, he was beaten by another kid in a pick-up game when the other kid (mistakenly believed to be a boy, actually Misaki, who doesn’t recognize him either) had only just learned how to use Gravi-shoes at all. This is what broke his faltering resolve and sent him into retirement from flying, though admittedly he was already under a lot of related stress. Asuka visited the island in her youth as well, and though neither of them realize it spent some time playing with little Masaya, which helped form her love of the idea of flying (he’d already quit actually flying). And, if you’re guessing that between Asuka’s prodigal talent and airheaded attitude on one side and Misaki’s competitive streak on the other that her major arc involves getting depressed and almost giving up just like Masaya did back then, you’d be right. Thus the circle is complete.
Everyone else on the protagonist side is more or less incidental. In addition to those I’ve named, we get plenty more inconsequential recurring figures like that Vice-captain who was doing the bullying in episode 1 (more of a friend ever after), some purple-haired girl who lives next door to Masaya and can’t figure out to close or curtain her window opposite his when she’s changing – so I bet she’s important in the VN, but here she’s auxiliary to Mashiro who is auxiliary to Misaki who’s a deuteragonist at best.
More critical ends up being one of the “antagonists,” the prideful favorite to win, Shindo. He’s the team captain to who the girl from earlier is vice-captain, and he’s good enough to totally humiliate most of his opponents. In the qualifying tournament, Misaki makes a rival of him and is the first to actually score a point against him. However, her spirit is crushed when Asuka faces him in the next round and her unorthodox style actually pushes Shindo to the limit. He still wins, but barely, and the fact that he got serious against Asuka humiliates Misaki in that he was still “playing” with her. This leads to Misaki’s temporary retirement – and, oddly enough, Shindo is perfectly friendly outside of a match and actually gives Misaki some good advice while she’s down. Shindo also has a good dynamic with Masaya – he took up FC because Masaya’s example inspired him, can’t comprehend why Masaya quit, and dearly wants a chance to measure up to his idol, fueling his desire to at least do so by proxy in playing against Asuka and Misaki.
The second tournament arc, after Misaki’s moment and, pulls into focus another figure: one who took down Shindo in the final round of the qualifiers (which everybody we care about placed highly enough in to make this tournament) and who represents the philosophical threat that gets Asuka invested in winning even more than playing and drags Masaya and Aoi in as much as they’ll be drawn in. This competitor is Saki Inui.
Saki doesn’t seem like a bad person… but she does come off kind of like a robot in the palm of her coach. Her coach has unfinished business with Aoi: she was inspired by Aoi’s play back when Aoi did FC, and developed the style that Saki uses in order to recapture that “beautiful” FC. However, the reason Aoi stopped playing is because she found the style she was falling into, which relied on mind games and forcing exhaustion on her opponents to pretty much destroy them, was unsporting and uncouth and not something that she could allow to be learned from and propagate. So, naturally, Saki’s new version is something that Aoi deeply wants to guide her students to beat.
Through a lot of complicated jargon and fancy maneuvers that are, admirably, all fairly well-understood, we go through the tournament. The emotional arc for Misaki is sewn up with her learning more how to enjoy herself, which is also a message that Asuka wants to get through to Saki: that FC is supposed to be fun. She seems to plant the seeds, with Saki wanting to challenge Asuka on Asuka’s own terms, but Saki’s coach is quite obsessed with the beautiful FC, so we do have to see that get challenged and beaten in the end.
So, that’s your basic outline: Meet the characters, train, do the qualifiers, angst, do the real tournament. Pretty simple? Well, I cut the plot summary this short because I basically had two choices: either summarize things in a tight manner, or let this review be an eternity long trying to pick up all the smaller details and emotional moments. I’ve done long, detailed reviews in the past, but brevity seems more advantageous here.
So, what is the experience of Aokana like? Well, while it has this backbone that’s a simple sports story in terms of its major movements, doing well enough to move forward until the time comes for the main character to dramatically take the championship, that’s often not what it feels like.
For one, Aokana deals with a fictional sport, FC, and it knows what it has to do in order to make that feel real. Because of that, quite a lot of screen time and focus is given to the technical aspects. We learn all about the different play styles that a FC player can take up. We learn how their shoes have to be tuned differently, and how different match-ups result in different overall game flows when looking at the major archetypes. We get loving detail on the basic maneuvers that people use to gain and maintain advantage in the air, as well as all the advanced special tricks that the more potent and experienced players use. We concern ourselves both with how the game is played and the minutiae surrounding it, like the balancers in Grav-shoes being able to be turned off for a nearly uncontrollable and significantly more unsafe but faster flight, with Saki being able to adjust hers on the fly and Asuka going without for the final match. There are a lot of nice touches.
For another, we spend a lot of time on characters and relationships. There’s a degree to which while this is more of a sports affair, implying a particular brand of very light action, Aokana has a “hidden” slice-of-life component in how it addresses many of the episodes. It has too much plot and too tight a focus on FC to actually get there in terms of genres, but we explore Asuka and her friends more like we would in a Slice of Life than not. You can see that when you contrast Shindou and Saki, or even the Vice-captain, with any of the one-off or tertiary opponents from Angelic Layer who were more thinly sketched despite the show having a longer running time. The characters there were fine for what that show was doing, but in Aokana, we’re operating a little differently and everybody gets a layer or two as a result.
In terms of enjoyment, though… this show is going to live or die based on how you react to Asuka. Remember, she’s an idiot. A chipper, positive idiot striving to have fun who makes most of her accomplishments while still largely coming off as a lost and confused newbie, at least all the way through the regional qualifiers and arguably until the end of the big tournament. I thought Asuka was watchable and even engaging, because her demeanor doesn’t feel fake or forced (except in moments when she is explicitly forcing herself; I mean it’s not forced by the show writers) and as such can kind of be infectious both to other characters and the audience. But when you pitch a character like her, I know she’s going to be dead on arrival for a significant subset of people.
And in a different show the protagonist being dead weight wouldn’t necessarily be a fatal blow. However, Aokana is so much Asuka’s story in terms of what drives it, and it has the slice of life component that I mentioned earlier that puts more weight on the characters, so I think it’s going to be very hard to overlook not liking her.
For my part though, she was fine: that’s more a caveat on what is otherwise a firm recommendation, rather than a knock against the show’s letter grade. As to that letter… it’s a B. Aokana is a solid, entertaining show. It’s rarely exceptional, with some nice flying stunts but also a few cases where the animators couldn’t quite keep up with the supposed spectacle, but it also doesn’t do much if anything wrong, and a good number of its elements are stronger than average. It’s certainly one that I would say is worth checking out.