If there ever was a topic that begged to be used for fanservice, it’s beach volleyball – a sport famously played in bikinis to the possibly prurient enjoyment of viewers everywhere. Given how Cute Girls Sports Anime is basically its own genre it seems utterly natural that someone, eventually, would decide to make a show about beach volleyball. At least that sport actually exists. The show that emerges in response to that inevitably is Harukana Receive, with which we might as well try to have some fun in the sun.
Our show stars Haruka Oozora, who has just moved to Okinawa where she’ll be living with her cousin, Kanata Higa. You know these girls are the important ones because the title involves a portmanteau of their name. Soon enough, Haruka discovers a beach volleyball court, and after incidentally offending the quiet, no-nonsense member of the pair playing there ends up getting drawn into an exposition match against them, with Kanata as her partner.
During this it becomes clear to the audience that Kanata has some sort of past hang-up about the sport, and probably a history with the angry girl. It’s also clear that Haruka is a bit thick in the head since she does not catch on to any of the hostility in the air and instead has a lot of fun, even setting up another match in the future.
The tragic past turns out to be that Kanata was angry girl’s partner in the past, but as they got older and Kanata stayed tiny, she got a serious complex about her ability, to the point of screwing up matches and running away from the game. This comes to a head in the second fun match between the pairs (after a week of fanservice and training for Haruka) where we do the required “overcoming her fears” cliché and give the former partner a nasty shock on seeing Kanata get back into the game.
They follow this up by doing… the exact same thing again, except this time the rivals are some old friendly rivals of Kanata’s (a pair of blonde sisters) and her hangups are about her play style rather than playing at all. At least it gets the two into the obligatory school club and partnering up officially for a local tournament.
Thus we sort of get the show’s fare. The menu is butts, boobs, bouncing, angst, friendship, Yuri overtones that are as intentional as they are misleading, training montages, and of course games of beach volleyball. In short, it’s everything you probably guessed would be here from the start plus a wee bit of angst and those weird overtones with the cousins.
We get to the Okinawa Junior Tournament, and as the first match takes more than one episode we find it… shifts most of the little drop of angst over to the other team? At least they do remember to give the rivals personalities in order to make the matches at least somewhat interesting. This oddly enough is the only match we follow in said tournament as it’s our main pair’s only win. Their club seniors, being former national competitors, take the trophy (the pair including Kanata’s Ex live in Kyoto now and were only in Okinawa seasonally earlier). Thus, our leads will have most of a year to train for national qualifiers, where they hope Okinawa will be able to send two teams.
We take a couple episodes, dealing with a new addition to the club and more of Kanata’s hangups about her old team before kicking off the second and final tournament arc. This begins with the revelation that only one team will go to nationals (they had expected top two, but there wasn’t enough turnout) and after a little heartwarming team building moves into matches. Haruka and Kanata take out their first match in a little montage, and their second (with a pair that has a one-sided rivalry with the other team from their school) with flying colors in the better part of an episode.
Thus, at the top of the lists, our main pair and their friends/mentors face off for the right to go to nationals. This will be the remainder of the show.
Naturally, this does end up going to the third set in a best-of-three format, with the sisters taking the first and the cousins the second. The third goes to overtime, not that I really understand much about the intricacies of beach volleyball competitive decisions, and the last episode is all for that tense anything-goes time. Fitting the general rules for this genre, Haruka and Kanata pull it out in the most dramatic fashion, with a long exchange at the end of the overtime scoring situation, and we have a long tail where the girls come to terms with victory and defeat, preparing to face old friends in the nationals and just celebrating (with a beach party) being friends through beach volleyball. The end.
So, what is there to make of Harukana Recieve?
Really, not much. This is about as basic a sports anime as you could hope fore. It doesn’t make its secenarios fanciful to make them more awesome, so it doesn’t threaten to make them too absurd. It takes its sweet time with downtime, but also gives us two tournament events, one of which gets the typical “rivals meet at the top” ending. The characters are bland, but perfectly serviceable. Every team seems to have one quiet sensible girl and one extroverted loon, except the team with Kanata’s ex where said ex is both the quiet one and the intense one.
The added idol girl in the second half accomplished basically nothing, never even finding a partner to play, but she was so wildly inoffensive that I just sort of give it a pass. Her stuff could have been just packing peanuts when, by one thing and another, most of a year passed, but it had an acceptable drop or two of pathos.
Even the fanservice is oddly forgettable. Don’t get me wrong, the camera knows that the bikinis are a major reason to watch anything beach volleyball related, especially when we’re going with cute anime girls, and it will give plenty of closeups on intimate bits of anatomy in various poses.
But, like Atelier Ryza, it doesn’t really distract from the show, and most of the shots feel surprisingly natural. Now and again they’ll pan or linger in a way they maybe didn’t have to, but the focus is ultimately more on the volleyball than on anything else. I think I could count the number of shots in the whole show that crossed the line to “hastily clothed a fetish scene” on one hand.
Still, Harukana Recieve is just… basic. The story is generic, the characters are generic, the art is generic. It’s not actually boring, but I feel like I’ll be forgetting this one pretty easily all the same.
For that, I’ll be generous and offer Harukana Recieve a flat C. It’s harmless and reasonably engaging, take it or leave it.