Reviews for H2

Adachi Mitsuru's "H2" is a delightful and simple tale of two young men finding their place in the game of baseball. It is also a testament to why the sports genre is one of the most powerful in storytelling. Known for his work on "Touch", "Katsu", and more recently, "Cross Game", Adachi Mitsuru has rightfully earned his place as one of manga's most influential artists. People may complain that his stories are merely copy-pasted from one another (just how many baseball manga has he created so far?) but there is a reason for why he rarely strays from the usual: nobody else can combine theslice-of-life and sports genres as elegantly as he can. H2 is just another reason why the Adachi Mitsuru brand of storytelling is so damn successful.

The story follows the rivalry between ace pitcher Kunimi Hiro and his best friend, Tachibana Hideo. After receiving a medical diagnosis and realising that his shoulder is about to break, Hiro begrudgingly gives up on pitching and moves to a high school without a baseball team. A sudden turn of events brings back his interest in the sport, and a story in the newspaper reveals that the doctor who made him give up on playing was recently arrested for being unlicensed. Hiro's shoulder had no problems to begin with-- he can pitch again without worry. Rather than transfer away to another school, he decides to turn Senkawa's weak baseball club into a full-fledged team, resolved to meet Hideo in the Koshien.

The real battle is not in the sport itself, however. The girl who Hiro loves is also Hideo's girlfriend, and the three of them all know it. While Hideo trusts Hiro enough to not cross a line, Hiro still regrets not falling for her earlier. As childhood friends, weren't Hiro and Hikari the two that were meant for each other... ?

Where H2 succeeds most is in its characterisation. The two players, as talented as they are, are never defined by the age old format of 'good guy vs. bad guy'. Both of them are inherently flawed people. The relationship between Hiro and Hideo feels natural and believable, and their skill in the sport is never justified on the basis of superhuman ability and secret moves. Even characters that are initially antagonistic (Kine) are developed into likeable characters by the end of the story. One of the hardest things to accomplish when writing a character is to turn an enemy into a friend, but Adachi goes a step further by making this development feel natural, too.

Considering the massive size of the cast (dozens of players per team, and many more in between), it isn't a surprise that some of them are overlooked. Several members of Hiro's team are sadly forgotten as soon as their story arc has ended. Fortunately, the matches are kept interesting as each opposing team is given a distinct personality. In the case of Senkawa's main rival, Eikyo, the opposing coach and starting pitcher provide a conflict that cleverly contrasts the nature of Hiro's pitching. You grow to despise Eiyko over time - you want them to lose, you want them to fail and eat the dirt. There is an actual reason to care about the matches beyond the usual "protagonist-dude must win".

There is a sense of suspense to each match that is so rare in other sports manga. Matches will be lost when you fully expect them to win, and matches will be won when you are prepared for a loss. You cannot ever fully predict what will happen. Adachi carefully foreshadows and places red herrings throughout the manga, though never enough to result in a sudden plot twist.

H2 also has a... unique sense of humour. Many times the characters will break the fourth wall (i.e. complaining about only being given one panel to talk) and Adachi will often make references to his previous works and his current state of mind. He even made himself a character in the story, which is... utterly bizarre. The most hilarious moment in the entire story occurs as Hiro mentions his perfect vision, then squints into the lazy blobs drawn in the stands and makes a shocked face. Yeah, the author actually made fun of his own artwork. The self-deprecation is comedy gold.

The artwork of H2 is simplistic yet graceful. The mute panels of the scenery effectively immerse the reader in the setting, and the story is carefully told through imagery rather than infodump. Even during the dramatic scenes, the mangaka respects the audience's intelligence by allowing them to understand what happened through the artwork. The action scenes during the baseball matches are also made easy for the eye to follow as a result of the simplistic art style. There is never a moment where you must pause and think "Huh, how did that happen?"

At 34 volumes long, H2 is the longest manga I have ever read. But it almost felt as if it was too short. There are no filler arcs, no unnecessary chapters. Every panel in the story has a meaning and purpose, whether it be to develop the characters or to simply make the reader laugh. My only complaint is that it all ended too suddenly. Considering how perfectly-paced the entire manga was, it's a bit strange that everything was wrapped up in a single chapter. It needed a few more than that, or better yet, an entire volume. We are left with assumptions rather than conclusions. It shouldn't have been that way.

Regardless of whether you are interested in the sports and slice-of-life genres, H2 is a must-read. It is an absolute joy to read and perfectly harmonises entertainment with quality. I had to purposely slow myself down because I didn't want the story to end, and that is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to a manga. Adachi Mitsuru can confidently continue to do what he does best-- delight his audience.

I recently finished this manga only a few hours ago and really wanted to write a review immediately after finishing it up, as so it would be completely fresh in my mind. However, after reading it through, I could not help but to dedicate a few hours to think over what I had just read. Let me begin by saying that I had not read any of Adachi Mitsuru's works and after hearing positive things about this manga-ka, decided to go for one of his completed, yet somewhat recent works, H2. With Touch receiving many of the accolades of being a greatstory way ahead of its time, H2 is a beautiful example of the exquisite style that that Adachi is able to create in his stories, a style which blends sports and a true, emotional romance story into one.

Don't let the surface of the story fool you. Even though it's prominently a baseball themed sport story, what drives the plot is the romance. There are two integral parts of the story in H2. One is the baseball aspect. Hiro Kunimi and Hideo Tachibana are childhood friends who met in middle school and as customary of close friends in these situations, both of them end up going to different high schools. Hiro is your ace pitcher while Hideo is your powerful clean-up batter. One aspect of the story depicts the relationship between these two characters and the friendship shared between two, which is tested on the baseball field as both vie incessantly to win the championship.

However, as I've stated previously, although the baseball aspect of the story is important, it would be nothing without the romance. And this is where I believe Adachi truly shines. He is able to flawlessly weave in an extremely strong and touching romance story within the sports world. Normally, you encounter sports stories with simple comedy and hints of romance that is never developed. However, Adachi's stories are unique in that romance takes center stage prominently in many instances. So a love square is seen between Hiro, Hideo, their childhood friend Hikari Amamiya and Hiro's baseball team manager, Haruka Koga. Adachi not only uses romance strongly in his story, but masterfully interweaves it with baseball.

A point to argue about is the art style Adachi implements in his works. While not the most attractive of styles, it does get the job done. It's not detailed and not pretty. A lot of the minor characters (and even some of the major ones) look oddly similar within the story. This is also the case within Adachi's different works, as characters from one manga look very similar to H2's. However, because his art style is simple, its not overly complicated and is extremely easy to follow, which is very nice when reading through the baseball games. You actually know what's going on in every panel.

Though the focus of the romance sports story is mainly between the four aforementioned characters, Adachi has introduced a very adequate set of minor characters (again, a ton who looks the same) to not only develop the main characters, but truly helps them shine. There are a lot of unique situations that occur which makes the romance square so much more interesting between the four. Aside from all of the minor characters, Adachi has also done well in developing the two main protagonists in Hiro and Hideo. Even though the personality of both never really undergoes a drastic overhaul, you still get a sense of a truly different character from what was seen in chapter one in comparison to what we end up with in chapter 338.

With all of these basic elements set up, it was up to Adachi to bring them all together and ultimately produce something enjoyable. And let me be the first one to say that when I tentatively picked up this manga in the beginning, after reading the first bunch of chapters, I was easily hooked. I spent hours at home - and during work in the spare time - to see what happens. Who do Hiro and Hideo ultimately end up with? Who are going to win the championships? And the beauty of it all is that just when you think you have everything all figured out, Adachi literally throws you a curveball that you wouldn't be expecting, and everything is thrown into disarray once again, captivating you all over again as well.

There are a few downsides to this story. One in particular is the completely abrupt ending. Don't mistake that with the fact that there isn't a complete ending, because there is one. It's just the most abrupt thing in the world, that it makes you wonder after spending 337 chapters building up the suspense to the final showdown between Hiro and Hideo - and ultimately, who ends up with whom - the author suddenly got bored and wanted to end things quickly. Either that or he became busy with his other manga works. It really puts a damper on things.

Adachi writes about Hiro's and Hideo's three years in high school baseball, so you have a great sense of the years flying by and you literally get to watch them develop as baseball players, and develop romantic relationships with their respective ladies. And just when you think you have the pairs matched up correctly, little emotional situations changes things, for better or for worse. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that if you are sports fan, and have been dying to have something where sports and romance meet in earnest, H2 will be right down your alley. Alternatively, if you're a simple romance fan, chances are H2 will also be something that will satisfy your needs. Adachi truly brings you on a rollercoaster of emotions following the lives of these young adults.

Out of Adachi's 3 big baseball mangas, H2 is the worst. The flaws include bad pacing, and an unrewarding ending after beign dragged over 300 chapters. This is a tricky read, like some of Adachi's other works it has a drop of quallity near the end, and obviously some very bad humor and filler pages. The pros are that the side characters are nice and had some nice back story, even if they are forgetten after their respective arcs. But the biggest flaw is that you feel like Hiro and Hideo don't evolve a lot during the manga, you don't see a real development, Hikari and Haruka youcan see some development, but Hikari is just near the end.

So the final judgement is 6, by no means this is a bad manga, but when you have Cross Game this is not a read i would recommend.

Masterpiece I started reading H2 to enjoy more of adachi's subtle sense of humor and best slice of life work that he gives in his evey mangas. But at the end H2 turned out to the Best Manga I have ever read. The night on which I finished reading it, I was unable to sleep and even after that, for few days I couldn't stop thinking about it. Of all the mangas I have ever read this is the one that left huge affect on me. If someone is just starting to read Adachi Mitsuru work then please start with H2 because main character used by Adachiis almost similar in his every work. Though main character is very influential still if we are familiar with Adachi's work then we can kind of predict main characters behavior.

It is the most detailed sports and romance manga of all of Adachi's work. Especially romance and also baseball. Some may find boring reading all the baseball detail but every romance part easily makes up for that.

SPOILER** :ABOUT ENDING. though the ending was not what i wanted and i hated adachi for many days after finishing H2, but slowly as the time passed by I came in terms with it and realized that along the manga there were hints about what ending will be. But it still is very painful to accept. The main character is the best. He is so good that many readers start hating the main female character for her role.

A guy good at pitching and a guy good at batting were on the same team once but are now on opposite sides, and this is a manga that is all about their rivalry, and they face each other an entire one time, because this is a manga by Adachi Mitsuru. His previous baseball work, Touch, is a classic, in spite of the flaws that hold it back. The slow build-up to the main plot twist is excruciating, characters aside from Tatsuya aren’t fleshed out, and characters kind of appear, out of thin air, like the author just decided to just draw them on awhim, and then realized he had to put them in the next panel for the story to keep making sense. H2 in comparison is a much more professionally put together work, with a lot of thought put into how to organically grow its group of characters and have it be a part of the main story. The main character, Hiro, embodies this change in direction from Touch to H2 by being more of a team player who trusts his fielders to do their job instead of just pitching really hard and hoping he wins. He’s still more or less the main focus, but it isn’t all on him to carry the reader’s interest. Kine, Sagawa and Yanagi all have their stories and mannerisms that make you recognize them when they’re playing on the pitch. The first part of the manga is dedicated to investigating their personalities while the first few baseball matches are played, and it’s surprising how long it is able to be interesting without relying on tricks. All of it is very readable drama between people that naturally occurs when their interests don’t align, and it ties together well with the baseball matches to make them mean more than a win or a loss.

Of course it isn’t new to add a extra layer of stakes to a sporting event, people do it all the time with betting, but Adachi is very good at making these wagers and making them seem like they’re not rigged. There are various twists in the matches that are sometimes aggravating to read because they’re not what you want, but they’re what the story needs in order to keep all the matches engaging. Even if you know that Hiro’s team has to win for the story to progress, there’s still the sense that maybe they won’t, because you don’t know for sure, and Adachi exploits this sense very well. Sometimes though it's like he rolls dice across his table to make up some of the scores, because Hiro’s team should be able to steamroll some opposition, and then they don’t, and then it seems like they should lose, and then they steamroll. At a certain point, like in real sport, the reader should be able to get a feel for how good a particular team is after they’ve seen them play enough times, and roughly know what the outcome is before a match starts. You can’t do this in H2, and it’s due to the Adachi’s development of the baseball members: he wants you to like them, so he makes them all competent, but then they’re all too competent, and should realistically beat every team they’re up against. This cheapens some of the tension later on when they run into some artificial difficulties.

So Hiro’s team are going along and they’re beating everybody pretty easily. They draw a match against a baseball team who have a hysterically evil pitcher, and they later beat this team in a tournament and are set to progress pretty far in it, possibly to the finals to face Hideo’s team, who have Hideo and a bunch of other strong players. The issue though is that Adachi wants to save this showdown for later, preferably for the end of the manga, because if he makes them face now, he loses the ability to make their match seem mysterious and suspenseful. But that still leaves the issue – who will beat Hiro?

Adachi’s answer is to clone the two main characters and put them on the same team against him., and then he has the audacity make it seem like he’s going to reuse these characters and that They’ll Meet Again Someday. The story doesn’t go downhill or anything after this but it’s a sour moment. You put all this trust in Adachi to not stretch reality too far and then he goes and rips a hole in space and time just to make Hiro lose a baseball match. The fourth wall breaks are less intrusive than this (they’re just a form of padding). What also seems like padding are the multiple fanservice shots, which seem to be done to fulfil some sort of quota. Or maybe seeing woman’s underwear has a kind of key-jangling effect on the Japanese public and helps them keep reading. Maybe this is the real key to the Adachi Mitsuru formula all along, but you have to wonder whether or not its worth alienating the female part of your audience just to do it.

He takes the fourth wall thing pretty far though. Hiro and Hikari, and Hideo and Haruka all go visit an Adachi Mitsuru museum, and his work is displayed in glass casings, and then afterwards they talk about how much it sucked just like how you would after a real trip to the museum. There’s not many of these instances where the main group are hanging out as you’d expect, it’s usually either Hiro with Hikari, or Hiro with Hideo, or Hideo with Hikari, or Hiro with Haruka. Haruka is the odd one out here – she doesn’t have as much interaction with the rest of three as the rest of the three have with themselves, and this lack of attention hurts her development as the story goes futher on. Hiro, Hikari and Hideo all have goals in their life that extend beyond just highschool, but all Haruka wants to do is to start a highschool baseball team. This is the starting point of the manga, sure, but besides starting it and cute and endearing, Haruka stalls and doesn’t grow. Hiro and her form a connection that eventually goes beyond friendship, but nothing much changes even when they hold hands. Eventually she gets pulled into the ongoing action between Hideo, Hiro and Hikari, but again, there’s no real result from this. This is probably where Adachi’s desire to be subtle and realistic gets the better of him. Haruka has the patience, not of a girl, but of an 80-year-old grandmother. Hiro puts her through enough mental turmoil to justify her throwing a fit on at least one occasion, but instead she just smiles and accepts it and everyone moves on. Hikari too, also seems to have developed a similar level of telepathy and neatly sidesteps any potential confrontation that could happen between her, Hiro, or Hideo. Adachi’s subtlety and avoidance of common anime/manga exaggerations has been praised and deserved to be praised but at times it runs counter to what it’s trying to achieve. Realistically, there should be at least one scene where any two of the four have an argument, but Adachi is too protective of them - he wants you to like them, and so he wants to avoid negativity, and so implications and wordless acknowledgements are all you get, and while they usually work, they’re overused and sometimes feel like a pose.

That’s not to say that H2 is lacking in confrontation or genuine emotion, but it’s not completely consistent in portraying its characters as people. There’s a lot of development given to a lot of a characters, and while it’s spread evenly, it’s also spread thin. A lot of them are still two-dimensional and act on obvious lines. The hysterically evil pitcher mentioned earlier is such a caricature that it’s hard to take him seriously - but at least he stands out. Everybody on Hiro’s team is just some variant of nice and polite. Part of what made Touch great was the fact that Tatsuya always had a certain skepticism that helped balance out the tone. Everyone in H2 however is just relentlessly nice, which contributes to a sort of toothlessness in casual conversation. Even Hiro and Hideo’s rivalry never really goes beyond harmless jabs like “I’ll beat you!” “No, I’ll beat you!” and so on.

There’s always potential for drama though thanks to the baseball matches, which help supply the missing tension. Contributing to the enjoyment is the consistently clean and readable artstyle, which manages to convey a lot thanks to how the eyes are drawn and where they look. Adachi’s very good at compressing information like this and it helps keep the story’s momentum. The volumes go by very quickly – even Adachi, looking back in one chapter, is surprised at how easily he’s been able to fill up so many volumes. He probably shouldn’t have looked back.

When you have a story as wide as H2 and apparently as plotless as it goes on it becomes a lot harder to wrap things up. You have all these characters that you have to provide solid endings for, and you have to find the time for this while wrapping up the main story. In Touch you only had Tatsuya and the people Tatusya cared about, but in H2 you have Hiro, and Hiro’s baseball team and later Hideo’s baseball team, and also the love triangle, and that’s not including Haruka, who – does she even like Hiro? Will she end up with Hideo? Who does Hikari like? And you also have the baseball matches as well - something has to give, and it’s baseball. The final tournaments matches lack the tension of the previous ones and are shot through pretty quickly. The two clones mentioned earlier aren’t brought back for a rematch, and the evil pitcher guy is injured – there’s nothing left to look forward to besides Hiro versus Hideo. There are, of course, certain moments for certain members, but the matches are otherwise breezed past without much detail, like Adachi was just sick of working on the manga, and wanted to move on to something else.

The final, climatic showdown between Hiro and Hideo arrives and the build-up and the eventual ending are equally unsatisfying. The stakes are muddled and it’s not clear who gets what or who gets hurt if either Hideo or Hiro lose. You’re rooting for Hiro obviously since you’ve been with him since the start but it’s not like Touch where Tatsuya absolutely has to win or the world falls apart. Either can win or lose and it’s not like it matters. It’s just a game of baseball. You can argue that maybe the dissatisfaction is intentional; regardless, the ending sucks to read.

Getting there is fun though, and it’s still fun to re-read the first few chapters, and see Kine being an idiot, and then comparing him then to how he is at the end. It’s satisfying to see the progression, both from the people in the manga, and from Adachi Mitsuru himself, in H2. To see its people change over time, and work towards something, and express themselves through baseball, is fulfilling in a way that can only be described by experiencing it yourself. You should read it, it's really good.

As neither a fanatic of works by Adachi Mitsuru nor a frequent manga reader, I have somehow found the urge to write this review. From its synopsis, one might think of "H2" as a typical tale of youth entailing character tropes the likes of which can be found throughout today's shounen genre of boys falling head over heels even through graphic printouts. Had it not been for my curiosity whence a quest has been fueled to further my appreciation for a certain mangaka's character designs, the story of a classless athlete, bounded by cries of unsung love and whose unfaltering passion for baseball having become thevery premise of the coming 34 volumes, would have never been told.

I wish that I could share my love for baseball and write for you all just how much "H2" voices this oh-so profound resonance. Sadly, baseball never spoke to me in a way that would suddenly cause me to write a lengthy review on the subject. Don't get me wrong, though I did not have an initial interest in the sport, the panels portraying it throughout the many chapters were still satisfying to read and even prompted me to research more on the Koushien and its shares of youthful aspiration and talent.

34 volumes. 338 chapters. 'Base'-less thoughts on a sport that I have never switched a channel to.

Well then, what in the world did I get myself into?

The few chapters sprinkled around here and there between arcs of tournaments and practices that depicted daydreams of friends brought up by childhood memories are ultimately what had kept my reading of "H2" on a spree in spite of its length. To be teased by the flashing memories where a young Hikari would pester Hiro for his height only for the next panel to be the painful expression on a present Hikari wondering what could have been, to read a monologue of a tailing pinch hitter admist the dialogue between his childhood crush and his best friend only to say aloud the words of encouragement for the two in their coming date, and to watch it all happen beneath the shadows of a horizon infinitely colored by a solemn gray on a single page: a rush of emotions coming from the rare panels where only eye contact between these characters can be made.

From the simple character designs, in which a bolded set of eyes can be drawn so to tell the whole entire story from only staring at its pupils, to the mix of sports and drama laid out as a basic formula for a genre where a final victory marks the end only to somehow be rewritten as a longing pulse of fleeting memories washed away by the passing of time, "H2" serves to this day as an outstanding piece even with its age and length.