The tournament is underway and it’s no surprise who’s tense…

What They Say:
Baby Steps centers on a honor student named Eiichiro Maruo who becomes frustrated with his life and decides to join the tennis club. Despite lacking experience and physical strength, he utilizes his studious nature to develop a strategic approach to playing tennis. Taking notes of his opponents’ habits and tendencies, he is able to predict their next move before they even react. He also meets Natsu Takasaki, a beautiful girl with a passion for tennis. With her help, he aims to become a professional tennis player.

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Baby Steps moved us forward in time pretty well with the previous episode as we got some mild montage material. Largely it just wanted to explore what it was that Eiichiro had gone through and some of the progress he made over time, notably through the serious amount of notebooks that he had built up showing all the kinds of things that he had done to improve. With him doing so much and having some good personal time with Natsu as well to help explore and nudge that side of things along, Baby Steps definitely did some good stuff with the kind of progress that works. Not too drawn out nor going to fast without touching upon some of the more personal elements that can draw people in and allow them to connect with them.

With the new match just about here, Eiichiro is again showing his overall newness to things as he’s so nervous that he’s practicing hard to try and deal with all that energy. Something that panics Natsu in a cute way since she doesn’t want him wearing himself out. The new tournament is getting underway in an interesting way though as there’s a lot of familiar faces from the previous time but now things have changed up as Takuma is the first seed, which indicates that he’s done a lot to change in the time between and with what the coach had said with both him and Eiichiro, which is welcome to see. For Eiichiro, he gets to go up against someone different this time, which is expected but you never know, as he gets to have the first match against Nariyuki, which is amusing since their both ranked 89 and 90 respectively.

For Eiichiro, there’s a lot riding on this match, even if it is against someone from his school, because he wants to get closer to really starting on the path of achieving his goal. Unfortunately, because he’s so intent on winning, he’s overcompensating and making more and more mistakes because of his controlled intensity, which results in him losing quite a few games at first. What’s fun is that during a breather moment when looking at his notes, he sees one from Natsu that helps him to re-center and move forward again. So when the game gets underway, Nariyuki starts wondering of Eiichiro has figured out his weakness, which may be partially true, but it’s more that Eiichiro is nicely motivated in the right way with a personal message from the girl that he likes.

With some decent little character material between the matches, we also see the softening of relations between Eiichiro and Natsu. It’s pretty cute, if harmless when you really look at it, but you can see how both of them get flustered a bit by each other. But Eiichiro has little time for that, even as it lifts his wings, as he’s going into his second match with Noborikawa. That ends up being an easy match overall, given a few seconds of time really, that sets the stage for the more difficult third round. Events are moving to have him go up against another from his school, one that he actually practices with at the club, with the fifth seed Miyagawa. Eiichiro has definitely put in his research on Miyagawa and it’s definitely interesting to get this exploration.

In Summary:
Baby Steps does some good stuff here that leaves me hopeful for the future of the series in certain ways. While a good bit of time is spent on the first match, it’s all in this episode. And the second match is given a couple of seconds overall, which definitely helps because not every match will be critical to watch. The setup for the third match figures into here as we see who Eiichiro will be playing and getting the observational time really makes it clear that the next one will be a lot more important. With some good movements throughout the episode, some really nice and sweet character bits for Natsu and Eiichiro together and a good bit of growth overall, there’s a whole lot to like here that plays well for the characters and the series, even without any Takuma to be had.

Grade: B

Streamed By: Crunchyroll

Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.