Eiichiro’s in Florida and things won’t be the same.

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)
The first season of Baby Steps, awkward name and all, was the kind of series that simply worked very well for me. With a more serious approach to the sports side as opposed to the comically outlandish, we got to experience seeing Eiichiro’s struggle that started initially with an attraction to a classmate and turned into a real passion for him and his particular set of analytical skills. The slow build approach took its time, but it was interesting to see how the things that drew him into the sport ended up being less of a focus along the way, though still present and important in their own way as well. The series may not be in the stratosphere of an amazing work, but that first season with a lot of source material to work with presented a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable work.

With this season, things kick off with Eiichiro having gotten the nod to go play in Florida with a training camp facility that to him feels like a city that’s all about tennis. Amusingly, pretty much everyone looks beautiful to him and his shy and awkward side is definitely there in a cute way. It doesn’t take long to get him on the court though, initially with Marcia, so he can try and shake off his jet lag a bit. Just getting back into playing is great, but it’s also fun to watch the really emotive Marcia play, since the Japanese players tend to not play like this. Marcia gets set up nicely here to be an interesting character against Eiichiro as this storyline moves on. But the same is also said about the others that he meets, such as his dorm mate, Atsushi, who fills him in on some of what to expect as a fell Japanese person in dealing with the food and the like there. He provides a nice senpai kind of feeling without it getting weird or over the top.

Eiichiro’s two week exchange program stay here is something that starts off well and we get to see him exposed to some very different ways of practicing and learning, which includes conditioning and exam aspects of it all. It’s solidly done and you get to see the effort they all put into in order to progress and succeed. Eiichiro makes an impression on others as well though, initially with all his notebooks which just shocks them in a big way with how detailed they are. The show doesn’t go too deep into things in its opening episode here overall, but we get some decent tennis being played in front of Eiichiro as he tries to analyze others ahead of his own match, which leads us to the closing moments here as he goes against Alex, who is playing pro and ranked 819th in the world. And it’s made clear why quickly, though Eiichiro makes his own opening mistakes that he sets to correct here.

In Summary:
Baby Steps in its second season here doesn’t do much to introduce new viewers to things, which is unfortunate since you might get some new folks on and you hope to grow your audience. But what it does for established fans is definitely fun and welcome as we get the separation of Eiichiro from the people he knows and places him in a whole other world with its own struggles and challenges. What’s really great to watch is that he doesn’t spend hardly any time at all on worrying about adapting here as he’s just enticed by all the tennis play and opportunities here and throws himself directly into that, at least for now. That keeps us away from some of the sillier things, but it also says well of Eiichiro and his growing passion for tennis that has taken him to the other side of the world to learn how to play. This is a series I loved the first time around and it’s off to a great start here.

Grade:

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Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.