Re-Main

This anime is a missed opportunity to show the intricate nature of water polo with a compelling character.

This anime started off strong by introducing us to the teenage protagonist – Minato Kiyomizu. Minato awoke from a half-year-long coma after surviving a serious car accident. The doctor and family inform Minato that he has forgotten the last three years of his memories. His family and Minato’s previously close friends are especially dismayed to learn that Minato doesn’t remember the friendships and any water polo skills he had cultivated over the last three years. (This was the particular clip that I saw online that convinced me to add this to my watch list.)

His family and previously close friends elaborate and the audience learns that Minato was a prominent water polo player with unmatched skills before the accident. But Minato has completely forgotten his love of the sport and does not wish to learn it again. This is specially reinforced after Minato realizes how much schooling he needs to catch up on. After starting at a new school, he is reluctantly convinced to try water polo again.

I think that this anime could have had a much more emotional view of how traumatizing it is to forget three years’ worth of memories. Memories are fundamental in shaping your personality and guiding your future choices based on these past experiences, and to have a chunk gouged out like that could be very traumatic.

This anime lightly touched on Minato working hard to get back into the swing of things in their life, but I think it would have been a much more interesting watch if they focused more on that struggle. After the shock value of the first episode was over, this anime didn’t have much-staying power to keep me motivated to finish watching it. But since I want to do reviews of anime in their entirety, I watched it all the way through.

Some key takeaways from this show could be beneficial to others. The first is that to be good at something, you must work at it continuously until you are satisfied with your skill. On more than one occasion, Minato examines their room to notice different items that show how much he had worked to become a good water polo player. There was a wall that was beginning to dent as it was used repeatedly for throwing practice. He also finds a worn-down water polo ball that had been completely stripped of all of its grippy material due to Minato’s previous daily practice regimen.

Another takeaway from the show is failure is necessary to become better. There is one episode that really hits this home when Minato and their team have a practice match against some middle school students. By the end of the match, Minato and his teammates hadn’t made a single goal and were demolished. Due to this failure, there was some internal strife between the teammates, but overall, it convinced each player that they would need to work harder if they wanted to succeed. This is kind of a no-brainer to most people, but it is a recurring theme in this anime so it’s worth mentioning.

Overall, though I would not recommend this anime to others. There were some cheesy and funny scenes, but this anime is predictable and lacks a plot. Each character has standard personality tropes that make this show rather boring and not worth the time.