Ongoing Investigations #100 marks a milestone for the blog! To celebrate, this time around we asked Twitter to suggest the titles for us to check out.

Ever since I finished Cross Game, I have been itching for more baseball anime, and truly I find myself more and more engaged in sports series overall. Major is a damn long and famous series that we finally started to explore. Major has a dual story taking place, the next stage of the career of an aging baseball player and his son the growing, passionate young baseball dreamer, Goro. As with other baseball series, death seems to stalk the cast, but you can see it coming, though this doesn’t make me any happier to say good-bye. Since Goro is too young to really be the star yet, we follow the dad as he pursues a new road on his team. This is an excellent way for us to experience Goro as a child while still getting plenty of baseball tension. At this point I am more excited about the dad’s future but Goro is a good a kid and things seem promising. And as a popular title, and currently hitting its 6th season, the animation is quite nice. For me, Major exuded a lot of heart and I fell in love with it easily. Liked this show so much you can expect to see a full review soon.

Major was suggested to us in a roundabout way by Ed Chavez. Apparently he was never a big fan of the manga but suggested we sample the series anyways as part of a proper Shonen Sunday education. When Bradley C Meek suggested it on Twitter for our 100th Ongoing Investigation we had to watch it.  I had mostly heard of the show for the fact that it follows the professional career of the main character, Goro Honda,  from his early childhood days when he really gets into the idea of playing professionally to his playing the major leagues. The series starts with it being the story of Goro’s and his potentially career ending injury. Seeing his father’s struggles inspires Goro to aim to be professional ball player himself. So far Narutaki and I have been intrigued by both Goro’s fathers struggles and his romance with Goro’s teacher. Eventually Goro’s dad will have to step out of the spotlight as Goro gets older and the show focuses more on him but we have been enjoying the show so far. The first 3 episodes we watched did not have the opening so the picture of the cracked baseball helmet does not seem encouraging especially since we are getting this bad feeling about Goro’s dad. I am curious to see were the series goes and how Goro grows as a character.

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