Haikyuu 4×13 Review: “The Second Day”

What a frustrating place to have a cliffhanger! But it’s true, “The Second Day” is the last episode before the break, so now we have to wait even longer to dive into the long-awaited match between Karasuno and Inarizaki.

“The Second Day” does a great job of hyping up the match. Ukai gives us a rundown of the players to watch out for, and we got to meet most of them for a little bit. From the warmups and the short amount of the game that we’ve already seen, it’s obvious this is going to be a tough fight for Karasuno. I mean, this is one of the top-seeded teams in the tournament, but Karasuno has performed miracles before, and they can do it again.

Atsumu calling for silence before his serve was intense in the manga, but in the anime it was just such a boss move. Atsumu is The Worst™, but I will never get over how cool that is. Atsumu’s and Osamu’s reaction to the double threat of Kageyama and Hinata is chilling, and that last shot of a staredown between the two teams – I can’t help but shiver in anticipation. This is going to be so good, y’all.

I will say that Kita’s voice is a lot, hmm, stronger than I was expecting. Without going into spoiler territory, I imagined him having a much softer voice. He’s one of those characters who is quiet and reserved but still incredibly terrifying. And I’m a little surprised because I remember reading that Nobunaga Shimazaki was going to be voicing Suna, but it sounds like he’s actually voicing Osamu. Of course, neither character spoke that much during this episode, so they could just have similar voices.

This is probably one of my favorite matches in the manga, so I’m really excited about seeing it animated. I love the dynamic between the Miya brothers, and I’m anticipating a lot of humor in future episodes. (Not that there isn’t humor in every episode – Kageyama calling Hinata a tangerine, Sawamura screaming progressively louder to be heard over the band, and Hinata just forgetting to spike are some of my favorite moments.) And I like the look of Karasuno’s orange uniforms more than I thought I would! They’re very dynamic on screen.

“The Second Day” also does a great job highlighting what’s so spectacular about Hinata and Kageyama’s relationship, too. I mean, I mention in basically every review how much I love them, and how their relationship is the foundation of the series, but it cannot be overstated. It’s things like Kageyama not even flinching at saying Hinata sucks, but then immediately saying he isn’t weak.

Season 4 is a two-cour season, so we will be getting more episodes, but not until July. I’m confused about the split, though. I don’t believe the first two seasons had a break, and this seems like an odd spot to put one. I have to wonder if the initial plan was to have Haikyuu!! airing during the Olympics, which would allow for cool promotional opportunities. Since they only recently rescheduled the Olympics, it was probably too late to change it.

It’s definitely going to be difficult to wait until July. But a preview video for this match dropped the other day, and a new featured image was released earlier this week, and they should hype you up for the rest of the season even more!

I feel like the animation has gotten much better from earlier in the season. There were some iffy spots that took me out of their respective episodes, but for the most part, it looks like the animation team has found their groove. “The Second Day” was very well done – Hinata’s bam! jump in particular.

I’m still not a fan of the mid-episode outros and intros. Last week’s episode had the cat!Kuroo and cat!Kenma with the owl!Bokuto and owl!Akaashi from the OVAs, but this entire season has only had crow!Hinata and I just want to see something different. Why haven’t we seen the animal versions of the other players yet?

Have you seen “The Second Day”? What did you think?

Author: Jamie Sugah

Jamie has a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from The Ohio State University. She self-published her first novel, The Perils of Long Hair on a Windy Day, which is available through Amazon. She is currently an archivist and lives in New York City with her demon ninja vampire cat. She covers television, books, movies, anime, and conventions in the NYC area.

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