English Dub Review: SK8: The Infinity “Snowfall on a Hot Night”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Reki Kyan is obsessed with skating, especially in underground high stakes races at a secret track known as “S Races”. One such race against a bully skater named Shadow ends up messing up his left arm, putting him out of the competition for awhile, but he still intends to go to the races by bringing people custom boards he builds himself. One day, he meets a new classmate, Canadian transfer Langa Hasegawa, who seems like his total opposite number in personality, but ends up working at the same skate shop. However, in their haste, Reki grabs the wrong board to bring to one of the racers, instead bringing a broken board. The racer then makes Reki race in his place, though Langa decides to instead. Langa initially doesn’t quite have the hang of things, but then tries translating his snowboarding skills from back home into his skating, pulling off a narrow come from behind victory.

OUR TAKE
One of the things I have always appreciated about anime as a medium is its ability to breathe energy and life into seemingly uninteresting things, or at least things I normally wouldn’t gravitate towards, like Tennis, Ping Pong, Ice Skating, Basketball, Boxing, and now even regular skating. SK8 looks to be another one of theses sorts of shows, taking an oft overlooked area of sports and infusing it with instantly likable and relatable characters. It’s not like I wasn’t exposed to skating throughout my life, since I usually watched people play Tony Hawk games at after school clubs and watched Rocket Power as a kid, but it just never quite interested me past that. As such, I wonder how much I’ll be able to fully immerse myself in a story like this as an outsider to this sort of sport. But then again, the point of the story should be that the story and characters are what make people connect to the sport, so it comes down to how well they do that.

As far as first episodes go, this isn’t a bad start, helped in no small part by the studio making this series, BONES, who have quite a lot of notoriety in anime for their many popular series and well liked reputation. They’ve made both Fullmetal Alchemist shows, Eureka Seven, Darker than Black, Wolf’s Rain, Soul Eater, and all seasons of My Hero Academia thus far, so any project they’re attached to is going to get attention. Reki and Langa look to be a good double act with Reki being the outgoing and approachable one and Langa the thoughtful if dense one. This episode, while being an introduction to the show’s world, is also seemingly about introducing this relationship, which seems to be the heart of the show. Where it will go exactly is anyone’s guess, but it does look like the two boys are already learning quite a bit from each other, with Reki showing Langa the ropes on his new town and Langa showing some notable intuition from his snowboarding days which he applies here. With only twelve episodes in this series to work from, it will be interesting to say the least as to how they use that time to its full advantage, but they’ll have the budget to play with at the very least. Now we just have to see if they’ll use it right.