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http://amanchu-anime.com/
It's happening!!!!!!!!!
Id recommend Hajime no Ippo then. It does a great job of building up every fight and making you care for the characters(even the opponents).
Jex actually recommended that other boxing one... something something Joe, because it apparently has a depressing nihilistic ending. lol
I don't think either is readily available anyway though... and hell, I made an honest effort to try to get through Slam Dunk but I just got bored half a dozen episodes in.
I think the success of Ping Pong comes from showing us two things in particular that makes it appealing to people who don't typically like sport anime.
It shows us who the the people are outside of the sports. A lot of the main characters care about the ping pong, but it explores why they care about, what drives them to care about it beyond the sport. What are they like as people? What drove their character before the sport? There are individuals out there who devote literally everything to a sport, and that's fine, but Ping Pong gave us more insight into the characters outside the sport. There are characters in Ping Pong who almost don't care about the sport. That's kinda rarely seen in a sports anime.The sports still plays an important point in the story, but it's not the only point. The characters drive the drama before the sport does.
Ping Pong was also one of the few sports anime that challenged the notion that winning is the most important thing. There's nothing inherently wrong with stories about winning and overcoming challenges, but when that's the main focus of a sport story, the longer it goes on, the more it kinda grinds down. I reach a point in Ippo where I'm just like, why isn't Ippo the best already? He seems like he should be the best by now.
Yeah, this is my problem with pretty much all sports shows. The only ones I've liked that are "traditional" are ones that feature strong female characters, because there is usually something more going on that at least makes it more than "I WANNA BE THE BEST THE BEST THERE EVER WAS (POKEMON)" arc that pretty much most shounen sports shows go through.
It's why I can at least say that as stupid as
RKB was, at least the whole "feminist" angle of girls can play sports too! made it different.
I'll admit, I skipped Friday Night Lights because I assumed it was just a boring show about high school football, and who cares about football let alone high school football... but it's literally anything but football. Football is just the excuse to talk about issues of class, race, and the annihilating depression of living in small town Texas.
I would argue dumb sport action is still better than something like Chihayafuru with all the "that Memory card game changed my life" monologues that every random opponent gets.
I feel like that stuff appears in all the dumb shounen sports things. At least from what I saw of Baby Steps, Haikyuu, Knight in the Area, and whatever else I watched.
Doesn't look like it's yuri, at least not explicitly so. Probably has the average amount of yuri undertones people can find in any slice-of-life series centered on female characters.
It's as yuri as Euphonium, so not really unless you just like mashing girls together for whatever reason.
