The story starts with Yoigoshi Tatsuya, who absolutely hates sports after having reached great heights and fame in soccer but losing all his close friends. Every sports team in school, especially the soccer team, wants to recruit Yoigoshi but he simply doesn’t budge. That is until he met Souma Azemichi who quite literally made him budge and dragged him to the Kabaddi club. Yoigoshi soon realizes that there are a variety of great players in Kabaddi, and speed alone doesn’t cut it here.

The anime starts with Yoigoshi’s exposure to Kabaddi and learning what it means to be a team player and rely on his teammates. The past doesn’t catch up to him here and he finds friends who genuinely care about him and want him to reach great heights with their help. Like we mentioned before, the plot drives itself through the characters and the characters drive the plot in turn. There is no overarching and complicated plot in Burning Kabaddi but that works fairly well for a 12 episode anime that would only suffer from a complicated plot.

It’s interesting to note how Burning Kabaddi started its story with Yoigoshi but actually ended with the Kabaddi team of Noukin High. Noukin High’s team players are some of the best characters you might ever come across in the sports genre. Without exception, the characters who made the best impressions on us were Yoigoshi and Misumi Kyouhei. While the captain Masato Oujou was simply fantastic, the depth of Yoigoshi and Misumi was unbeatable. With Misume, especially, we got to see how he was brought to Kabaddi and his growth. Misumi proved himself to be the best anti ever and Yoigosh as the main character delivered the final blow and raised himself to be one of the best raiders of the show!

It was a little disappointing to not see much depth for Azemichi since he carved himself out to be a friendly rival for Yoigoshi in the first few episodes but towards the end and in most of the matches, he simply faded out. The antagonists were simply spectacular and their characterization was in no way boring, making them great rivals for Noukin High.

Anime is an audio-visual medium and that, of course, means that the animation has to be good. However, Shakunetsu Kabaddi did not really reach that mark of good animation with certain scenes feeling like a slideshow. The anime isn’t severely affected by its animation but it does feel like it could do much better by showing us what’s happening instead of simply telling us. On the other hand, the opening and ending songs were really catchy but not as impressive.