2017-2018 seinen manga adaptation in 22 episodes:
AniDB, vt
"March Comes in Like a Lion". Kiriyama Rei is a young professional
shōgi player, but is profoundly lonely.
After the first season mostly dealt with shōgi, this one spends
rather more time outside competition, dealing with Rei's social
development and his friends. The overall feeling is a bit more
positive as a result, but I came here for the shōgi not the teenage
slice of life (and particularly not the extended storyline about
school bullying, though it does at least end by admitting that there
are no easy fixes).
Even when shōgi comes to the fore, the story is as likely as not to
deal with one of the other game-playing characters; in manga you can
get away with a huge cast who don't get much narrative time each, but
in anime I think it works rather less well, particularly when there's
no guarantee of a continued story.
Still, I found it worth watching; when we do get to spend time in
Rei's head he still comes over as interesting, and if the women are
all distinctly less developed as characters than the men that's
something I'm used to in anime not explicitly aimed at women. And at
least there are some developed characters here, particularly some of
the older players who have to decide whether to retire on a high or
keep playing for one more season even if they suspect they're past
their best performance.
What there isn't is any of the attempt to encourage people to be
interested in shogi that the first season had, and which distinguished
this show to some extent from all the other teenage
competition-related slice-of-life stories.
No third season has been announced.
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