Haikyu!! To the Top: Complete Collection

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Haikyu is one of those sports anime series that made the genre popular again and paved the way for the wave of them we have now. If you’ve seen my reviews for the previous seasons, you’ll know I’ve been enjoying along with the rest of the anime world. Now season four is upon us with Sentai’s Haikyu!! To the Top: Complete Collection that has Hinata and the gang doing everything they can to reach the top and beyond.

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Thanks to all of their hard work and tenacity from the previous season and the others before it, Hinata and the Karasuno High School volleyball team have qualified to be in the upcoming Nationals. As they continue to train and get ready for the grueling matches to come, Kageyama and Tsukishima are sent away to separate special training camps, leaving Hinata feeling left behind as everyone else trains.

He decides to take it upon himself to sneak into the special camp Tsukishima was sent to, only to get caught but is allowed to stay and watch the training from the sidelines. While he’s stuck doing mundane tasks and is frustrated at first, he’s able to take a step back and go over everything he’s learned as he watches new players train, giving him a much needed boost and strategies on how to apply all of this knowledge in the nationals.

It goes without saying this will come in handy, as it’ll take everything he and the Karasuno team has to make it through the matches, and if they’re lucky, to the top. As with the previous seasons, I had a great time with this one as it’s always fun and exciting to watch Hinata and the gang do their best to become better and learn new ways to do so while rising and falling in the process.

I will admit this season had some odd quirks with it, such as the animation not being as good as the previous ones (most likely due to the pandemic taking place during its 2020 original run in Japan). And while I’m all about watching Hinata and team train, they went a little overboard with it for this season as most of it is just watching them working to get better instead of mixing it in with matches here and there.

Besides those gripes, everything else is just as good as the other seasons as the visuals and audio look and sound great as with the previous Blu-ray releases, and there’s some pretty cool extras with not one, but two OVAs titles Land vs. Air and The Path of the Ball that give even more insight into the team and their training.

For fans of the show and sports anime, picking up Haikyu!! To the Top: Complete Collection is a win as it continues to dominate with sports action and drama on and off the volleyball court. While the animation and pacing is off some in this season, it makes up for it with some of the best episodes of the show so far and comes with two cool OVAs to make this set rise to the top of your anime collection.

About the Author: Chris Mitchell