Is Tribe Nine Really a Sports Anime? Or Is It More?

We here at J-List have previously talked about how sports anime are both a staple of the genre, but often very hard to get into. That’s usually due to the structure of how painfully procedural sports can be. Creators have to give the series that little bit of spice to keep watchers interested. Yuri on Ice! and Haikyuu!! did it by giving us a compelling underdog story with interesting relationship dynamics, while Free! and Salaryman’s Club gave us attractive men to ogle on a regular basis. But the newest addition to the “sports anime” genre doesn’t exactly fit the bill. Heck, if you look at the key visuals alone it looks nothing like a sports anime, and that might be the first clue that something fishy is going on. Enter Tribe Nine.

The setting of Tribe Nine is a dystopian Neo-Tokyo where young people get by and assert dominance by playing Extreme Baseball against rival factions. While in the first few episodes we get our classic sports anime tropes such as the rag-tag team slowly coming together, consistently dire stakes when fails because it’s short on members, and the introduction of an antagonist, there’s not much actual Extreme Baseball happening. Unless you count all the nameless, faceless background characters getting unceremoniously massacred through off-screen blunt force trauma.

Which is, if you think about it, very on-brand for an anime made by the creator of Danganronpa. This brings me to a potential theory: Tribe Nine isn’t actually a sports anime. Well, not in the traditional sense. The best comparison is Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. Yu-Gi-Oh! GX was the spin-off to the widely successful Yu-Gi-Oh! anime back in 2004. While it started off as being all about Duel Monsters, after 180 episodes and four seasons, it took quite a few twists and turns before it ended.

While it’s not an outright suggestion that Tribe Nine will manage to pull off this particular kind of twist, it’s already well-known that the creator of Danganronpa knows how to keep a mystery close to their chest and reveal it when the time is right. Given that we’re almost halfway through the first season, there’s no doubt that a twist is coming soon. At least then we’ll know if Extreme Baseball is going to be the least of the Minato Tribe’s worries.