For the fourth year in a row, the authors of Borderline Hikikomori will write a series of twelve posts for the “Twelve Days of Anime” project. Each day, from today up until Christmas, one of us will share an anime- or manga-related moment or event from 2010 that we found special. Today, I’ll be kicking things off with a post on the Saki manga reaching its national tournament arc. Fair warning: excessive fanboying is involved. Enjoy this, and enjoy the rest of the posts in the series!
In September last year, the anime adaptation of Saki ended on a cliffhanger; we essentially got an extended preview of the series’ national tournament. We saw new characters, new special moves, and, of course, the same Yu-Gi-Oh!-esque tile effects. And then we received an on-screen message that said ‘we’re just getting started, yay~’ and things finished. The wait for the nationals was frustrating. It was made more frustrating by the fact that the Saki anime had gone far ahead of the manga by the time it finished. There were delays to the manga, too, before a series of set-up chapters. The wait stretched out further. And then, finally, earlier this year, the nationals began.
