The Beach Volleyball Club continues their training for the Okinawa regional qualifiers, and not even the appearance of one of the Thomas sisters’ rivals can shake them up! (Well, for Akari and Haruka, probably in a specific way!) But what Akari worries might shake the club up is the rules of the regionals — due to a limited amount of participants, only one team can advance to the main tournament. That means either the sisters or Team Harukana can qualify for it, and it’ll only be more stressful if they have to face each other in the final.
You can guess the club handles it well, but Akari faces how she feels about it in a neat way.
The major highlight out of this volume of Harukana Receive is the action, which makes this the series’ strongest one yet. We don’t just see these girls in bikinis smacking a ball on the sand — we see how they’re doing it and forming strategies in a manner that in no means interrupts the flow of a match. I’ve talked before about how complex a match can be, and volume 4 adds to it in an engrossing way. We have at one point Haruka explaining the many types of shots one can end up doing, an explanation on hand signals and when they’re employed, and discussions on how best to execute a strategy during a set.
This becomes a focus when Haruka and Kanata face Yona and Kanna, two twins who lost to the Thomas sisters in the finals last year. And they’re also the ones who appear early in this volume and spoke in a way that made everyone — Akari and Haruka especially — think they were beginners. They obviously show they weren’t, and issue (well, Kanna specifically) a challenge to the Thomas twins. But they face Harukana in the tournament first. Haruka and Kanata soon discover why those two were able to face off against the Thomas sisters in the finals…
That match encapsulates what makes Harukana Receive a great read — the volleyball tactics. Ok, Nyoijizai’s drawings of the girls also stand out, but please note Yona and Kanna’s strategy to force Kanata to make a choice if Haruka can’t block a shot. We have good explanations on certain strategies during this match, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t because the other player’s better or counters quickly. This has been reverberated in prior reviews, but beach volleyball really is use every advantage you can get. Like, are you thinking about driving the ball early in order to set up a tactic midway through a set?
Well, ok, you’re probably not! But in this manga, even that can later throw off an opponent who isn’t expecting it. That again though focuses on the mental aspect of competition, where you can certainly beat an opponent through talent alone, but eventually, you’ll run into someone just as talented or even more talented than you. That’s where your game knowledge, strengths, and mental toughness come into play. Every set can matter — even if you win or lose a point within one — because a certain movement or strategy can come back to ultimately win or lose you the match in the end. Hence why many interesting matches can occur, and, aided by the artwork, makes it great.
So all of that makes Harukana Receive volume 4 of the standouts in the series. Volume 5 could potentially top it though, since it will involve of my favorite matches from the anime. Looking forward to finding out!