Haikyu!! To The Top Complete Collection is a three-disc set that includes all 25 episodes of this season of the Haikyu!! anime, as well as two OVA episodes. The release includes both the original Japanese audio with English subtitles and the English dub.
Haikyu!! To The Top Complete Collection
English Publisher: Sentai Filmworks
Format: Blu-ray
Release Date: March 29, 2022
At the beginning of Haikyu!! To The Top, Kageyama is invited to the All-Japan Youth Training Camp, which is a camp for promising 15 and 16-year-old players to participate in. Tsukishima, meanwhile, is invited to the first-year only prefecture-wide training camp. Hinata, in a fit of jealousy, sneaks into the first-year training camp. Of course, since he showed up uninvited, Hinata is not allowed to participate in the training camp as one of the attendees. Instead, he is allowed to stay and serve as a ball boy. At the All-Japan Youth Training Camp, Kageyama meets other talented players, and as is revealed a little later, Kageyama will encounter some of these players at the forthcoming Nationals tournament. The most important of these characters, though, is Atsumu Miya from Inarizaki High.
The first five episodes focus on the two training camps. Over the course of this season, the audience gets to see how much Hinata picks up on and learns while serving as the ball boy at the first-year prefecture-wide training camp. While Kageyama shows growth as well, Hinata’s growth is more noticeable and is picked up on by the audience earlier in the season. Near the end of the season, the audience also picks up on some growth that happened to Tsukishima through his training camp.
After Karasuno has a practice match against Date Tech, the team heads to Nationals, and the remainder of the season focuses on what happens there. After two episodes focusing on a match between Karasuno and Tsubakihara Academy, we get almost two episodes where the audience gets to see Nekoma and Fukurodani playing in their respective matches.
From here, Karasuno begins their next match, this time against Inarizaki High, a team that’s favored to make it to the finals. Basically, most the remaining 13 episodes focus on this match (with the only exception being two episodes that focus on a hard-fought match for Nekoma). With the Karasuno and Inarizaki High match, though, the audience is introduced to new characters, such as the Miya twins (Atsumu and his brother Osamu), as well as Alan Ojiro. The match between these two teams is quite intense, with the third and final set being a major nail-biter. The scales kept tipping back and forth as it could have been either team’s game. Emotions ran high for me as a viewer, because one minute there would be a sense of euphoria as it looked like Karasuno would break through and win, but then a huge sense of disappointment as Inarizaki would block the momentum. The final play was such a nail-biter, and the tension for that final play was perfect.
With the way this season ends, it’s obvious that there’s supposed to be more to the story. But as of this writing, there is still no word on when Haikyu!! will get a fifth season. I really enjoyed Haikyu!! To The Top, and I’m hoping another season will be coming sooner rather than later.
Two OVAs are included as bonus features on this release, and if you watch the episodes on Disc Three straight through, they are tacked on after the end of the final episode. However, the story in these OVAs take place earlier, and in fact, are really a bridge between Haikyu!! 3rd Season and Haikyu!! To The Top. Logically, these should have been put at the beginning of the set, but I think they were placed where they are since they’re considered to be “bonus features.” However, I’m grateful that Sentai went to the effort to includes these OVAs, so maybe I shouldn’t be quite so picky about where they were placed on the release.
These OVAs focus on Nekoma and Fukurodani and the matches they play in order to progress to Nationals. Between the two teams, Nekoma got the bigger focus in these OVAs. And the OVAs also introduce a new team, Nohebi. If you watch Haikyu!! To The Top, you realize that a guy who shows up at Nationals with a girl to watch the matches is the captain for Nohebi. If you don’t see these OVAs before watching this season, you’ll have no idea who this guy is.
When it comes to the Blu-ray release, the video has 1080p High Definition / 16×9, and the audio includes English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. I had no complaints about either the video or audio quality of this release.
In addition to the two OVAs, Sentai Filmworks also included the expected bonus features: Clean Opening Animations, Clean Closing Animations, and trailers for other Sentai Filmworks releases.
If you’re a fan of the Haikyu!! franchise and already have the previous three seasons of the series in your anime home video library, you really need to get this release if you haven’t already.
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