SEKAI DE ICHIBAN TSUYOKU NARITAI!

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ActionSekai de Ichiban Tsuyokunaritai!
SPECIAL ActionSekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai! Specials

REVIEWS

• 

  AndoCommando

  5/100
  Bouncing boobies and bulging coochies.

  “This is more than just a simple match; this is real drama and real excitement! I dare say it’s the finest form of entertainment in the entire world” – Mariko “Jackal” Toujou, in regards to the final fight in the series.

  Dear Mariko, fuck off. Matter of fact, to everyone that was a part of the creation of this show, fuck off! This kind of shit is the reason why the general public sees anime as either for children or as some kind of sick animated porn, that probably includes tentacles. The latter is mainly due to the use of ecchi within anime shows. For those of you who don't know, ecchi is a genre in anime where playfully sexual actions are present within a show. I personally don’t see ecchi as completely bad, as I have seen shows that have successfully integrated fan-service and lewd acts within a story, whilst not coming across as pandering to the audience (e.g. Prison School and Shimoneta). However, the main problem that I find with the ecchi genre overall is that most ecchi anime uses fan-service for exploiting the sex appeal of characters with the primary reason being to please the audience. This show happens to fall so far down the latter that I honestly think that the staff behind the making of this show have no shame whatsoever. And you know what? That’s probably right! So with that said I will have no problem with calling this show out on its absolute bullshit!

  SPOILERS BELOW BUT I DIDN’T GIVE A FUCK AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU!!!

  Wanna Be the Strongest in the World is a 2013 anime series based off the manga of the same name and was produced by Studio Arms, the studio that made such disappointing and frowned-upon shows such as Brynhildr in the Darkness and Queen’s Blade. They were also responsible for Elfen Lied, take that as you will. The show lasted for 12 episodes and was centred around teen pop singer and main star of the popular idol group “Sweet Diva” Sakura Hagiwara, who becomes a professional wrestler to avenge her best friend and fellow Sweet Diva member Elena Miyazawa, as well as prove that pop idols can also ‘lay the smackdown’ when it comes to working in the ring. What makes this series so… interesting is that it belongs to the ecchi genre and therefore is obviously going to lean more towards the pervy side of the anime medium, but boy! The fan-service in this show is not just present, it is nearly everything that this show does. I am convinced that the people in charge of this show tried to shove in as much fan-service as they possibly could. Within the first 4 minutes of the very first episode, there is already a shower scene with the two main characters of the show, Sakura and Elena, naked, along with some other Sweet Diva members that don’t matter, who are also naked. You may not know this, but both Sakura and Elena are 17 years old… That may shock you and make you feel a little bit bad about yourself, but Japan obviously doesn’t give a fuck about that!

  What’s even more insulting about this shit show is when it comes to the wrestling side of things. First off, the attire these women wear look more appropriate as swimming gear or what you would wear sliding down a stripper pole rather than wrestling gear. Just look at the cover of the show and you’ll see the kind of outfits that these women wear. Their scantily-clad gear, accentuating the T&A of each wrestler to such a degree cannot be considered realistic, even for pro wrestling standards. Take one quick bump and we could very well have a wardrobe malfunction on our hands. Now I don’t care much about the objectification of women in this show, but there is no other reasonable explanation of why their gear is so skimpy than that the animators were banking on sex appeal to intrigue the audience and not much else. But this issue has nothing on the amount of breast, groin and ass shots repeated over the entire 12 episodes, coupled with moaning. Lots and lots of painful moaning. If you enjoy listening to the screams of curvaceous yet disproportionate women coming from your screen, this show might seem like a gift from God to you. However, after a while I wouldn’t be surprised if you just got bored masturbating to Wanna Be the Strongest and decided to look up some hentai to get off on because I’m sure that there’s hentai you can find that has more variety of animation than this shit. The number of close-ups of breast and camel toes on this show is so damn excessive and unrestrained that you’ll probably start to relate to their parts more than the characters themselves. Even the number of boobs and vagina clips showed in the first episode, where pro wrestler Rio Kazama humiliates both Sakura and Elena can be considered tame compared to what is shown over the next 11 episodes.

  One of the biggest problems this show faces is how it uses the concept of professional wrestling to move the story along. The end of the first episode has Sakura face Rio in a legitimate wrestling match after Rio earlier had beaten down and embarrassed her friend Elena at Berserk gym. Sakura tries to avenge her friends and is beaten in rather quick fashion via passing out to the Rear Naked Choke (a proper submission, but in this show, it’s false advertisement). Sakura got rightfully schooled by the professional and even loses some of her hair as a result, but undeterred she vows to go pro to defend the honour of idols all around the world. She trains her body for three months before taking the ultimate test for rookies: the hellish hundred throws. Basically Sakura takes a total of 100 suplexes from Rio and some other pro wrestlers that don’t even matter, some of which share nearly the same character design as Sakura, the only differences being their hair and wrestling gear. After Rio’s attempts to keep Sakura down along with numerous shots of tits and ass, Sakura survives the challenge, which means that she’s ready to have her first match as a pro. So apparently, they just let you take a hundred bumps and that’s all you need. They didn’t bother to teach her any technique or move-set or even the damn rules before throwing her into a match? We’re two episodes into the shit fest as it’s already a failure of a realistic wrestling drama.

  Anyways, Sakura has the first match as a pro and is beaten by being locked in a submission known as the “Boston crab”. But it’s alright since the fans still love her and happy that she gave it her all in that match, until she loses again, and again, and again, all to the same submission manoeuvre. Obviously she’s always put in the Boston crab because the animators kept wanting to show us her ‘bust & crabs’. Sakura loses several matches in a row, gaining a streak like that of a common jobber and causes fans of her and the show itself to lose interest. Luckily for Sakura, the ace of Berserk gym Misaki Toyoda starts mentoring her and gives her the motivation to break out of the submission of her nightmares, and in her next match she does manage to break out of the hold, before immediately losing via pinfall. Wow, great progression. Meanwhile back at the idol group Sweet Diva, the group has practically become stagnant thanks to their star Sakura becoming a pro wrestler and tapping out to pros that have no development whatsoever. I’m in bewilderment as I’m writing this as to why on Earth did the creator want to make wrestling look realistic? It wants to be a sports drama so badly, yet events in the show and plot points go well beyond the line of ridiculous! If they chose to see pro wrestling as more of a scripted fight than an actual fight, then development wouldn’t have been such a huge issue and they could’ve explored the different lives of idols and pro wrestlers a lot better. But the show doesn’t and would rather take the sport side of it very seriously, with added crotch shots and moaning in between. Fuck this shit.

  Halfway into the show, Sakura gets her rematch with Rio, the woman who humiliated her in the first episode, with no real build-up to it other than what happened in that first episode. That shit isn't how wrestling works but oh well, nothing in this show works. In the match, Sakura shows a lot more fighting spirit and refuses to give up, and even manages to hit her double-kick finisher to win the match in a huge upset, scoring her first victory. This could have been a strong moment for the series if they had bothered to show Sakura getting progressively stronger and closer to victory in her matches beforehand as well as actual build-up to the match rather than the half-assed execution we got. And another thing, every single match that we have seen from this show or ever will see all cut out the more acrobatic and entertaining parts of actual wrestling matches that are fun to watch, along with any chain wrestling to help wrestling get a feel for how the other wrestler works. All that we see are suplexes, strikes, holds and finishers, but with no reasoning behind them. It’s as if they’re performing moves just for the sake of performing moves. I guess all those submission holds used don’t put much of a strain of the animation budget. Anyway, with Sakura achieving her original goal, she can go back to being a pop star, but she says that she wants to keep proving herself as a wrestler, much to the dismay of her best friend Elena and all of us who’re still watching the shit.

  Nothing else of importance really happens till the final match so we’ll just go there. While Sakura is facing other wrestlers that are literally there to keep Sakura occupied for a couple episodes, a new mysterious masked wrestler named Blue Panther begins taking out other wrestlers until she gets a match with Sakura, demanding that she retire upon losing. It’s at this point where she unmasks and reveals herself to be Elena, Sakura best friend from Sweet Diva. Her plan is to force Sakura into retirement so she can join Sweet Diva again. I don’t know about you guys, but forcing someone to join a group through beating them in a wrestling match does not sound like the healthiest thing for a relationship, and it sounds like something that could come from the WWE storyline, and that’s not a good thing, cause WWE sucks. They have their match and it’s easily the best match from the entire show, actually showing ring psychology within the match. Unfortunately, the main problem with this match is with the animation. Overall the animation of the show is rather inconsistent, but the movement in this match especially is just downright shoddy and makes some of the moves shown looks unintentionally hilarious. Sakura took a damn Tombstone Piledriver (move where the opponent's head is driven into mat) and a second later her body started to twist and contort out of nowhere. The use of CGI on the crowd was also terrible and the crowd was shown on-screen for way too long, making the poor use of CGI even more obvious. This show also pulls one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in an anime: they have Sakura pinned to a near-fall, but rather than showing Sakura kick out, they turn to a shot of the lights above the ring, and we hear some guy in the crowd say “Wow, that was close”. It’s times like like where I just want to facepalm in frustration with how shit like this is given a pass.

  The match ends with Sakura winning the match. Elena is left heartbroken and pleads her friend to come back to Sweet Diva. The crowd chimes in with their opinion as well, oddly enough, and most say they want to see Sakura back in the idol group, despite cheering her for the last 11 episodes for pursuing her goals of wrestling. Eventually Mariko Toujou comes in and says that both Sakura and Elena can continue wrestling and be pop idols if they can handle it. Who’s Mariko? We’ll get so her soon enough. The show ends with Sakura and Elena all dressed up in their idol gear, performing in front of the wrestling crowd, completely no-selling injuries that they sustained previously in their match. Hoo-ray, the end. Now after all of this I can easily tell you that this was one of the worst stories I have even seen played out in 12 episodes, but that’s not the only horrible thing about this steaming pile of horseshit.

  The characters, oh my God! Despite the amount of characters in this show, not one manages to stand out as even average! Sakura, despite being the most significant character, is also one of the saddest excuses for a main character I’ve ever seen. I’d call her the John Cena of the show, but at least John Cena has a personality. Throughout the entire show she struggles in every match, either winning by the skin of her teeth, or being dominated throughout the match. She wants to become the strongest and prove herself, but never once changes or has her morals challenged. They could have if say, they had her reflect on her losses, but they never even try that because the staff are too busy prioritising crotch-shots over character development.

  Elena is next up on the platform of shame. This girl is both Sakura’s best friend and rival, always coming close to beating Sakura, but never beating her in anything. She is obviously jealous of Sakura’s accomplishments, bra size and overall success. Unfortunately she always maintains her place throughout the show, ending up one-dimensional. One thing I want to know though, how the fuck is this girl able to challenge and almost beat Sakura despite having barely any proper training over the duration of the show, compared to Sakura, who needed to train her boy up for 3 months before even getting a match?

  Rio Kazama-You know what? Fuck this bitch. She doesn’t matter at all to the overall story. She’s just a bitchy wrestler with a cocky attitude and no ass. NO ASS! Alright next character is Moe. Moe is a high school freshman who’s the granddaughter of a former wrestler and who was inspired to start wrestling through watching Sakura. This girl is only important for one episode where she faces Sakura purely to keep the show going. She’s easily replaceable and her only memorable act in the entire show was motorboating the main character.

  And then, there was Mariko “Jackal” Toujou. This woman happens to be the world champion, and yet, she doesn’t matter at all when it comes to the story. She faces Sakura in the second half of the show because her original opponent was injured, but if you had replaced this woman with some random wrestler, the show wouldn’t have changed at all. She’s just another pair of tits to get off to when you get bored of Sakura. But if there is one thing that I hate about her, more than any other character on the fucking show, it’s that quote that I put at the start of the review. She called the match between Sakura and Elena the finest form of entertainment in the whole world. She just shitted on the entire world of professional wrestling this that one sentence. I know that it shouldn’t be taken seriously but fuck it: Fuck off Mariko! You wish you had as much depth as your cleavage does! Fuck you and this show, bitch!

  Earlier on I talked about how shit the animation was whilst explain the “plot” (and I use that term lightly here) of this shit show. But it needs to be said again: THIS SHOW LOOKS LIKE SHIT! The art style is generic as all hell, with nearly every character having a similar design and no cup size below C (if we exclude the high school girl, no cup size below D). This show also has only two proper locations; the gym and the wrestling ring. This show is so devoid of artistic freedom that even at 12 episodes I’m surprised at how long it went for. Character movement is just garbage, and when they aren’t showing proper movement, they’re showing close-ups, screen shots, and reused footage, and it is painful to watch. The fan-service. Is fucking painful. To everyone who likes shows like this because of the ecchi elements in place, if you removed the close-ups of female anatomy from this show it would be very bland. That’s what this show was, even with the fan-service, because it fails at using ecchi well at all. In fact, with the kind of shots that were used repeatedly within the show, it’s more disturbing than erotic at all. Seeing Sakura’s vagina whilst during a submission for the umptieth time is not only tiring, it’s just sad.

  If there was anything that I would say was positive from this show, it would have to be the opening and ending themes. Not the overall OP and ED; those shit videos were piss breaks. But the themes on their own fits with the idol part of the show, and were at least decent to listen to. I wouldn’t say that I didn’t skip them every time, but they didn’t further hinder the show. Overall the soundtrack was a dud, with no song standing out except for one that sounded like a rip-off of the battle theme from the original Pokemon games. In my opinion, no song meshed well with any of the scenes in the show. Voice-acting wise, well what can I say? Half the time the characters were just moaning and screaming; it was just annoying. I guess I’d say the voice of Sakura did the best, since she screamed more than anyone else, but then again I screamed just as much from just watching this piece of trash anime.

  This show is literally one of the worst anime that I have ever layed my eyes on. It tries to make professional wrestling look like a noble and rigorous sport, whilst cutting to a muff shot every 10 seconds. It puts pandering shit fests like Queen’s Blade and Sekirei to shame. The makers of this disturbing fan-service filled and generic as fuck “you-can-do-it” crapfest should have changed the name from Wanna Be the Strongest in the World, to Wanna Be the Worst in the World, because this show is deserving of a title like that. The entire existence of the show was an elaborate scheme made to animate bouncing boobies and bulging coochies whilst under the extremely thinly-veiled disguise of telling a story, and an awful one at that. The plot was pure garbage. Calling the cast of this show characters would be giving them too much credit. This is a failure in every possible sense of the word. If you want a proper sports drama, check out something like Hajime no Ippo. If you want proper use of ecchi in a story, I’d recommend Prison School. If you just want to see scantily-clad animated women play with each other, even Keijo and some hentai shows would be better than this pile of garbage.

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• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  10/100
  You should not watch this if you're a wrestling fan. Or an idol fan. Or an anime fan.

  Being the lead singer and most popular member of the idol group Sweet Diva for four years running, Sakura Hagiwara is on top of the world, bathing in the glory of the spotlight and constantly serenaded by the cheers of an adoring fanbase. One day, when her idol group strikes a deal to guest star on a wrestling program, Sakura’s friend Elena starts horsing around in the ring, earning the ire of veteran wrestler Rio Kazama. Enraged at the slight, Rio humiliates and injures Elena before insulting the pop idol scene... And Sakura has quite frankly heard enough. With the pride of her sisterhood on her back, Sakura takes a break from her idol career to jump in the ring herself, and no matter how long it takes, she vows she WILL shut Rio up once and for all. Will this outsider to the world of combat sports be able to prove once and for all that who the fuck cares I’ve already put way more effort into this paragraph then the writers of this show put into their story.

  Hey, remember Studio Arms? We’ve talked about Studio Arms before, oh lord have we ever, and this outing is no more impressive than the last two I reviewed. I haven’t seen every anime that they’ve produced, but I’m pretty sure the only ones I thought had any sort of visual quality to them were Valkyrie Drive Mermaid and some three episode OVA about puberty. The budget for this series was very obviously paper thin, which is kind of a problem when you consider the fact that it explores not one, but two forms of entertainment that require heavy choreography and a lot of physical movement in real life, professional wrestling and idol culture. Now I’ve stated in the past that a low budget should not hold an anime back from looking impressive, there are ways to manage your budget so that the strengths of your production are highlighted over the weaknesses, and to it’s credit, Wanna be the Strongest in the World (which I’m just now realizing might have gotten it’s name as a reference to the 1986 OVA “Wanna-be’s,” which also revolved around women’s wrestling) does actually have one pretty impressive trick up it’s sleeve... In theory, at least.

  What this show does to cut corners, at least for the most part, is abuse the fuck out of submission holds. There is some brilliance to this, as submission moves are often jokingly referred to as ‘rest holds’ by wrestling fans as a reference to the fact that wrestlers will often do something like this when they need to take a short break or communicate the next few moves, so it’s not the worst idea in the world to use the same principal to save on your animation budget... Again, in theory. In practice, though, results are just as important as your method, and regardless of whatever money they saved by showing lingering shots of Sakura struggling to break free of the boston crab, the rest of the series still looks like ass. There are frozen key frames all over the place, movement within them is minimal and awkward, a lot of the striking and grappling is portrayed through extreme close-ups and action-lines, and while there are a few fully-animated shots of idols dancing, they’re reused like three times if you don’t include the ending credits.

  On top of the terrible animation, every single detail about the design is bland, generic and uninspired. That applies to the wrestling promotion Berserk who operates in a minimalist ring and... Is it just me, or does the crowd size sometimes change between shots? From some angles it looks like they’re performing in a legitimate arena, but in others it looks like a bingo hall. None of the wrestlers are memorable, they’re just a bunch of generic anime waifus in skimpy outfits, and even the few performers who have their own gimmicks have the laziest gimmicks you could imagine. I’ll give them some credit that most of the wrestling moves DO look technically accurate, but only most, because you still have submissions where it looks like the user’s legs are bending in unnatural directions, and people slapping dropkicks away with their bare hands. The blandness also extends to the in-universe idol group Sweet Diva, who are generic from their name to their kisekae-default outfits. Everything is poorly framed, tilted like you’re watching fucking Battlefield Earth, it is just a constant eye-sore.

  The voice acting was a Funimation effort, and God bless them, they put way too much effort into this. Lindsay Seidel is on her A game as Sakura, and no matter how ridiculous or degrading the material is, whether she’s giving dumb speeches about her character’s motivation or screaming out in agony while also sounding suspiciously sexual, she is holding nothing back. I was also kind of impressed by Caitlin Glass, who played an off-screen ring announcer for the entire series, and actually did a good job conveying the action and story-telling in the ring to the audience in a way that sounds way more cool than it actually is, just like the pros do. There are actors who sound like they might be phoning it in... It’s legitimately hard to tell how much effort Monica Rial put into playing Elena, for example... Because out of the entire cast, there’s maybe one character who has a shred of personality outside of what the plot needed out of her. That character is played by Cristina Vee, and because the character is hyper and enthusiastic, it's probably the first time I've ever found that specific actor to be annoying. But once again, Funimation has taken a sledgehammer to a simple job that only required a hammer, and I have mixed feelings on that, but I do appreciate the effort.

  So, it’s weird how little anime there are about pro-wrestling, right? It’s not like there aren’t any to choose from, but for a lot of reasons, you’d expect there to be more. Story-telling in professional wrestling is typically over-the-top and corny, but it can also have a hidden depth to it, especially when those stories are told over time, and that sounds like an anime to me. It’s not even a cultural issue, because Japan is one of the top wrestling markets in the world alongside the US, Canada and Mexico. Even stranger is the fact that while the Japanese wrestling scene is highly prestigious in general, they are on top of the world when it comes to women’s wrestling. If you’re even slightly interested in the medium, I highly recommend you look up a few Joshi matches, they’re on another level. The only women’s wrestling I’ve seen in the western world that comes close to it was early NXT. But yeah, as big as wrestling is over there, you’d expect more anime to cash in on the craze. I mean, hell, there’s a ton of Idol anime, right?

  Well, there is a women’s wrestling anime, it’s this one, and it is probably the dumbest anime I’ve ever seen, and while I could point fingers at a series of idiotic decisions made throughout, it all boils down to one specific decision the anime made... It portrays wrestling at face value. Now, quick disclaimer here, I’m not going to be using the terms ‘real’ and ‘fake’ in reference to wrestling, because for one, we all know wrestling is scripted. The results are predetermined, the match is a performance, people who hate each other on screen are sometimes really good irl friends, and people who seem really close and even work together in a tag team might actually hate each other’s guts. It’s a TV show, but you can’t really call it fake when the people involved are beating the shit out of themselves and each other all year, with no off-season, and they’re the only actors who do all their own stunts. It’s easy to immediately reject pro wrestling as fake, but there’s a lot more nuance to it than you think. This show ignores all of that. Characters are really fighting each other and trying to win, and it never, ever makes any sense.

  Before we get into why this doesn’t work plot-wise, let’s talk about why wrestling is the way it is. There are two reasons. First off, and the most serious, is the level of physical risk. When I said before that wrestling was a performance, I meant it. People rehearse. Wrestlers train not just to toughen themselves up and rise above pain, like the anime suggests, but to have the coordination to take other peoples’ attacks in as painless and safe a way as possible. Yes, there is a ton of cooperation involved, and I don’t think it’s unfair to say that more than 90 percent of pro wrestling moves, if used in any other context, would result in a serious injury for worse for one or both parties. Wrestlers in Wanna Be have to take 100 throws and suplexes to be initiated into the promotion, but in real life, it’s far more important to learn how to safely perform a move that looks painful than it actually is to learn how to deal with pain. Some of the best in-ring performers of all time have dealt with pain-killer addictions, after all.

  And the second reason is that if you’re actually fighting someone to try and beat them before they beat you, the kind of fighting they do in pro wrestling would be horribly inefficient. Professional wrestling is a spectacle, first and foremost. It’s style over substance, and for the most part, it looks nothing like mixed martial arts for a damn good reason. There are plenty of submission moves that you could easily punch, kick or even scratch your way out of. When you’ve knocked somebody out cold, you can’t just pick them up by grabbing the back of their head and dragging them to their feet, and then throw them into the ropes in such a way that they’re the ones running, and they have the wherewithal to turn around at the right time to rebound off the ropes. If you were really trying to battle someone into submission, you WOULD fight like MMA fighters do... Strike from a distance, get close enough to bind their movements, and then pummel from close range. You wouldn’t even dare pin someone without kicking them in the head first, just to make sure.

  The reason this anime fails on a basic level is because in order to take a concept like this seriously, you’d have to be extremely young and naive, and it’s an ecchi show aimed at adults. It’s target audience is old enough to see through the illusion, and to understand how fucking stupid every aspect of the scenario is. No self-respecting idol group would let their stars wrestle for a company where the fighting was genuine, because bruises would hurt their looks, and injuries would hurt their ability to dance. No wrestler, after being put into a boston crab for an extended period of time by someone who was actually trying to hurt them, would be able to stand afterwards, let alone keep going. Characters take unprotected weapon-shots to the head and it doesn’t cause a concussion, but they break their legs by falling off the turnbuckle(maybe). There’s blatant interference in these matches, outside individuals getting involved with no repercussions whatsoever, yet nobody looks at this as a precedent that THEY can start bringing back-up to the ring too.

  But hey, what can you expect from a show where an idol singer becomes a professional wrestler, right? That’s just silly, right? Well, no, it has happened before, and it’s really not that uncommon. There’s a short shelf life for idols, and a good amount of them transition to voice acting or other media afterwards, including wrestling. The most famous example is probably Maki Itoh, a former member of the idol group Linq. She kind of struggled in the group at first, as her looks and style didn’t conform to the group’s aesthetic, and she wasn’t very popular. She never really stood out until Linq did a guest start spot at a wrestling show, and she used the appearance to her advantage to play to the crowd and promote herself to a new audience... A gambit that worked, but not how she expected. Her popularity as an idol never really increased, but she was a smash hit among wrestling fans, which inspired her to pull double duty until Linq decided to cut her from it’s lineup.

  Being cut allowed her to pursue wrestling full time, and after adding “The Fired Idol” to her monicker, it paid off big time for her. Now, I want to be clear about something, Maki Itoh is not a great wrestler. She’s not technically gifted or some unlikely prodigy. If you want an example of how limited she is in the ring, look up her match against Riho at AEW Dark Elevation, and compare it with the rest of Riho’s work to understand just how slow she had to work to carry Maki to a decent match. It doesn’t matter, though, because you don’t have to be a tough as nails ring general to succeed in that business. Maki Itoh has succeeded primarily as a comedy jobber, endearing herself to fans through character work and force of personality, combining her history of failed endeavors with her abrasive sense of humor to create a complex persona that people can’t get enough of. Not only did she find more freedom and acceptance as a wrestler, because it’s a business that rewards individuality far more than idol culture does, but it’s probably going to last a lot longer as well.

  If Maki Itoh’s story sounds way more interesting than the story of Wanna Be, it’s because the truth is, professional wrestling is far more interesting to watch if you know it’s a work than it would be if you were taking it at face value. Wrestlers have far more interesting stories behind the scenes than they do on stage, and knowing about it is an essential part of the experience. If they make us believe that they’re actually fighting to win, it’s not because we’re stupid, but because they’re good enough at what they do that they’re able to tell a story that’s worth getting lost in. Compared to all that, Wanna Be is just pathetic. Watching Sakura fall to the same three submission moves over and over again until she learns how to exploit a weird transition nobody does in real life in order to escape... Even though grabbing the ropes to escape didn’t work earlier in the series, and her opponents just dragged her back into the middle of the ring, which they mysteriously stop doing at this point in the story... is just insulting. I can say without exaggeration that this show is the most embarrassing thing to happen to wrestling in an anime since they mispronounced the word ‘suplex’ in the Angel Beats dub.

  As for how it handles idol culture... I’ll be honest with you, I’m no expert on that stuff, but it felt pretty bad too. For example, Sakura is the lead singer of Sweet Diva, which... Do Idol groups have lead singers? I don’t know, I’m just used to the idea of everyone getting more or less equal time singing. Maybe each group is different. What I do know is they seriously downplay the amount of exercise and physical conditioning an idol has to go through. Yeah, being a wrestler is hard, a lot of working out goes into it, but the thing is, you can be a successful wrestler with a wide range of body types, but idols have a consistent standard they have to meet both for dancing and aesthetic appearance. Also, there’s a story... It isn’t terrible... Sakura goes pro to defend the honor of idol singers, which is stupid, but she does realize it’s stupid, which is I haven’t given her any shit for it. She falls in love with it, has to deal with being torn between two worlds, some convoluted stuff happens towards the end... It’s fine. It’s a perfectly functional character arc, but I seriously doubt you’re going to remember any of it afterwards.

  But I guess before I whole-heartedly condemn this waste of space, there’s one more aspect of the anime I should address. The first time I ranted about this show, way back in 2017, the one and only comment I got was from someone who claimed they enjoyed it as an ecchi title because they weren’t ‘triggered’ by the same things I was. Now, ignoring how meaningless right-wing buzzwords are if my criticisms thus far count as me being ‘triggered,’ he does raise a good question. It’s an ecchi show, so how sexy is it? Well, I can only talk from my own personal viewing experience, but honestly, it doesn’t do anything for me. I’m not immune to fanservice, but bad animation is a barrier for me, and if Master of Martial Hearts couldn’t excite me, this series never had a chance. I’m not sure what kind of fetish it’s trying to satisfy, with all the extreme close-ups on women’s(clothed) privates while they’re screaming in erotic pain, but it’s a fetish I do not personally have, and while there IS some proper nudity in a handful of shower scenes, they’re still badly drawn with inconsistent proportions, and I’m just picky like that.

  Is it as bad as Master of Martial Hearts? Well, that’s complicated. It’s not as objectively awful on a fundamental level, but it IS however twice as long, meaning you suffer just as much while watching it. They’re equally shitty in my opinion.

  Wanna Be the Strongest in the World is available from Funimation. The original manga... Don’t worry, I didn’t know it existed until now either... Is not available stateside. There’s no other supplemental material to mention, but I actually would recommend following Maki Itoh on Twitter, because she’s hilarious. Seriously, she roasts people like a Japanese Wendy’s.

  The question I’d like to end on is, why did I put myself through the torture of watching this series again? What was I ever going to get out of it? Let’s be real, people do not read reviews for anime that are as obscure as this. Once I post it, it’s probably going to get four upvotes before it gets knocked off the front page by three different Jobless Reincarnation reviews. This show hasn’t been relevant since Brian Zane tore it up a few years ago, so why am I reviewing it? Because it’s an excuse to talk about wrestling. That is literally it. I’m at a place in my reviewing tenure where I’m more concerned with reaching the 150 review milestone than actually seeing any success, and I just felt like using my 141’st review as an excuse to talk about wrestling on an anime site. This isn’t the worst anime I’ve ever seen, or even the worst I’ve reviewed, but it’s a serious candidate for the dumbest, and I’ve already taken it more seriously than it deserves.

  I give Wanna Be the Strongest in the World a 1/10.

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