Nine: Kantetsuhen HD

Orphan's HD releases of the Nine saga reaches its end with the third installment, 1984's Nine: Kanketsuhen (Nine: Final). Niimi Katsuya, Karasawa Susumu, and Kurahashi Eiji are all third-years, as are Nakao Yuri and Yasuda Yukimi. The principal romantic relationships are set. Katsuya is paired off with Yuri, and Jirou-kun (a second-year) with Yasuda Yukimi. Katsuya's former romantic rival, Jirou's older brother Kentarou, has gone on to college or pro baseball and is out of the picture. Thus, Nine: Kanketsuhen focuses on some of the side characters, as well as the climax of Coach Nakao's decades-long quest to get to the holy of holies, the high school baseball championships at Koushien.

In the first vignette, Coach Nakao (Yuri's father) uses a minor hospital stay to motivate the happy-go-lucky third-years to buckle down and try for Koushien. In the second, Susumu, who has mostly been a comic wingman to Katsuya, takes center stage, as a prolonged batting slump draws the attention (and eventually, the affection) of budding manga artist Takagi Youko. In the third, a mixup about a bottle of shampoo causes the ever-doubting Katsuya to wonder if Eiji is a romantic rival for Yuri's affections. And finally, the team reaches the hallowed halls of Koushien, fulfilling the coach's dream and providing an appropriate climax to the series. For more information, see my blog post on the standard-definition release.

 

The Orphan staff is the same as the standard-definition release. Moho translated; laalg checked the dialog and signs; and Sunachan checked the songs. ninjacloud timed. I edited and typeset; the typesetting had to be completely redone for the different color balance in the high-definition raw. BeeBee, Topper3000, and VigorousJammer QCed the original release; getfresh and Uchuu QCed this one. bananadoyouwanna downscaled a 1080p webrip to 720p and removed the pillar-box black borders.

Some translation notes:

• Takagi Youko pokes fun at Karasawa's weight by calling him Karabuta literally, "Kara-pig." I've localized the insult as a pun with "Kawa-sow-a," even though a "sow" is actually a female pig, because she caricatured him as a pig in Nine 2.
• Omaeda, the monster pitcher on Seishuu's Koushien rivals, mistakes "Seishuu" for "Seishu," a brand of sake. That's the key reason I added the "u" for long Japanese vowels (Seishuu, Kentarou, Jirou) throughout the show, even though Seishuu's team uniforms say "Seishu" in Roman letters. 
• Many of the signs at Koushien are parodies of real Japanese brands and companies. For example, KDY 電話 (KDY Telephone) is a joke on a real telecommunications company, Kddi.
  

For this release, I've typeset a few more of the Koushien signs, because laalg bothered to translate them all; I want to honor her contribution.

Looking back on all three episodes, it's clear that Nine is not a typical sports shounen; rather, it's a romcom with a baseball foreground. Nine lacks the typical shounen hero's determined rise to the top in the face of adversity, and the humorless focus on building the team and achieving victory. Here, getting to Koushien is just another incident in high school life, and the boys are much more interested in having a good time, and in girls, than in becoming champions. For Niimi, Karasawa, and Eiji, baseball is fun; it's not an obsession.

Unless actual Blu-rays are released, this concludes Orphan's work on Nine. It's a charming series, invoking the innocence of high school sports and romance in simpler times.You can get Nine: Kanketsuhen HD  (and the other two HD episodes) from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.