Before their last match in middle school, Michi Sonoda announces to her teammate Sanae that she won’t be continuing judo in high school, believing that youth should be spent having fun and getting a boyfriend. However, her goal to go out with a bang is smashed when she is embarrassingly defeated by talented newbie, Towa Hiura.
In high school, Michi discovers that Towa enrolled in the same school as her just to apologize, but also because she wanted to do judo with her again. Together, Michi, Towa, and Sanae decide to revive the school’s currently defunct judo team so they can continue to experience the rush that ippon elicits.
Serious martial arts anime is rare, and having it be all girls is even rarer. However, while it does do some cute girls doing cute things stuff, Ippon Again does well to also take itself seriously as a sports anime. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Ippon Again, head on down below.
Anime Like Ippon Again
For Fans of Martial Arts
Tsurune
Kyudo is a modern martial art with a focus on archery. Minato used to be into the sport in middle school, enchanted by the “tsurune” sound made by a releasing bowstring, but gave it up after a certain incident left him with target panic.
This phenomenon resulted in Minato missing every shot he took and crushing his confidence.
Now, forces conspire in high school to bring him into the newly founded Kyudo club, but can Minato overcome his anxieties?
While archery is a bit different from judo, both Ippon Again and Tsurune approach sports anime with the same delicate tone. It focuses on characters with complex feelings about the sport, but also so passionately in love with it. They struggle, they cry, they win, and we – the audience – feel all these complex emotions with them.
Aside from a difference in martial arts, Tsurune, despite being a co-ed club, focuses more on the boys in the sport whereas Ippon Again is all cute girls doing sports things.
Bamboo Blade
Kojirou is the kendo teacher at Munroe High School, and also flat broke. However, his senpai makes a bet with him – if his team loses to Kojirou’s, he’ll buy him meals for a whole year.
The problem is, Kojirou doesn’t really have a kendo team, let alone a good one.
Kendo plays a very small part of Ippon Again, so if it got you a bit curious, Bamboo Blade is fully dedicated to the training of a kendo school club.
Like Ippon Again, Bamboo Blade follows girls in martial arts clubs. However, as an older anime, it has a bit of a different tone to it. It is less about cherishing those youthful days and more comedic and aggressive in its presentation of the sport.
Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl
Yawara Inokuma is interested in being a normal girl. However, being trained in judo by her grandfather who was a former champion, she is constantly pushed towards the sport.
Unfortunately for her, his manipulations are too good and ambitions for her too great, so she ends up being forced into the world of judo.
There aren’t really too many anime series about judo, but Yawara is about girls who enjoy judo like Ippon Again.
However, while the characters in Ippon Again love judo and are varying degrees of competent at it, Yawara has a different approach. The main character is great at judo, but doesn’t actually want to do it. She is kind of manipulated into judo and judo training while otherwise trying to do normal school girl things. This means it is often more of a comedy anime than serious sports anime.
For Fans of Cute Girls Doing Sports Things
Hanebado
Ayano and Nagisa are two girls at the same school. Ayano has superior badminton talents, but avoids the sport. Nagisa, on the other hand, endlessly toils to become better.
Together, they end up on the same team, and along with their teammates, are pushed toward badminton greatness.
While Ippon Again looked distinctly like it will be a “cute girls doing cute things” sports anime only to add a good amount of endearing emotional depth, Hanebado is more upfront with the deep, female-led sports anime it is going to be.
Both series are about somewhat obscure sports, and about women who do them. While badminton has distinctly less physical contact, weirdly enough, they made it more fan service than judo, a martial art about grappling.
Regardless, both series tell emotional sports tales through their female characters.
Encouragement of Climb
Aoi Yukimura has loved mountains since she was a kid, but a playground accident left her afraid of heights. Now a timid first year high school student, she is practically friendless until she reconnects with the lively Hinata.
As an old friend from her climbing days, Hinata fosters a change in Aoi’s world that leads her back to the mountains she loves.
Ippon Again, with its art style and doughy characters, looks like it will be more like Encouragement of Climb – a sports anime that is distinctly about cute girls doing their sport cutely.
However, unlike Ippon Again which has the characters frequently practicing, Encouragement of Climb is often more about the girls talking about climbing rather than doing it. This is fair considering they have to travel, but if you find the climbing intriguing, it is best to temper expectations.
Farewell, My Dear Cramer
In middle school, Nozomi Onda honed her soccer skills on the boy’s soccer team and thinks playing soccer with girls would drag her down.
However, her former coach convinces her to join the girls’ soccer team where her paths cross with other prodigious soccer talents who all hope to bring women’s soccer back into the spotlight.
Like Ippon Again is to judo, Farewell, My Dear Cramer is an emotional sports story about girls in soccer. Both series explore the various physical or emotional struggles that the main characters have with the sport and encourages you to watch as they overcome them.
However, Farewell, My Dear Cramaer also has an element of the girls playing a sport that is more popular when played by men, and how they have to overcome that they will never be the same kind of stars at the sport.
Slow Loop
As a young girl, Hiyori’s father taught her the joys of fly fishing. Even after he unexpectedly passed away, she still uses fishing as a way to feel connected to him.
One day while fishing, she meets and energetic new girl in town named Koharu who ends up fishing and eating said fish together. However, when she returns home, she discovers that Koharu is also her new step-sister.
Although Slow Loop, being an anime about fishing, may not be the same sort of sports experience you are looking for, it is still similar to Ippon Again and a great watch for sports anime fans that like more obscure sports activities.
Like Ippon Again, Slow Loop focuses on very moe girls with a few emotional problems that engaging in a sport can help them overcome. However, the thing that often helps them most is the friendship they find while doing the activity with other people.
For Fans of Small and Scrappy
Haikyuu
After being inspired by the small, but talented volleyball ace Little Giant, Shouyou Hinata trains endlessly despite his middle school not having a boy’s volleyball club.
Managing to scavenge enough athletes at his school to field a team for a middle school volleyball tournament, Hinata is soundly crushed in his first and last game of middle school by King of the Court, Tobio Kageyama.
Swearing to surpass him, Hinata joins the volleyball team in high school only to discover Kageyama is now his teammate.
Is there a sports anime you can’t compare to Haikyuu? That is both a joke and, at this point, almost a serious question.
Anyway, although they are about different sports, both anime series follow main characters who have a smaller frame than would be ideal in their sport. However, they make up for it in spirit and hard work. They also both end up on the same team as their rival, though Haikyuu has them more at odds than the wholesome relationship that the rivals form in Ippon Again.
Hinomaru Sumo
Ushio Hinomaru is a new student, small of stature and body. However, he appears before the sumo club of his school and wishes to join.
Although all the other members are big men, the sumo club is hardly renowned. However, this little sumo wrestler has a goal – the Hinoshita Kaisan, the pinnacle of sumo wrestling.
Both Hinomaru Sumo and Ippon Again are about high school marital arts clubs. However, Hinomaru Sumo is, obviously, about sumo and not judo.
What these two sports anime have most in common are main characters that are smaller than they ideally want to be in their physical sports, but make up for it with their spirit.
However, while Ippon Again is about getting better at the sport, the main character in Hinomaru Sumo is already pretty great at it. He just isn’t meeting the size requirement to be a professional.
All Out
Gutsy young go-getter Kenji Gion joins his school’s rugby team as soon as the entrance ceremony is over.
There he finds three distinctly different teammates that not only have differences in personalities, but in performance as well. This is their story about how they grow as a team.
While All Out has distinctly more muscular men with serious cake in the back, both All Out and Ippon Again are about smaller characters in a sport where size has an advantage. However, both series are also about them learning to use the size and skills they do have to their advantage.
Until they learn to do that, passion for their sport carries them.
For Fans of Moe Clubs Filled With Friendship
Do It Yourself
After the Fourth Industrial Revolution, cutting edge technologies have taken over and the old way of doing things is left in the dust. For childhood friends Serufu Yua and Miku Suride, they both applied to the elite Yuyu Girls’ Vocational High School that excels in teaching new technology.
However, due to her grades, care-free accident-magnet Yua could only get into the neighboring Gatagata Girls’ High School.
After getting into an bike accident, Yua has a run in with a passerby who fixes her bike effortlessly and later finds out that she is a member of the Do It Yourself Club. With the club in danger of shutting down due to a lack of members and becoming enchanted by the old way of fixing and building things, Yua hopes to gather new friendships and build new crafts by joining it.
Although Do It Yourself is about a crafting and repair club in a slightly more technologically advanced future, both the art style and the characters are highly evocative of Ippon Again.
Both anime follow characters who either have, or learn to have a passion about the school club that the series is centered around. In that club, they train in the activity, but most importantly, becomes closer as friends.
Laid-Back Camp
After moving, Nadeshiko decides to go see Mount Fuji. She manages to bike pretty far, but has to turn back because of the weather and ends up fainting.
When she wakes up, she finds herself somewhere she has never been and no way to find her way back. It is in this wilderness where she is saved by Rin, a girl who was out camping by herself.
Like judo, you don’t think about female characters when it comes to outdoor camping – the topic of Laid-Back Camp. Yet, like in Ippon Again, the topic is probably made most interesting by having it done by likable moe school girls in anime.
While they differ in topics, both series do well to balance both the “bonding and friendship” focus in the anime with actual knowledge on the topic they are exploring.
However, while Laid-Back Camp is, well, more laid-back and soothing, Ippon Again strides towards the intensity that sports anime often has.
Let’s Make a Mug Too
Himeno Toyokawa’s mother was considered a legend in the world of pottery, but passed away when she was a child. Her memory lives on in the series of mugs that Himeno brings with her as she moves back to her mother’s hometown.
Bringing these mugs to her new school, she instantly attracts the attention of the Pottery Club that ropes her into joining.
While making pottery is distinctly lower octane than flipping someone over your shoulder with judo, both anime surround school clubs of all women who, while exploring the topics the clubs are dedicated to, are building solid friendships with their club mates.
However, while Ippon Again can be emotional, Let’s Make a Mug Too tends to keep things a lot lighter and a lot more fun. Both anime do share a similar sort of art style and softer looking characters as well.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Ippon Again? Let fans know in the comments section below.
