Nozomi Nishida, Reina Kondo, Saki Minami & Honoka Inoue -- Donna Toki mo（どんなときも）

One of the new anime that we've gotten a gander of this season is "Hachi-gatsu no Cinderella Nine"（八月のシンデレラナイン...The Cinderella Nine of August）which I found out was based on a smartphone game from two years ago. As soon as the first episode started rolling out, I immediately got memories of another baseball-and-high school girls anime from a decade prior called "Taisho Yakyu Musume"（大正野球娘。...Taisho Baseball Girls）. That show was based in the Taisho Era almost a century ago, so my imagination started running on whether the characters here were actually the descendants of the students from "Taisho Yakyu Musume". Maybe another title for the new show could be "Reiwa Yakyu Musume"（令和野球娘。）?

I've only seen the first couple of episodes from which the story is showing some similarities with "Taisho Yakyu Musume" in that the energetic and optimistic central character suddenly decides to set up a girls' baseball team in the school with her loyal best buddy in tow after which they recruit a couple of timid students with no particular athletic ability and then an initially disillusioned classmate who has a keen eye for baseball tactics and strategy. There hasn't been a whole lot of drama and despair as of yet but I'm sure that it will be coming from the middle episodes. So far, it's all been happiness and light.

The opening theme for "Hachi-gatsu no Cinderella Nine" hasn't exactly grabbed me yet but I do like the sweetness of the ending theme. My overriding reason is that it's a cover of "Donna Toki mo" (どんなときも...No Matter When), the breakthrough single of songsmith Noriyuki Makihara（槇原敬之）from 1991. The absolute cheerfulness of that big hit has been retained in full for this version as sung by some of the cast consisting of Nozomi Nishida（西田望見）, Reina Kondo（近藤玲奈）, Saki Minami（南早紀）and Honoka Inoue（井上ほの花）. As I've mentioned in my last anime article (from this morning), I wouldn't also mind hearing the full version of this in the coming weeks.