Interview: The Tribe Nine Staff On Creating the Wacky World of Extreme Baseball

Tribe Nine is a story about baseball… with an extreme twist. The story concept comes from Too Kyo Games' Kazutaka Kodaka, best known for the beloved Danganronpa series. The anime series is part of a broader media mix, which includes an upcoming smartphone action game by Too Kyo Games and Akatsuki Games.

We spoke to Kazutaka Kodaka, anime director Yū Aoki, and composer Masafumi Takada about the anime world of Tribe Nine. Read on to find out more about the differences between the anime and game, how the core concept was developed, and how the anime team brought the action of Extreme Baseball (XB) to life.

ANN: From The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to Samurai Champloo to FLCL, many anime feature a wacky baseball episode. Did this tradition inspire Tribe Nine's concept? If yes, do you have a favorite anime baseball episode? If no, what were some of your inspirations while coming up with the concept of the show?

Kazutaka Kodaka: I first started with the idea of exaggerating the 23 wards of Tokyo, which breeds distinctive tribes that duke it out. I did have the idea of making them simply battle with fists or race with unique motorcycles, but I worried that it would be too normal that way. A writer at our company, Kōtarō Uchikoshi, suggested using the entire city for baseball without any rules and seeing what happens. We fleshed out the idea from there.

As you mention, there are a lot of wacky baseball anime in Japan. I'm a particular fan of Gatarō Man's Battlefield Baseball manga, which serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump. It might not be well-known overseas, but it is an absurd gag manga where everyone dies playing baseball. It's so absurd, in fact, that I ended up not referencing it for Tribe Nine at all.

ANN: XB players use a lot of off-the-wall wearable sports equipment to make their baseball styles particularly unusual. With this in mind, do you consider Tribe Nine to be something of a mecha anime as well as a sports anime?

KODAKA: I wanted to put in lots of mecha. If it's baseball where anything goes, then of course you can put in lots of mecha. While the anime actually downplays the mecha elements, the game flaunts them even further, so look forward to it.

ANN: Right from the start, Tribe Nine shares some parallels with your previous project, Akudama Drive, in particular the futuristic, urban setting. Why might fans of Akudama Drive want to check out Tribe Nine?

KODAKA: Honestly, whether it's Danganronpa or Akudama Drive, we didn't have the fans actively in mind, at least when we were making this. As far as the creative side is concerned, we approach each new project with a blank slate.

That said, when it's the same people involved, there are going to be shared elements because that's a reflection of what they think is interesting, so I think that every work is bound to have some similarities. We don't purposefully try to stray from expectations either. Because of this, I'm sure that there will be people who are attracted to the overlapping elements, but the judgment is completely up to the individual.

If I did have to pinpoint something these projects all have in common, it's that we're always trying to give the characters quirks and charm. I hope that Too Kyo Games can have a reputation for media with appealing characters.

ANN: Since Tribe Nine is a multimedia project consisting of an anime, video game, and comic, how did you formulate the concept to cross multiple forms of entertainment? How has this constraint challenged you, and what message do you hope the project will convey to fans overall?

KODAKA: We were conscious of developing the project across multiple media because the people that thought of the story are at the core. We didn't just want the anime to be an adaptation of the video game, or the game to be an adaptation of the anime. We developed them as completely different stories; if you experience just one you can be satisfied, but if you experience both, it'll be extra satisfying. We could include things that are surprising because it's a multimedia project, and we created it with the holistic vision in mind.

This project is our sincere attempt at this, so I hope it gets attention.

For the overseas fans, Tokyo's 23 wards appear in a highly exaggerated form, so I hope it makes you want to learn more about Tokyo. When COVID is over, I hope you can come visit.

ANN: Delinquent stories seem to have been seeing a revival in anime lately. What do you think is the appeal of such stories?

Yū Aoki: In Japan, stories about chivalrous outlaws have been popular for a long time. Due to the emergence of social media and a change in the consciousness of the people, Japan has become a stricter society these days in terms of both hard and soft rules. I think that within the context of this stifling society, stories about chivalrous outlaws and delinquents who speak of justice outside of rules have a distinct appeal.

Tribe Nine also has a few occasions where the characters beat up their opponents while postulating about justice, but in real life, you can't just beat someone up. Nevertheless, in a delinquent story, you can depict their violent tactics in an appealing light as an expression of their passionate friendship or unswerving emotions.

ANN: In Tribe Nine, the baseball matches occur within the city rather than on a baseball pitch. What did you keep in mind when creating the storyboards?

AOKI: Because you play XB in a space that's an order of magnitude larger than a baseball pitch, depicting the distance between bases and how long it takes to toss and hit the ball in real-time would inevitably worsen the tempo of the footage. We try to make hitting the ball, running, and battling an opponent a brisk sequence of events; to that end, every time we drew the storyboards, we experimented with the amount of time it takes to perform the actions and where the characters are positioned.

Battles are a big showcase in Tribe Nine, so on many occasions it's unnecessary to show the characters picking up the ball and throwing it to the base. If we are going to show those things, then as a way of hyping up the battle, the camera follows the runner instead. Thus, within the context of a game that takes place in a large space with multiple things happening at once, it was always a trial figuring out what to omit and what to amp up.

ANN: What were you conscious of when it came to the anime's weapon and prop designs?

AOKI: Tribe Nine has this in common with sci-fi works, but we tried to incorporate gimmicks in the weapons and props as much as we could. I think that the appeal of fictional items in anime is not only that they look cool, but in how they can convey their function through the gimmick. I think that instead of explaining the setting through dialogue, showing a beam bat or bench trailer transform shows the weird and wonderful world of Tribe Nine to the viewer directly.

ANN: What was your first thought when you heard about Tribe Nine's concept?

Masafumi Takada: Each ward of Tokyo has its own tribe which participates in battles. With baseball! I was excited by the concept.

However, at first, I had the image that they were battling with baseball on a regular baseball field, so instead of an upbeat soundtrack, I thought it would be better to use chord progressions and strong melody lines, but then I realized it has people riding motorcycles in town and bats that shoot jets…

When I learned that they fight in absurd ways, I decided to emphasize the beats and add energetic songs. The over-the-top image of tribes having a baseball war expanded for me, and I had the feeling that this was going to be a very interesting project!

ANN: What kind of musical style were you aiming for with this anime?

TAKADA: Because Tokyo is the setting, I thought a good match for it would be four-on-the-floor techno music that makes liberal use of synths with a feeling of speed. As the project progressed, we got various artists to create songs for each tribe. I foresaw that a lot of tribes would have upbeat songs, so to ensure that the effect was distributed equally, I consciously put in a lot of downbeat songs in the background music score.

ANN: How different is it to compose music for a television show compared to a game?

TAKADA: With the exception of opening and ending songs, a lot of songs for games generally play on loop, so there are times when I don't even create an outro. With anime, you can tailor the direction at the end of each scene with the outro, so I make sure that every song has a proper outro. For songs that will probably get played a lot, I make sure there are variations in the outros so that they can be compatible on a minute level with various styles of direction.

Other than that, there are times when an anime's background music can be too overpowering. It can clash with the energy of the direction and dialogue. Because of this, I arrange the tracks in a way that makes the melody and riffs gel with the direction; it should still work even with those parts muted. I also separate the data with a stem to make it flexible for directors to take tracks in and out.

Meanwhile, with games, I give the music a slightly more energetic feeling than what is being expressed on the screen. Especially when it comes to narrative games, I create the music to be a part of the story.