Princess Nine pulls out every sports-animé cliché, but does them well. It's an action-packed series which is hard to stop watching.

A small-town baseball team has a secret weapon. Their pitcher is a young girl with a golden arm. The star of the Kisuragi Boy's High School team challenges Ryo to strike him out--and she does. Watching is Keiko Himuro, the chairman of both the Kisuragi boys' and girls' schools. From that moment she is obsessed with the dream of creating a girls' team which can take Ryo Hayakawa to Koshien, to pitch in the championship, just as her father had before her. Keiko must face the fury of the league, the faculty, the parents, and her own tennis-star daughter, but she has an ulterior motive and a determination which won't admit defeat.

Ryo is a likeable character, and the team that assembles around her are nicely diverse in personality. There are lots of tense moments and cliff-hangers.

Young teens will probably enjoy the high levels of melodrama and angst in the player's off-the-field lives, but I found it overdone. One scene in particular aggravated me: Ryo has had a soaking and is in the hospital with critical hypothermia. Friends and family huddle in the waiting room for hours (by which time, with REAL hypothermia, Ryo would either be dead or ready to walk home) before the doctor comes out and says, "We've done everything we can, but her body temperature keeps dropping!" Hours ago she was already critical....what's she now, an icicle? And 'All we can do,' judging from the next scene or so, appears to be laying her on a hospital bed with a thin sheet over her. I didn't see any wires to indicate that it was an electric blanket or that the bed was actually a griddle...

And though the series has a certain feminst appeal, all feminist brownie points are lost when their strategy for their first game is revealed: flirt with the boy team and distract them. Plus, in the end, life, death and the national championship all hinge on the more important matter of who gets the hot n studly batter for a boyfriend.

I am very hard on the various series I like, though, just because I feel they had a shot at greatness, if only. If you like baseball and girls stories, Princess Nine is just plain fun to watch, and I recommend it for good entertainment.