As a big time fan of Mitsuru Adachi, I was quite looking forward to this anime. But I was a little optimistic too. The only decent animation based on Adachi's manga I have seen so far is Touch. And I had to drop H2 anime just watching the first half of the first episode. So, I started watching Cross game with a critical mind........... and just after watching the first episode it banged me so hard in my heart that I became obsessed with it :D. No doubt, this is the best anime adaptation of Mitsuru Adachi's manga so far.

The story is more about human emotion than baseball. The mangaka did a really good job playing with the characters emotions - love, pain of loss, ambition, friendship. The story is not completely same with the manga, but it followed the manga story line in it's own way. There are a few additional character and side story which were not present in the original manga. But I can't say these side stories filler. These side stories actually made the anime more solid. Specially they helped the character development of Aoba Tsukishima.

The animation is really good. They kept the original Adachi style character expression :D . You will know it when you watch it. As the sound, for a couple of months I'm listening the musics almost everyday. The opening theme is same for all 50 episodes. The ending theme changed 4 or 5 times.

The character development is really well thought of. Of course Mitsuru Adachi is a master mangaka. But as i said, the anime story differ a little than the manga. But the difference really made the character better. In my opinion, in some respect the anime is better than the manga.

I enjoyed this anime for the last one year. After the series was complete, i re-watched the whole 50 episodes non stop in 2 days. It made my eyes hurt a lot. But, I can still do the same thing over and over again.

About the encode, I shouldn't praise myself too much. But these is the best encode i have ever done. almozayaf also did a pretty good job encoding the first 15 episodes.

Overall I will give it a 10/10. This is a must watch anime if you like romance, baseball and slice of life.