ユーリ!!! on ICE S1

Okay, but wouldn't recommend it

Yuri!!! On Ice is part sports anime about the comeback of a disgraced figure skater, part love story between an athlete and his coach. I approached it having never watched a sports anime before, and knowing next to nothing else about it. It seemed to have been very popular at the time, but I had a poor enough impression of it during the first few episodes that I considered dropping it, and I didn't find anything that was happening truly compelling enough to want to see what happened next until about halfway through. My opinion improved towards the end, but it still didn't meet my expectations overall.

Language-wise this is challenging. Lots of skating- and competition-specific jargon, characters tend to speak quite quickly (especially the commentators), and there's very little in the way of simple pleasantries and stock phrases during dialogue that don't require active concentration to understand. Most of the dialogue is abstract, like characters navel-gazing while skating or discussing their emotions and motivations, so the visuals don't provide much supporting context. There is a lot of repetition, however, as there are unnecessarily-frequent recaps of who the characters are and what has happened so far, the same skating routines are done over and over, and the commentary follows the same patterns. At an upper-intermediate level, parsing the dialogue felt like a good way of stretching the muscles and it was nice to feel a tangible difference in effort from the first episode to the last as I got used to the style and vocabulary, but it's so specific that I'm not sure if I learned anything that I'll end up using again.

Entertainment-wise this show is a bit of a mess. At the start I cared neither about Yuuri's failure and his journey to redeem himself, nor about his love interest, Viktor. By the end, it was an alright sports anime in that I became invested in what skating meant to the competitors, but it failed on the love story front because it never made me care about Viktor's side of it. He wasn't outright unlikeable, but the lack of vulnerability and emotional depth made him too uninteresting to hold up half of a romance plot. I could at least eventually believe that Yuuri loved him, but every single other relationship Yuuri had -- his parents, his rinkmate, his childhood friend, his dog that died before the show even started -- felt more natural and was more compelling. The first few episodes have a lot of low moments, like awkwardly focussing on how much Yuuri gained weight (only to have him magically lose it all in a week) and how uncomfortable he is with Viktor's inappropriate handsiness (only to have him suddenly become fine with it, without the behaviour ever being remarked upon as creepy), and the show doesn't get consistently better in terms of pacing, tone, and storytelling until the second half. There are a few fun character moments for Yuuri and Viktor here and there, but the supporting cast are ultimately what made it worth it; I probably wouldn't have kept watching if not for the personality the other competitors and side characters brought, and they thankfully continued to be a charming presence even when most of them were being sidelined.

As a whole package, I'd call this a strong 3 stars. It turned out to be more fun than I thought it would be after the weak start, but 4 is too generous, and I don't have any inclination to recommend it.