Initially advertised as an emotional sports anime and then unveiled as a time travel adventure to a war-torn Japan, Turkey! Time to Strike immediately piqued my interest out of all the shows for Summer 2025. The show follows the five girls of the Ikkokukan High School Bowling Club — Mai, Rina, Nozomi, Sayuri, and Nanase — when a lightning strike during one of their practices transports them to the Sengoku period. There, the girls find shelter away from civil war thanks to the sisters of the Tokura family, whose secrets slowly unravel as the two groups’ lives entangle.
Creating original stories is a risk more studios could stand to take, especially in a subset of television that produces adaptations a majority of the time. It was refreshing to sit down each week without any inkling of the antics that would unfold onscreen, and I applaud the creators for taking the leap. That being said, I have very few positive things to say about this show. Turkey! shocks its audience with its striking twist but fails to find a solid trajectory thereafter, and most of my enjoyment of watching this show came from vigorous hate-watching and my sheer frustration with how its narrative was handled.
©BAKKEN RECORD, PONY CANYON INC./Turkey! Anime Production Committee
After the initial twist, the show transitions into a brief arc centering on Rina, the youngest member of the team, and Mai, the team’s leader, who clash because of Rina’s stubborn refusal to open up to the rest of the girls. It then dedicates an episode each to the remaining Ikkokukan girls, unveiling their backstories as they each bond with one of the Tokura sisters, before barreling toward the climax where the girls stop the Tokura clan’s village from getting conquered by the neighboring Sakaki clan.
This structure sets up the show for failure because of how it divides up the characters’ screen time. With each girl getting a short arc allotted to go on a hero’s journey and then reduced to a caricature when it’s not their turn, none of their personalities feel genuine or well-constructed. This clunkiness shows itself most in the episode dedicated to Nanase, whose only role up to this point has been to remind everyone not to do anything that might change the course of history. She’s quick to abandon her own rule when she meets Natsume, the eldest Tokura sister who has just returned to the village after leaving to avoid an arranged marriage and seeking out ways to develop their village’s agriculture. Nanase loudly berates Natsume for her negligence, and later she justifies herself by explaining how Natsume reminded her of her father, who abandoned his familial duties in favor of building water wells for impoverished communities.
An unexpected outburst like this might make sense in real life, where we aren’t omniscient viewers of everyone’s internal battles. But to write a story this way, with no foreshadowing of a character’s actions until the moment it happens, comes across as incredibly careless. If only Nanase had been written like this, it might have flown under the radar, but nearly every character’s storyline unfolds through this formula of outburst-then-explanation. In the end, no character feels fully fleshed out — not even Mai, whose trauma surrounding her dead parents draws the most consistent thread throughout the season. Even if the reasons for their actions are plausible, the audience hasn’t built up rapport with any of the girls prior to their tantrums to really garner sympathy for them. Every detail about each character only exists to progress the narrative, and because the narrative itself is so weak, neither ends up supplementing the other.
©BAKKEN RECORD, PONY CANYON INC./Turkey! Anime Production Committee
Adding to Turkey’s disjointed nature is its horrible execution of dark humor in exploring deeper conversations. I will acknowledge that the animation style is the one aspect of this production that sells the dark-humor tone the show desperately wants. The OP includes a particularly gory shot that is so repulsively hypnotizing that I always watched it all the way through, and the rare, frantic pencil-drawn animation and fleshy, garbled killing sound effects capture the psychological stress the characters undergo. And while it was a bit corny that each of the Ikkokukan girls’ hair colors matched that of the Tokura sister they got closest to, it helped highlight each pair’s distinctive quirks when they were together.
In terms of story, however, “dark” and “humor” are insoluble tones in this story, and the attempts to reconcile the two only make the show more confusing. The most ludicrous scene in this entire show occurs during a tense conversation between Suguri, the sister acting as the leading “man” of the Tokura clan in the absence of her father, and Sayuri, who cannot comprehend how Suguri could ever think of killing someone, even her enemies. This pacifist stance gets challenged when a nomadic bandit attacks Suguri, with Sayuri as their only witness. As she watches helplessly from the lakeshore as Suguri flails on a protruding peninsula meters away, out of the corner of her eye, she spots — a bowling ball-shaped boulder. Desperate to assist in battle, she uses all of the skills Mai has taught her over the years and skips the boulder across the lake. She then spots another equally convenient boulder and, in the spirit of bowling, thrusts her second throw across the lake, pummeling the nomad’s skull. Spare!
©BAKKEN RECORD, PONY CANYON INC./Turkey! Anime Production Committee
Judging from the grim sincerity in which this sequence is structured, this was not meant to be a funny moment, even though I’ve probably never laughed harder watching anything in my life. Whatever complex angle the show wanted to take on pacifism gets completely watered down by this implausible commitment to shoehorning a bowling sequence. Not to mention, the scene ultimately holds no relevance to the plot; even though Sayuri laments that she’d consider committing violence again if it meant protecting Suguri, she never acts on this when presented with the opportunity toward the end of the show. Instead, she and the other Ikkokukan girls devise a plan to save the Tokura sisters from the Sakaki clan using all the non-violent weapons in their arsenal, such as deodorant “smoke” bombs and the foolproof art of “trash talking.”
©BAKKEN RECORD, PONY CANYON INC./Turkey! Anime Production Committee
It’s this facetious humor that further undermines any seriousness the show has managed to hold onto. Amongst the worst of these gags and jokes are the ones related to bowling, most of which are said by Mai due to her deep attachment to the sport her late parents loved so much. Endless are the analogies between bowling and life’s tribulations: Maybe you wanted to turn that ‘gutter’ into a ‘spare’! In bowling, there’s always the second throw! These jokes are hard to stomach as is, but the show makes the dialogue even more painful to listen to by having the other girls point out their ridiculousness.
This mockery is not only awkward but also confusing, especially because the central message of the show revolves around the “second throw” analogy: Just like how there’s always a second throw in each round of bowling, you always have a second chance to turn your life around. The girls don’t seem to believe in this message — at least, not in relation to their own lives. Through the backstory episodes, the show has established that the Ikkokukan girls are deeply discontent with their lives, even if they’re acting fine on the surface. At one point, they even admit that they’re willing to blink out of existence if it means saving the Tokura sisters from the gruesome history that’s been written for them. If the main characters don’t embody the message and at times even ridicule it, why make this analogy the crux of the narrative?
©BAKKEN RECORD, PONY CANYON INC./Turkey! Anime Production Committee
Perhaps more critically, this message fails because of just how much the show stresses the bowling aspect of the analogy. Including bowling in every situation without exploring the technical aspects of it undercuts both the sport’s symbolism and the deeper discussions of pacifism, feminism, and suicidal depression that the show has planted seeds of. When the twin sisters of the Tokura family, burdened by a prophecy that demands one of them should be dead so as not to curse their bloodline, threaten to sacrifice themselves for the other, Mai convinces both of them to give life another chance — by organizing a bowling match that shows them the fun life has to offer. When the leader of the Sakaki clan comes to conquer the village and kill the Tokura sisters, the Ikkokukan girls delay their beheading by challenging him to a life-or-death battle…of bowling. In this show, bowling isn’t a metaphor for a second chance at life — the second chances are literally bowling. This unsuccessful leitmotif makes every sincere moment in this show laughable, and unfortunately trivializes a message about life that is inherently true.
A good sports anime would convey its message through its showcasing of the sport, instead of explicitly pointing out its symbolism until the audience is forced to internalize it. Turkey! didn’t have to submit itself to existing sports-anime tropes, but by choosing this unconventional mix of genres, it reduces bowling to a childish metaphor and the narrative to a laughingstock. With so many other moving parts that it failed to explore in its 12 episodes, the show may have been better off without any bowling at all.
