[Team Rocket Elite]

With this round the male tournament is kicked off. There have been a few surprises relative to my initial expectations so far. Yatogami Kurou from K turned out to be quite a bit stronger than I expected. Looking back, I'm not sure why I was underestimating him. The trio from Kuroko no Basket aldo did quite well for themselves. I didn't really know anything about the series so I'm not too surprised I was wrong on determining how strong they were. I'm really happy to see Togashi Yuuta do so well. He was in a tough group and I wasn't sure he woudl even make it out alive. Right now, he might be one of the stronger characters in the tournament. Poor Accelerator ended up getting offed here. He's probably the strongest character to go out in Round 1. It was a tough group. Oreki is another character that did really well. Chitanda's first exhibition match was pretty awful but it seems Kyuoka characters have rebounded quite a bit since then. I'm still not completely sold on Oreki's strength but he's still a lot stronger than I first thought he would be. Some characters also ended up bombing relative to me expectations. I expected a lot more from the leads of Oreimo and Haganai but they ended up failing big time. Some of the Key males struggled out there. Riki looks to be one of the weaker characters in the tournament and Tomoya looks way worse than last year. Kyon and Hideyoshi look like they'll have trouble repeating their stellar performance from last year, however both should still be quite strong. Lelouch looks to be in top form this year. If it wasn't for Sword Art Online, I woukd say he has a good chance to repeat. Unfortunately, it seem Kirito is the one to beat this year. With all this year, multi-way matches are a mess. We'll see how well the characters hold up in the one on one matches.