Blue Lock

Story: Literally non-existent. Each episode resolves of pseudo-developing football skills. The characters get a pass from another player and than stand face o face for 30 seconds and talk toxic redudant bullshit to each other to make sure the one speaking is more alpha than the other. Characters: Nothing special here. Typical shounen character set, fancy hair styles. There is the already mentioned pseudo-developing of each character's individual skill set, which some people might find interesting. While this is a shounen anime i can understand this doesn't have to be near to realism, but it gets boring pretty soon. Its a typical schema: Isagi faces abetter oponent which is depicted as super overpowerd, then he get's an epiphany on his oponents individual skill and tactic set and becomes better in ca. 45min. And this repeats on each story stage. Boring. Only Bachira's stoy background is kind of interesting and supports his development but thats all. The other 40 characters are not very individual to each other, they are all a bunch of toxic, narcistic losers who should better go to college. Music: Typical shounen garbage. Design: Some chars look cool, most of them have guffy hairstyles. Another boring part about the anime is the surroundings. These wannabes are caged inside a isolated cage. There is nothing, really nothing, that makes this anime in any way beautiful and a piece of art. Animation: Literally non-existent. There is maybe 5min of total football animation in this anime, the rest are stand alone pictures. I didnt know time pauses when you play football. Overall: Bad, redundaant, meaningless shounen anime, A score of 8.25 is blasphemy but shows, how bad anime fans can judge art lmao

Let’s jump straight into the point. Blue Lock is an anime which shows different ways of achieving our goals. Understanding Blue Lock, as simple as it is, is understanding the reasons of different characters to move forward. By no means do I think that the anime is complex or anything. So, what is going on? Characters: Every character is stereotypical. We got the “goofy” Bachira, main character Isagi, friendly straight-face Kunigami and some edgelords. We’ve all seen these characters before, but all of them have something to share in common. They show us their own way of getting better, moving forward, striving for success. Kuon, for example,will do whatever it takes to be the last man standing, whether it is morally good or not. Barou – a beast on the field, unstoppable rebellious force- also shares his way to victory. By realizing his mistakes, by finding someone better than him in the field where he should be the “king”, he shows us that, whatever stops him from going forward, he will devour. Haven’t we felt the same way? Whether it is at school or at work, we have always encountered someone better than us. And that really bothers the ego of most people. What do we do then? We get better, and better till we beat that specific person “Those who continue to fight in spite of their despair are bestowed with the power to achieve their dream”-Ego Jinpachi. Although, we have seen a little from Kunigami, he also has something to say: “If our heads drop down now, we’re done for!”(my favorite quote). Failure is merely temporary and if you accept defeat then you stay knocked down instead of getting back up. Sometimes things don’t always go our way, so press on! Try again and again and learn from failure. Some characters can get you really hyped up, getting goose bumps from what they are saying, and that is the whole point. That is why I admire most of Blue Lock characters. Here come the problems. As I said in the beginning most of them are stereotypical, so I can’t really find a favorite character from all of them. If it wasn’t for the plot twists, they would be really bland and would fall flat. On top of that, their dictionaries are pretty limited (mine too, but leave that for my profile’s comments), by repeating certain words and phrases over and over again every single episode. Annoying. 8.5/10 Plot: Fairly simple, easy to follow, interesting plot twists and pretty enjoyable to watch. In the middle of the anime, some characters just disappeared, but I guess that we will find out what happened to them at some point. Other than that the plot is smoothly running and most episodes are fairly interesting. 8/10 Sound: From the opening theme, to the ending theme every little bit of sound effect is pleasant for the ears. The commercial break sounds, the heavily distorted sounds of shooting, the sound of electricity when characters are on a spree, Barou’s awakening guitar/drums. The sound effects of this anime are clearly made to hype you up, to go outside and kick a football as hard as you can, to beat the person better than you, to finally finish your assignment, to do some actual hard work, or to go back to play some competitive games and give all your best. 10/10 Art: Here, is where the anime fails. Comparing the art style of the manga and the one of the anime is like comparing Berserk manga to the latest adaptations. Throughout this review I have praised the anime for hyping me up, but just by looking at the animation and art style the hype lasts a couple of seconds. The sparks and colorful mist around players is so poorly made. I understand the reason behind them, but just seeing the poor quality really ruins their whole existence. The 3D is just as horrible and noticeable as most of other 3D animations in anime. On top of that, the art is really just made to be commercially successful. 8bit really did not try to put the soul of the manga in the adaptation. After all we want hollow emotionless white eyes and impactful shots, which we do receive, but the budget version of it. 6/10 I have skipped some unnecessary parts, such as voice actors and illogical moments, the reason being that I find them not that impactful on the whole anime ( they don’t kill the vibe or make things better). Overall: 8 Don’t get me wrong here. The overall score is just the overall enjoyment and fulfillment after finishing the anime. For me a good anime is an anime, which can make a person change or understand new things, such as worldviews and mindsets. Blue lock made me play football again ( not for long, I guess), made me continue with my work and not just slack off. This is a temporarily feeling, but I love that it exists.

Imagine yourself as one of the professional Japanese football players on the national team, and they just returned home after an exhausting World Cup game against Croatia, which ended in a 1-1 (3-1 on penalties) win for Croatia. They're frustrated that they couldn't make it any further and ended up being eliminated before the quarter's finals yet again. They turn on their TV, and the anime being exhibited is one about football; the very first line they hear is from a character named Jinpachi Ego; he's basically saying that Japanese football sucks because they lack a good striker, and that is due to the Japanesebeing too unenthusiastic, lacking ego, or greater desire to score goals, and this is what prevents Japan from progressing in football; he also trash-talks Japanese football and its players in general. It comes out that this anime/manga is extremely popular and well-received in Japan. After thinking about the amount of time spent on training and preparation just for that day and moment—an opportunity that comes only in a span of 4 years—how would you feel? That's the problem with Blue Lock: aside from being a complete disaster at everything it does, all it does is shit on and disrespect Japanese players, football, and footballers in general, especially the ones that are not strikers. Blue Lock just doesn't respect the concept of sport or competition at all. Things that make a good sports anime/manga is how inspiring it can be, how connected you feel to the characters, how genuine it feels, and being able to see different perspectives and takes on that sport. Take Haikyuu as an example, a really good manga that helped boost volleyball popularity in Japan, inspiring people all over the world and inspiring people who have now become professional main leads for the national sports team. Then on the other side, there is Blue Lock, doing everything it can to go against it, to be different, unique, fun, creative, and to reinvent the whole genre by deconstructing all the themes and narrative tropes of this genre. That is what Blue Lock imagines itself to be on paper, but reality is far worse than that. On top of having a gay subtext, something anyone can notice in this show is how it tries to appeal to popular things to make it sell. Like the bishounen, femboy-ish, ultra edgy looking characters in order to appeal to teenagers and fujoshis, the Battle-Royale concept, why not? is popular, right? I mean, Fortnite and all that shit, and of course the World Cup, like come on, the manga started its release right after the 2018 World Cup ended and the anime aired alongside the 2022 World Cup, so it's clear that Blue Lock is just a commercial attempt at success without any care for substance, fun, passion, creativity, or any form of artistic value, and on that they succeeded, so congrats, after all, this is what Blue Lock IS about. A facility that allows three hundred strikers to compete against each other to "create football from zero", whatever the fuck that means, and create the best striker in the world in order to win the World Cup. The concept that Blue Lock has of a great striker is that of a spoiled child who doesn't want to pass the ball and only wants himself to score the goals. By defining narcissistic and egocentric behavior as a good thing in a sport, all it does is a detriment to the sport itself, but that is the philosophy of Blue Lock. Going through a basic level progression while the matches are played to decide who is going to be eliminated as you just pray for this torment to end. The characters are constantly overreacting, delivering lines that don't match the tone of the situation or that are just blatantly stupid. The interactions are also lazy and poorly conceptualized; they constantly trash talk and give each other silly nicknames to show competitiveness. As the matches go on, the show develops their relationship, but that is also done in a very inorganic way. They all have some unique trait or ability that makes them useful in matches, and that is explored in the most superficial way possible. The show always feels the necessity to explain some plays through exposition; right after the play is made, a character will have a monologue where he explains exactly what you just saw, and the anime also makes use of visual explanation for that, so in case there is a toddler watching, they can also understand what just happened, thanks Blue Lock. There is no referee, no penalty, no offsides, and no throw-in. There are around 3 fouls, free kicks, and corner kicks in total. A really flabbergasting and exceptional use of the football rules. The author also shows us his incredible knowledge of football by using the most basic football junior tactics and hammering the same three names everytime he wants to use a real player as an exemple—it's always Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Neymar, with Pelé being mentioned only once—names that only the real football fans will get to recognise. The show presents us with terrible characters in order to have a pseudo-development later on; you can see that on a lot of MC, like Eren Yeager for example, it gives you a false impression of progress; a character who once was an absolute piece of shit and now it's tolerable feels like a good development, and that's the case with our great protagonist, Isagi Yoichi. The other characters are just as you would expect: caricatures and archetypes that you've seen a thousand times in other shows, just tools to help Isagi in his "journey" to become the best striker that plays alongside other strikers in a game with no rules inside a prison facility. The long, red-haired delicated character that relies on speed; the emotionless white-haired prodigy that learns to like the sport; a traitor who wants to win by exploitation of the rules because he sucks and he knows it but also regrets it and is forgiven later; a temperamental, loud blonde guy that is very egocentric but agrees on what others tell him to do; a femboy cringe lord that acts very silly and so on. No one really cares about who gets eliminated because none of the characters are interesting enough for anyone to give a fuck about them. The only one that has a little bit more emphasis than Isagi is Bachira, with his insanely cringe monster allegory. The production on this anime is trash; after around episode 5, things just went downhill. Lapses of decent animation, super exaggerated moves that don't convey the technique of the supposed move correctly, poor use of CGI—they even use CGI on still frames that lasted more than 5 seconds on the screen—how lazy is that? Sure, the character designs are detailed, but that is an exigence coming from a manga that has supposedly detailed art and character design, and that, on top of the lack of great animators on the staff, doesn't help the animation fluidity at all. It's super repetitive; everything plays out the same, and they don't even try to do something differently. The direction is super uncreative; you don't get anything unique or interesting; it's always the same perspectives and the same angles of the characters in CGI chasing after the ball and stand still animation. The OST is very forgettable. Also, what the fuck is that additional time garbage that shit is not funny it's just painful to watch. One may try to argue that Blue Lock is mindless fun and that it's not taking itself seriously, but that is not true given how edgy and over the top Blue Lock is. It's not a satire of sports manga, nor is it presented in an unpretentious way; it's the complete opposite. The only reason that Blue Lock may feel like that sometimes is because it is so unbelievably bad that you can't accept it for what it is without making up a reason for it. If you really want a football anime, the only one I can recommend to you is Ao Ashi. It's not exceptional, but it's WAY better than this shit

Winter 2023 is by no means a great season for anime, but from the very beginning I had my eyes dead-set on reviewing two anime. They were Oniichan wa Oshimai and Mahou Kakumei. But something called Real Life™ got in my way, and instead of writing shit, I spent my free time lying in bed, catching up on desperately-needed sleep time, half-awake and half-dreaming about some giant-ass pumpkin patch. It was pumpkins as far as the eye can see, with the hills and the valleys and the far-off mountains all textured with delicate orange stripes. Well, fuck pumpkins, fuck sleep, and fuck real life. Whocares about anything else when you can watch Blue Lock? It’s objectively the best football anime of Fall 2022 and Winter 2023 and it’s pointless to even consider a 2nd place. So now to answer the all-important question for the readers of this review: What is this anime about? Blue Lock starts when our power-of-teamwork guy Isagi passes the ball to his teammate instead of shooting for himself and his teammate misses. Isagi then starts pondering if teamwork is hella overrated, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock, where the goal is not to work as a team, but by becoming the single best striker in the world. And how is our now-not-so-power-of-teamwork guy Isagi gonna do this? Well, first he has to win matches in teams of 11… and then win more matches in teams of 2-5, and if he succeeds he gets to play in a better team of 11… wait… something doesn’t seem quite right, let’s try something else. Blue Lock starts when our not-actually-power-of-teamwork guy Isagi passes the ball to his teammate instead of shooting for himself and his teammate misses. Isagi then starts pondering if teamwork is hella overrated, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock, where Isagi’s current understanding of “teamwork” is immediately thrown in the trash. Our reformed-power-of-teamwork Isagi, throughout the trials and hardships of Blue Lock, comes to realize that teamwork is not about passing the ball to his teammate in any situation, but instead knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each player and working with that, to generate “chemical reactions” that play to the strengths of each player… wait, timeout, hold on a second. Isn’t this “chemical reaction” thing just the plain run-of-the-mill definition of teamwork? When you look at Blue Lock more closely, it turns out not to be the “revolutionary approach” to football that it boasts itself as. Instead, Blue Lock’s goal is to explain very basic concepts of football in the most overcomplicated way possible to make it sound like something really cool. Like, what is “smelling a goal”? It sounds really cool, but when we translate it from Isagian to English it turns out to just be “coming up with a winning strategy”. What about “turning zero into one”? It’s just learning how to play in a team instead of individually. And what does “awakening” mean? Easy; it means “shounen shenanigans”. Concepts such as consistency and luck are overexplained in the most overexplanatory way possible that when you realize this, this show starts to be painful to watch. The “character development” is nothing but a contrived sense of progression that is randomly bullshitted by the author with the idea that “if you throw enough bullshit, some of them might not be seen as bullshit”. There’s simply nothing to be found. Well, if the character development is nonexistent, then at least we can settle for just the characters themselves, right? Well, no, not really. Isagi is basically a reprinted shounen character who says things like “I have to get better” so often that he skips sleep to say it more. Bachira’s characterization is that he can dribble, he is cute, and he can be shipped with Isagi. Ego is a character who spouts off some random shit and also eats random shit. Chigiri has long legs and long hair. Raichi has spiky teeth and spiky hair. Nagi’s characterization is that he can do weird kicks, he is cute, and he can be shipped with Reo. They are pretty much just shounen characters, each with strange “superpowers” that no ordinary high-schooler could possibly have, constantly talking about winning and shit. So what’s the point of Blue Lock? It fails at plot, fails at characters, fails at OST (it’s generic as shit). But there’s one thing it doesn’t fail at, and that is making cute, shippable characters. Take Bachira. His VA is talented and adds a considerable amount of nuance to Bachira’s dialogue. But what is this nuance used for? Better character exposition? Reflecting Bachira’s emotional state in a non-obvious way? These are forlorn hopes. The nuance’s sole intention is to make Bachira cuter and more shippable. Nagi’s backstory makes no sense: he only practiced for 6 months and is already a living god at technique. But the story’s intention is not realism; Nagi hence seems more mysterious, so he can be contrasted with Reo better, so they can be shipped together better. The whole purpose of Blue Lock is to ship cute boys together. At the time of writing (just after last episode) there are 3067 Blue Lock fanfictions on AO3. 2643 of them are categorized as M/M fics, of which 473 just so happen to be rated explicit. There are 778 Reo/Nagi fics, 382 Bachira/Isagi fics, 375 Isagi/Rin fics, and many more consisting of all sorts (and forms) of ships. Comparatively, Okabe/Kurisu from the fan-favorite Steins;Gate has only 178 fics to its name; that is less than the 225 Putin/Medvedev fics that exist somewhere on this site. So we can say, with certainty, that Blue Lock was invented to ship cute boys together. Maybe we can go further: Men’s sports manga was invented to ship cute boys together. Fuck it, let’s go even further. Men’s sports was invented to ship cute boys together. Men were invented to ship cute boys together? At this point I don’t know anymore. Perhaps I’ve been ridden to insanity over writing this review, juggling real life, and watching this show. Who knows. So with all that said and done, let’s try this one last time. Blue Lock starts when our cute shounen boy Isagi passes the ball to an irrelevant character and loses the game. The plot don’t matter, the details doesn’t matter, but Isagi becomes tired of his surroundings, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock where he can meet other cute shounen boys for the audience to ship and scream random shounen stuff about self-improvement and winning that sounds really, really cool. As Isagi powerlevels, he can meet more cute boys and scream about more bullshit stuff, and the cycle continues until Isagi has all the qualities essential of the world’s #1 striker: know every cute boy on the planet, and be able to scream out the most overcomplicated form of every concept that ever exists. And if a story like that isn’t worth watching, I don’t know what is.

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