Blue Lock

Yoichi Isagi was mere moments away from scoring a goal that would have sent his high school soccer team to the nationals, but a split-second decision to pass the ball to his teammate cost him that reality. Bitter, confused, and disappointed, Isagi wonders if the outcome would have been different had he not made the pass. When the young striker returns home, an invitation from the Japan Football Union awaits him. Through an arbitrary and biased decision-making process, Isagi is one of three hundred U-18 strikers selected for a controversial project named Blue Lock.

The project's ultimate goal is to turn one of the selected players into the star striker for the Japanese national team. To find the best participant, each diamond in the rough must compete against others through a series of solo and team competitions to rise to the top. Putting aside his ethical objections to the project, Isagi feels compelled to fight his way to the top, even if it means ruthlessly crushing the dreams of 299 aspiring young strikers.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Bachira, Meguru Main

Kaito, Tasuku Japanese

Isagi, Yoichi Main

Ura, Kazuki Japanese

Chigiri, Hyouma Main

Saitou, Souma Japanese

Kunigami, Rensuke Main

Ono, Yuuki Japanese

Nagi, Seishirou Supporting

Shimazaki, Nobunaga Japanese

Itoshi, Rin Supporting

Uchiyama, Kouki Japanese

Barou, Shouei Supporting

Suwabe, Junichi Japanese

Shidou, Ryuusei Supporting

Nakamura, Yuuichi Japanese

Mikage, Reo Supporting

Uchida, Yuuma Japanese

Itoshi, Sae Supporting

Sakurai, Takahiro Japanese

Furukawa, Shin Producer

Mori, Yuuki Producer

Nagahama, Hiroaki Producer

Hirano, Tsutomu Producer

Reviews

Mar 26, 2023

Qkydzaa

Recommended

Well-written

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.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Mar 25, 2023

Mcsuper

Mixed Feelings

Blue Lock is a sports series where some of your normal sports anime tropes aren’t present, especially the “power of friendship”, which is good in a way, yet it made it so edgy to the point where sometimes, it’s quite laughable. If you’re someone who likes sports anime for its realism, you won’t get that here at all. It’s definitely quite epic at times, and there are a couple unpredictable moments mixed in there, but I feel like the appeal of sports anime in general is to have a good mix of humour and drama, while being very character driven and relatable to the viewer ... at times. With how gimmicky the characters tend to be, it was hard to resonate with any of them, or the plot in general. For me, it was mostly just a popcorn shounen show, that didn’t leave me with much to take away other than some hype moments.

The premise is quite interesting, as the Japan Football Union created this project called Blue Lock, who would select three hundred U-18 strikers into their program, and pit them against each other to rise to the top. In a sense, I thought it’d be like a death game anime, where if you fail, you would die, and this show sort of has that identity of being that way, as expulsion from Blue Lock is virtually the end of one’s pro soccer aspirations.

While soccer is generally considered a team sport, Blue Lock separates itself from other sports anime, as it focuses on selfishness and ego, rather than trying to build teamwork and good relations with teammates. While that seems like a novel concept, to me, it has a major drawback. Since character development is one of the most important things in sports shows in my opinion, the lack of team building and cohesion makes it so the characters aren’t that memorable, and they’re more gimmicky than anything, with each character having their unique part of the game that they’re good at, whether it’s vision of the field, speed, shooting, or handling the ball well. The character interactions for the most part, don’t tell us much about each character besides their surface personality. In fact, most of the characters don’t even develop properly, and have zero backstory to them. Without meaningful character interactions, it was difficult for me to really empathize with any of the characters. Their aspirations beyond being the “best striker” is all they want to do, so most of them have nothing that separates them from others aside from their gimmick.

The animation and art in Blue Lock is not all that great in my opinion. Some of the movement during the games was very stiff, especially during the second cour of the show, where I think the studio just rushed through production. The CGI was quite ugly at times when it was shown as well. As for the character designs, they scream like edgy teens. The eyes were extremely cringy to me especially, but I suppose the edginess is what makes this show special to people.

The music was middling as well, as the soundtrack wasn’t all that standout. The first ED and second OP were good, but the OP and ED by Unison Square Garden just wasn’t all that impressive.

As for my enjoyment throughout the show, I thought it had quite an unimpressive first half, and then the story improved towards the end of the series. It’s unfortunate that the animation degraded as the second half went along, or else I would have had a more favourable impression of this show overall.

Overall, Blue Lock is a fine show, despite all my criticisms. It can be quite exhilarating to watch sometimes, in the big moments, but the edgy dialogue and humour wasn’t all that great. The characters are quite weak overall, while the story was up and down. One thing I found funny was that the 2022 World Cup happened during the airing of this anime, because I felt it unintentionally promoted this show a bit more.

The main message here is just don’t expect a realistic portrayal of sports, you won’t get it in this anime. Otherwise, maybe try it out, but I can’t promise great things from this show.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Feb 29, 2024

TheNinthRequiem

Not Recommended

Funny

Picture this, you’re in extra time and it’s the final play of the game. Everyone’s sweaty and knackered, rightfully so, the scoreline is 6-6, or at least that’s what you think cause you never really keep track of the score during games. You’re in the penalty box and your best bud passes a beautiful through ball to you. You take a clean touch, fake a shot to the left, and whip the ball into the top right bin. The goalkeeper doesn’t see it coming at all. How could he? The crowd goes wild. A little quieter than normal you note–probably cause you’re at an away ... game. The ref blows his whistle, “fweeeeeeet”. The game’s done, you’ve won. You run to the sidelines and your mom hands you your favorite drink, a scrumptious blackcurrant Ribena that was in the cooler only seconds ago. You take a comforting sip and look around. You pinpoint exactly why the crowd was quieter than usual. It’s because your dad was dozing off in the middle of the game. Your mom sees where you’re looking at and gets mad. “JORDAN, how many times do I have to tell you, don’t sleep during your son’s game.” You’re not mad, you understand. He had to drive your ass for an hour and a half at 6am to watch a little league football game on a Saturday morning. You take a look at the other teams bleachers, trying to find the goalkeeper you just styled on. Strange, you can’t quite pinpoint him from the coagulate of jerseys until one of them walks up to you with his mom. His mom says: “hey, that was a great goal, my Kev could have never saved that.” You look at the child in tow, weird, you don’t remember a kid with glasses on the pitch. His mom notices and explains how she doesn’t let her son wear glasses on the pitch in case a ball hits his face. So that’s why he couldn’t save it, he couldn’t damn well see the ball could he? This, this pseudo-thrilling shithousery is Blue Lock to me.

The start of Blue Lock was actually bearable, dare I even say interesting. Seriously, it’s a good concept on paper. A bunch of ambitious teenagers vying for a chance to become Japan’s national team striker through a rigorous and ruthless training regime with one person remaining. Or that’s what it seemed at the start, until you realize that no characters introduced get eliminated. Or the absurdity of fielding a striker in goal could ever yield effective practice for anyone involved. But I understand there should be an expected level of plot armoring and suspension of disbelief afforded when it comes to these shows so I will give it some leeway. Instead, this review will focus more so on the myriad of reasons why this show doesn’t even work in an entertaining sense.

First and foremost, it’s the animation. For some surreal reason, some people actually think the animation in this show is good. The characters are drawn decently and the food looks realistic enough. But most importantly, the actual animation of the football? Really? For the people complaining about the work of the CG in another popular series that aired the same season that I just so happen to adore–You should be up in arms here with knives and pitchforks screaming “Sic ‘em!”; it’s hideous. But the biggest and most heinous animation problem are the still frames filled with exposition that completely ruin the flow of each play. Matches are shown in these constant close ups of the characters slowly gliding across your screen as you hear the play happening in their head. But the play itself is never actually explicitly shown. It's reminiscent of those imovie projects you had to do for middle school where you couldn’t quite figure out how to get the images to stop moving with the ken burns effect as you try your best to match your squeaky dialogue with the 4 second image overlay. It’s an embarrassing production. Football is dynamic and exciting at heart, especially in attacking play. But this static imagery completely ruins the momentum of each play and makes it really hard to sit through some of these moments that I would like to imagine were exciting on paper. If you don’t get the animation right for a sports anime, it’s really hard to build from there.

The ranking system is atrocious and representative of everything wrong with shonen anime. Why would the ranked 299 person realistically even have a shot at becoming one of the best players. It’s this unnecessary from the bottom to the top type writing that tries to maintain hype through introducing opponents of increasingly high rank. This might work for some, but to me, it’s tedious to sit through knowing that someone with more power but with even less personality will appear and none of this matters. Take Nagi for example. How on earth does he have the ego to say he’s the best player as he’s introduced when he’s ranked 250 something in this facility alone. It’s just meaningless fluff because it’s obvious they’re trying to drum up some kind of idiotic point where he realizes oh he’s not god’s gift and there are people that challenge him here. Then Rin comes along with a similar ego complex, but is just stronger and replaces what little Nagi’s purpose was. The part that really infuriates me is that after what seems like these development arcs for each of these characters. They’re reduced to these shells of their former selves and are added to Isagi’s collection of assets like they’re all tools in Mickey Mouse’s toolbox. “Oh toodles!!! Who will I pass to today?" As he bring up 4 options to the screen. I can just imagine the kids watching screaming at their screen: “Garou! Kunigami! Bachira! Chigiri!” or whoever else “fortunate” enough to be Isagi’s plaything at this current moment.

Strikers aren't the king of the castle but Blue Lock certainly thinks so. Football is a teamsport; it’s an 11-aside game played on a 105 by 68 meter rectangular field with the objective of putting the ball in your opponents net. The game most importantly is driven by cohesive teamplay. Unlike something like basketball where there is abundant teamplay, but there are also plays that can be started and finished by a single player because the pitch is relatively small. But it’s different in football. There is so much buildup required for each goal. Blue Lock doesn’t have nearly enough of this. I think it’s because of this ignorant “ego” thing they try to drive into each player. The mortifying “chemistry reaction” and “devouring” they keep bringing up as what they believe to be “football”. To anyone who has not seen football, please do not look at this affront and think this is what football’s about. It’s so cringey and it hurts every fiber of my being.

Similarly, players like Bachira and Chigiri are obviously more suited to be wingers. Yet they’re still pushed into this rigid idea that they’re number 9s. It does a huge disservice to your greats like Kagawa and that legendary Japanese midfielder that people get disappointed when they pack in Fifa. These midfield Maestros are some of your greats, why would you think to disrespect them by saying strikers are the most important position. Take some time to look back at the past few world cups, was Giroud the main reason France won the world cup in 2018? How about Spain’s 4-6-0 formation where they fielded 0 strikers and won the world cup in 2010? It’s just this cringey decadent idea that strikers are the most important part that I just know comes from a place to get impressionable children riled up for your show. Frankly, it’s dishonest and insulting.

Another crucial problem with only having strikers is, you only have a limited amount of qualities and unique skills to give around where players can excel at: Pace, finishing, hold-up play, off the ball movement, spatial awareness to name the key ones. And evidently, they’re exhausted pretty quickly. What you’re then left with are pure power upgrades that I really dislike. Where it’s this childish one-upping of “I read his play”, “I read his reading of my play”, “I can jump higher than you”, “I can run faster than you”. It’s just not fun to watch from a tactical and footballing standpoint. And deep down, Blue Lock knows this, so what do they do? They decide to introduce imaginary monsters. Yes you heard me right.

Just like Bachira and the monster inside of him, there are 2 wolves inside of me, one hates this show, the other also hates this show. The individual monsters of this show don’t work and don’t get expanded on. When you lean into that supernatural realm without actually doing anything meaningful with it–Or when they don’t iron out properties of these supernatural concepts like in the case of Blue Lock, it just becomes nonsensical mumbo jumbo. You have no limit defining, everything just ends up feeling so pulled out of the hat for convenience sake. It’s also those flaming eyes when the monsters come out or when they enter “serious mode” that are so badly animated for some of these scenes. They all start to look like Endeavor from MHA to me and it’s admittedly hysterical. But from a non-biased critiquing standpoint, it’s abhorrent.

This menagerie known as the Blue Lock facility also feels so barren and boring. There needs to be an incentive to make this program feel rewarding where players should want to stay here because they’re becoming their best selves. Be it, superior practicing methods, state of the art training equipment, illustrious coaching instructors, you name it. But Blue Lock doesn't have any of this. It just feels like a death trap that unbeknownst to each of the players before they join, if they get knocked out they can never play for the Japanese national team. I feel like these sort of stipulations should have been included in the letter. If not, screw it, just go full squid game and say if you’re knocked out you’re executed. That would have spiced things up a little bit. I also think it’s laughably pathetic how this show is only situated in an air conditioned indoor football pitch as they prepare for a competitive outdoor sport. It’s almost as if these writers couldn’t have borne the thought of not being in an airconditioned room. The world cup and every club football competition is played outdoors. So why are we conditioning these kids to never see the light of day?

I don’t understand why Blue Lock had to introduce made up characters in the series. I understand this point is more a pet-peeve as not everyone that watches Blue Lock is familiar with football and that’s totally fine. But as for me, I’m just wondering why we had to make up characters mixed in with real footballing greats? Noa Noel? Seriously? Noa-ne cares. I had to sit here as they tried to explain white-washed Thierry Henry to me. You should either choose to reference only real life players or make up all the players for your world. Because from where I stand, it just sounds like you’re undermining the two goats of our football generation, Messi and Ronaldo.

The only thing that I can appreciate in this show are the subtle or not so subtle yaoi elements. It’s the only thing that’s keeping me engaged in this show and I’m not even lgbtq. The series really tries to reach a target demographic here and I for one am happy it succeeds on this front. When Bachira calls out to Isagi to free him from his captors. I shudder at the thought of these 2 loverboys not being together. My favorite line is when Nagi or as I know him as “NTR-gi” says: “Sorry Reo, now that I know how good this feels, I can’t go back to how I was before” (20:59, Ep 20). Gosh, That was a fun episode. They should just do this every episode, feign seriousness and drop these banging sus one liners in the middle of the game. Just start testing the homies, see if you can catch one of them lacking. Alas, these characters have to be serious, they’ve got indoor football matches to play!

Look, if you like Blue Lock, that’s your prerogative and I could never take that away from you. Nor would I want to, everyone’s allowed to enjoy what they want. As a football fan myself, I was massively disappointed that a show I was sold to be this “excellent intense battle-royale football show" fell so flat on its face. Why can all the other sports get shows like Kuroku No Basuke or Haikyuu!!, and we get this. I’ve seen clips of these other shows and they look phenomenal. It’s just not fair. If you were starved of football content as an anime fan, I’d recommend watching the 2022 World Cup instead of watching this 24 episode choppy passion-devoid mess. That was a real treasure to behold.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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