Have you ever seen something happen in real life and thought “Man, this would be sick if it was anime and had some ridiculous anime shenanigans”. Well clearly the author of Blue Lock thought that about soccer and got to work.

The story begins with the main character Yoichi Isagi and striker for some random high school team losing a game which would’ve qualified him to the Japanese national soccer league. The reason why he lost? He passed the ball to his teammate instead of taking the shot himself.

After this Isagi gets invited to Blue Lock (hey it’s the title!!) where the inferior players would get eliminated and be prohibited from playing soccer in the Japanese national league. The creator of the facility argues that the best strikers in the world are produced by pure ego, aka they’re just making a facility with the sole objective of finding the person with the most severe case of narcissistic personality disorder.

If you love this premise, you think it’s the most anime thing ever and you run with it, but if you hate it you think this premise is absolutely ridiculous. I think it is bizarrely anime. What other median can make a battle royale for soccer players to find out who has the most mental illnesses gathered?

The fact that the author himself wanted to create an extremely competitive “the best takes all” theme with the facility had him create extremely hyper-competitive and self-centered characters which makes for some hype moments where they always try and outdo each other at every moment possible which is super entertaining to watch.

This is also used to delve deeper into the competitive spirit but in the most Tumblr way imaginable. Anyone who has entered flow when doing something competitive can agree it can feel like someone else takes over, but the terminology of a “monster” taking over is quite cringe. This issue could have been easily solved by using different terminology to describe what the characters feel.

At the same time the characters can be quite simplistic and one dimensional as is normal for a lot of sports anime, especially sports anime which represent teams sports with a lot of players. It is extremely hard to create an entire team of characters that are recognisable, unique and interesting. So a lot of the time authors have to write a lot of characters with extremely over-exaggerated personalities. Nearly every character’s personality can be described in one or two words.

Overall, it’s a good representation of what goes inside the head of a hyper-competitive person, but overall requires more polish and writing finesse to become a truly great show, overall it’s very deserving of a: