Story and art: Story by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Art by Yusuke Nomura
Genre: Shounen, Sport
Publisher: Kodansha Comics
Synopsis: After a disastrous defeat at the 2018 World Cup, Japan’s team struggles to regroup. But what’s missing? An absolute Ace Striker, who can guide them to the win. The Japan Football Union is hell-bent on creating a striker who hungers for goals and thirsts for victory, and who can be the decisive instrument in turning around a losing match…and to do so, they’ve gathered 300 of Japan’s best and brightest youth players. Who will emerge to lead the team…and will they be able to out-muscle and out-ego everyone who stands in their way?
Publication date: 16th March 2021
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a free e-copy of this manga in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Disappointed with the state of Japanese football, coach Jinpachi Ego decides to set up the Blue Lock programme. A prestigious programme, Blue Lock puts the top 300 youth strikers through their paces in an intense and hardcore training programme, aiming to separate the wheat from the chaff and ultimately end up crowning one player as the top striker in Japan.
Our protagonist is Yoichi Isagi, who is a well meaning striker on his high school football team. Yoichi costs his school a place in the national tournament due to his hesitation to take a shot at goal and his choice to pass to a teammate who then missed. Yoichi struggles to come to terms with the choice he made, and his whole mindset changes with regards to his feelings towards football. He’s always been very much a team player, but he starts to wonder if he should be more selfish when he’s playing and take the chances for himself.
Yoichi eventually gets recruited into Blue Lock, where playing alongside the best strikers in the world reinvigorates his love for football and makes him want to try as hard as he can to improve. Unfortunately, in comparison to his peers, Yoichi is really not all that. Ego’s vision for Blue Lock is very much to push the players as hard as he can, to breaking point. Everything in Blue Lock is based on rankings – what you eat, where you live, and how long you last in the programme. Yoichi finds himself in the bottom 11 ranked players fighting for his chance to be the best striker in Japan.
As a lifelong football fan, Blue Lock is really fun to read. There’s a lot of mentions to real life strikers which makes it really entertaining to compare the tactics and plot to real life occurrences. It’s also really interesting to see how the whole plot of the manga is to train the strikers in Blue Lock to only look out for themselves, and it’s basically the antithesis of any team game where the philosophy is very much based on playing as a team. The Blue Lock programme promotes the idea of ego and, what we’d call in the UK, glory hunting.
Blue Lock is a really interesting premise, and has a lot of potential. There are obviously a lot of potential rival characters for Yoichi to bounce off of, as well as a lot of self discovery ahead of him. Already in the few chapters of volume 1, Yoichi has come to realise that he’s perhaps not as weak as he believes himself to be.
It does feel like not a lot happens in this first volume of Blue Lock, but there’s a lot of set-up for onward plot and action. More and more characters are being introduced outside of the Blue Lock programme, and it’s interesting to see the perspective of outsiders on this very unyielding and unprecedented training programme as well as meeting the players who will undoubtedly make up the rest of the Japanese team with the Blue Lock graduates.
Whilst the first volume feels a little slow, Blue Lock shows a lot of promise, and one not to miss for fans of football.
NetGalley requires users to rate on a star rating of 5, so I have adjusted my star ratings for any reviews for manga reviewed via NetGalley. Non-NetGalley reviews will remain out of 10.
I loved the first episode of Tokyo Revengers. It had everything I love in an anime – it was really suspenseful, it made me laugh a lot, and the cliffhanger at the end of the episode definitely left me wanting more. I got some real Erased vibes from Tokyo Revengers, which is definitely not a bad thing as it’s definitely up there in one of my favourite shows.
Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much at a show since Banana Fish, and this was only the first episode! To Your Eternity was beautifully animated, it felt so cinematic, and honestly just heartbreaking. The first episode was an incredible opener, and I’m so invested in it already.
I was really looking forward to Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro because I’d seen screenshots floating around on Twitter and I thought the character design for Nagatoro was really cool and that she looked really cute. Unfortunately, I don’t really have anything good to say about it. It was a really uncomfortable watch from start to finish, as Nagatoro relentlessly bullies her senpai – who is so bland I’ve forgotten his name entirely. It’s not even in a lighthearted making fun of someone because you like them kind of way, it’s just out and out bullying and not something I’m interested in watching.
There is a lot going on in Fairy Ranmaru, and honestly it just felt like a total mess. It starts off as a kind of isekai as the fairy characters are sent to the human world, then there’s a sort of magical boy element, and then it turns into a musical with a song halfway through. I honestly felt like I had whiplash watching this show, it just was all over the place. Its saving grace was that the male characters were quite interesting, otherwise it doesn’t have a lot going for it.
I don’t think I’ve ever watched a girl’s sports anime, but Farewell, My Dear Cramer looked really cute so I thought I’d give it a go. It’s about girl’s high school football (I will not succumb and call it soccer!), and the first episode was mostly about the girls joining from their various middle schools and joining the club. It was a really interesting episode as it gives you some backstory about the kinds of players the main girls are, and sets up the premise for the series nicely.
I’m a little bit sceptical of this one. Playboy business man falls in love with and pursues his high-school sister’s best friend. I’m sure you’ll understand my reservations. That aside, I did actually really enjoy Koikimo. I thought it was really nicely animated and it made me laugh quite a lot. I’ll still hold onto my scepticism for now, but I was pleasantly surprised.
Another seasonal show with a huge age difference! Again, like with Koikimo I went into Higehiro totally wary and ready to bail at any moment, and honestly, I almost did. Yoshida is a 26 year old salaryman who takes in teenaged Sayu after seeing her on the street under a lamppost. She quickly propositions him and tells him she’ll sleep with him if she can stay which is how she has been managing to find places to stay. Yoshida rejects Sayu, which is the only reason I kept watching, but instead he offers to have her live with him in exchange for doing the household chores. Again, like with Koikimo, I’ll remain skeptical as I feel like there’s definitely potential for this to cross some boundaries. I’d really love it if Yoshida and Sayu’s relationship developed into more of a brother/sister one, but I fear that will not be the case.
I definitely didn’t expect a show about anthropomorphic animals to be so dark and mysterious. I’m so intrigued by where Oddtaxi is going, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Those Snow White Notes totally took me by surprise. I thought I’d be getting some sort of high school music club situation, and this is far from that. It’s actually quite dark and deals with some pretty serious themes. I was really pleasantly surprised to be wrong, and it’s definitely one I’ll try to keep up with.
Maybe I’m stupid, but I found 86 really hard to follow. I think by the end of the episode I’d sort of got the gist, but all the way through the episode I just felt baffled. It’s hard to say whether I enjoyed the episode as for a lot of it I felt totally lost, but I think by the end I can say I liked it. I’ll definitely give it another few episodes.
I love a sports anime, we all know it. Backflip!! is about men’s rhythm gymnastics. I’ve always enjoyed watching men’s and women’s rhythm gymnastics at the Olympics and such, so it’s cool to see an anime version! The plot hasn’t really kicked off yet, with most sports anime, this first episode was really just about the protagonist joining the club, but it looks to be quite promising. The animation of the performances looked really nice too, I was worried it might go full CG like in an idol anime dance, and whilst I think there was an element of CG it still looked pretty cool.
Another sports anime! This time one for a sport that I was entirely convinced was totally made up until I Googled it after the episode, and was shocked to realise that this contact sport version of tag is real. That aside, Burning Kabaddi was totally unique and chaotic, but in a good way. The protagonist doesn’t even want to be in the club, for one, but he’s basically blackmailed into joining. It made me laugh a lot and I’m really intrigued to see where it goes and how actual matches of this weird sport work.
This is a totally wholesome school club anime about a pottery club. Episodes are short, which is just as well because not a lot happens, and they’re surprisingly informative about the Japanese pottery scene. I’ll keep watching it because it’s quite sweet, but I can’t envisage it being a standout for the season.
I’d seen a lot of people hyping up The Pretty Boy Detective Club online so it felt like one I wanted to watch – who doesn’t like pretty anime boys, anyway? I’m not sure how I feel about it after the first airing, I like the premise of a detective club filled with pretty boys, but they all felt very shallow and there didn’t feel like there was a lot of substance to the plot, feeling almost like a knock-off Ouran. The animation choices were really interesting though, and there were some beautiful moments.
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