It’s 2018 and Japan hasn’t come even close to winning the FIFA World Cup in years and basically no one believes that’s even possible. Except for one new, dedicated employee who convinces the Japan Football Union to hire a new coach with a crazy plan: Japan’s team has too much cohesiveness and not enough selfishness so let’s take some young soccer players and mold them into the ego-centric, goal scoring players we need. Yoichi Isagi is one of the players to receive this invitation, someone who’s still wondering if passing to his teammate (and therefore losing the prefectural finals) was the right goal. Right or wrong, Yoichi is about to see the rules of the game stay the same but every other part of soccer implode while he’s trying to become the best striker in all of Japan!
You could call Blue Lock a survival game story since the initial premise is locking three hundred Japanese teenagers, all strikers, in a giant sports complex and pitting them against each other until only one remains. Honestly it’s feels like a death game story except for the fact that no one dies (instead you just have the horrible shame of knowing that you will never be a big, break-out soccer star either in Japan or the world, which is even more humiliating than death for some of these teens); do I have a lot of questions about how this endeavor is funded? Absolutely, second only to my wonderment at how on Earth they got all of the parents and guardians to sign off on this whackadoo plan! But that is the premise of the series so you either need to be able to push those pesky ideas to the back of your mind or accept that this is probably not the story for you.
Despite the silly premise, I suspect the bigger hurdle for most readers to clear is going to be the characters themselves, which was certainly the case for me. While the series isn’t introducing us to all 300 players right off the bat (and hopefully never will), the core cast is still at least 15 people and two volumes isn’t a terribly large amount of time to flesh out any of them. And beyond that, again these are teenagers who have agreed to be locked up in a sports complex, without beds, their cellphones, wearing the same practice uniforms all the time, etc. all for the chance at becoming a top soccer player; clearly these are not “normal” people to start with and so far everyone comes off as a collection of quirks. In some other sports series, like Haikyuu!!, the characters feel like ridiculously talented high schoolers but ultimately still like high schoolers, characters with distinct personalities that form the basis for why you root for them. Blue Lock goes in almost the exact opposite direction — if you root for these characters it’s because you enjoy the wildness of the premise and the crazy fanaticism they have for the sport rather than because of any deep backstory or characterization so far.
After two volumes, I’m still not sure if that’s going to be enough to keep me coming back. When I initially finished reading these two volumes I had the thought “well that’s enough of that silliness” but after watching the upcoming anime trailer I found myself wanting to read or watch more. Some sports manga work better animated than still but that’s not an issue here. The matches feel alive and frenzied on the pages, as if the ink is barely restraining the actions to the world of fiction, although I am already having a bit of trouble telling some of the characters apart and that’ll surely become a bigger issue if the cast keeps expanding (after all, a soccer team has 11 players and there are a lot of teams in the blue lock complex). For the moment I think I’ll wait and see instead of immediately continuing on. The story hasn’t quite captured my attention yet but it definitely has the potential to.
