Eyeshield 21 takes the standard mold of most sports anime with the main character being a school kid with a unique talent, surrounded by teammates who want to win a championship. They begin at the bottom of the ladder, and slowly work their way up with dreams to become national champions in the end. In addition, it's make or break with the season, as the ensemble of characters are school students and thus have a limited time to win a championship before they graduate.
Sena Kobayakawa is our main character, and his personality is rather bland. He's a coward who is forced into American football, and slowly gains courage to take on stronger foes along the way. Like I didn't see that one coming. He's essentially a workdog for other people -- and even when he's in his "hero" mode in which he discards his coward persona for something more shonen-like, his personality is just flat out boring. The character development of Sena throughout the anime is predictable, yet still satisfying to say the least.
Apart from Sena and useless girl 1 and useless girl 2 (Suzuna and Mamori), the other characters are very well done. Hiruma in particular was an absolute badass, and kept the anime interesting with his constant blackmails, mind fucks, and aggressive style. Kurita took your gentle giant archetype and gave him a deep backstory that made you feel sympathy towards Hiruma, Musashi, and himself. The 3 Ha-Ha brothers were good comic relief, and helped add a little bit of flavor to Eyeshield 21 with the whole theme of trash overcoming talent with sheer willpower and guts.
The art is nothing special, but it's easy on the eyes and has a mix of seriousness and comedy infused within it. Hiruma's features in particular really give Eyeshield 21 its identity with the pointy ears and devilish fangs -- all very fitting for a team named the Deimon Devil Bats.
The sound was all right; I particularly enjoyed Hiruma's theme simply because I have a soft spot for strategic bad asses who have good intentions. And the music that plays when Sena goes into light speed is very fitting as well.
I enjoyed the earlier episodes when I didn't know what to expect. But seriously, every football game Deimon plays takes your same mold of being stomped in the first half, and coming back in a ridiculous fashion in the second. It was enjoyable the first time, but it seriously detracted from the rest of the games as the series progressed, which sucks because the teams during the later parts of the anime are actually interesting by concept.
It was also pretty easy to predict the scores of the games, and you could usually tell how they would be scored. If the opposing team was up 35 points in the first half, I'd predict that the Devil Bats would score 5 touchdowns with 4 made kicks and one extra touchdown conversion from Sena's trademark move, winning 35-36. Without a kicker, then it's simply 6 touchdowns to reach that number. If the opposing team has an ace receiver / lineback / running back, it's painfully obvious that they're going to whoop the floor with Sena and Monta until they have some epiphany on how to beat their opponents and score a touchdown late in the last 5 minutes of the game. Such is the nature of a sports anime, I suppose.
Overall, I enjoyed Eyeshield 21. It's your run of the mill feel good sports anime with trashy players becoming something special. Don't be discouraged simply because you don't like American football, because you don't need to love the game in order to love this anime.
