With the whole quad-yearly Tokyo Olympics season of an affair coming up, it's yet another adaptation at a time when the world is slowly beginning to rile up from being hard hit by the pandemic (at least for Japan anyways), and more sports shows are being made to pronounce the diversity of the games featured in the Olympics. What "Sayonara Watashi no Cramer' brought to the Olympics table is women's soccer, a sport that's generally been long held by men for decades, and now slowly expanding this to the female side since it has garnered its own popularity in the modern age.
I've already watched the First Touch movie that was supposed to be released alongside the anime (that got delayed because of COVID), so I'll keep spoilers to a minimum. The gist of "enjoying" this show is that you NEED to have watched the movie first, because a key character in this show (Nozomi Onda) does the exact same soccer-trick styles here. Alas, keep your expectations super low, because the hell that Liden Films did of an astounding lackluster of a job, the animation sure don't hold up as what you'd expect of a sports show that DEMANDS animation, because that is how you excel in producing such shows. I say "enjoying", because by taking the animation away, even with good visuals, characters (and an insane multitude of them, because it's a full-fledged team), it's bound to fail anyways and look much of less unappealing.
Otherwise, the anime series is a super lackluster version of the manga, and let me show you why. First and foremost, getting the easy culprit out of the way, is Liden Films' jarring animation choices. Fun fact, the production staff for the TV series did the movie as well, and somehow by hook or by crook, the movie ended up being the superior version of the series overall. But once again as a reminder, keep your expectations low because it's subpar at best.
Secondly, I don't mind if there's a buttload of characters, especially for a sports show like soccer, where teamwork is essential. But as much as I like the presentaton in the movie, the anime drops that ball hard with characters that seem too full of themselves while looking very stagnant and un-striking like the manga. Whoever tried to give both the movie and anime a young kind of look, your expectations are stooply low to the point of bare air-kicking. For reference, take the 3 central Warabi Seinan girls: Nozomi Onda, Sumire Suo and Midori Soshizaki. These 3 girls mainly have a lot of screentime, so I could understand their friendship-cum-rivalry status from the get-go. But it always seems to me that Naoshi Arakawa tries to input too much of the influence from "Your Lie in April", so much so that I can distinctively remember the comedic moments mirroring that of the former. These girls have dreams and aspirations, and I completely understand their action line of moods. But at the same time, the supporting characters like the "princess-mannered" Aya Shiratori, they're not characters that you can reference them on the soccer field, but more like narcisstic ones that only provide comedic banter. If I were the coach of the girls' team, I wouldn't even have butt my eye on them being cardboards for a fitting story, unless they got real talent to show.
The third and last pointer of why the show failed, is that the pacing is fricking sloth levels of slow. I read the manga alongside the anime, and it seems that the production staff tried to "make it good" by including not more than 25% of all of its 13-episode length on anime-original padding, and every episode spared like 5-6 minutes of that. Granted, with all the action, the anime doesn't miss a beat, and the episodes fly by so fast that I'm always reaching for the next episode. But to see it veer back-and-forth towards the straightforward manga is asinine, and can feel like a chore to watch the show from start to finish. For that I really have to recommend reading the manga over the anime, because it gets the most important things done and grows its story so that it doesn't feel cumbersome. It's character development that the anime chose to do that's more important than the pacing, and I legitimately understand the reasons behind the directorial choice to do so. But as someone who used to watch soccer with friends, the sport is supposed to be as frenetic as possible, and sadly this show lost all of that mojo. Heck, a counterattack is easier done than said.
At least the OST was decent though. Aika Kobayashi's OP "AMBITIOUS GOAL" suits the show's themes to score the brillant goal, and is a nice song to listen to on its own. I could not say the same for the ED, which sounds very generic even with its upbeat sounds. A goal and own goal (of the metaphoric hit-and-miss) result here, I'd say that the OP is the only thing that I really liked about the show.
If you can take this with a light heart, then I suppose that this will suit to your tingling senses of playing a harmless friendly game of soccer. Otherwise, it's a snoozefest of a show, stick to the movie and the 2 manga works if you can.
