For months prior to the airing of this show I had been hearing nothing but great things about the manga. "It's peak!", "It's the best new-gen!", etc. Maybe I just got spoiled by how good Aoashi was, but this show has been neither of those things.
The art and animation, which I thought would be the only guaranteed great thing about the show, is arguably the worst. Every episode, every scene, and every shot looks exactly the same. The same color palette, the same backgrounds, and the same lighting. Bland blues and grays are the only colors that exist in the blue lock universe, so get ready to see a lot of that. The art direction is bad enough, but the animation isn't much better. I'm serious when I say this- this show has the worst CGI usage I have ever seen in my life. Every time they play soccer (which is often, as you can imagine), almost every character not directly in focus is a mobile game quality 3d model walking across the pitch. I don't know how much time, money, or effort was spent on each episode, but they need more of all of those things.
The characters are so unbelievably uninteresting. They all have decent enough designs, but each one's only actual character trait is that they wan to be 'the world's greatest striker!', and then they'll throw something like "he's lazy," "he's an asshole", or "he's smart" on top of that. When every character has the exact same ambitions, they all feel one dimensional. That isn't helped by the fact that we know nothing about any of them outside of their soccer careers. What do they like to do for fun? Who knows. What are their families like? Who cares. What are their school lives like? No idea. At this point in the show, literally every character on the main team, including the MC, are critically underdeveloped. They need to stop cramming as much action as possible into each episode, and start dedicating a large amount of time to expanding on these characters ASAP, or this show will be beyond saving. That might be an impossible task though, when all of the writing sounds like something I would come up with after watching a sword art online episode when I was 12. All of the 'cool' lines are something like "I have monster inside of me that wants to eat you all >:)", or "You have to let the demon out to score goals!". As you can probably expect, the way the characters talk and interact with each other, is also not good. Even if the characters were developed, it would still be hard to make the watcher care about them with that being the case.
I don't really know what people see in this show . Despite the massively flawed anime, the popularity has absolutely exploded- hell, Japan is wearing blue lock themed jerseys at the WORLD CUP! The biggest sports event in the history of the world! How did the author manage to pull that off???
Anyways, I'll keep watching until the end of the show, but my optimism for the next 15 episodes is pretty low.
