Blue Lock’s Anime Adaptation Is Just Tragic

Muneyuki Kaneshiro’s Blue Lock made a huge splash in the sports manga world when it debuted in 2018. With the beloved Haikyu finally coming to an end, Blue Lock seemed primed to fill that hole with a twist: soccer without the camaraderie, adopting a more cutthroat approach.

At the time of writing, the Blue Lock manga is still going strong. We’re well into the series’ third proper arc now, and it’s almost impressive how Kaneshiro has managed to keep the momentum going for this long. Most readers would likely balk at the idea of a single soccer match lasting a whole year as you wait for chapters to release on a weekly basis, but the manga’s excellent art, character arcs, and over-the-top, if unrealistic, soccer moves kept fans hooked. It’s that good.

Oricon’s yearly ranking of the best-selling manga series of 2024 is also out now, and the final estimates have Blue Lock placed in fifth position, behind the likes of Jujutsu Kaisen and Frieren. Simply put, Blue Lock is a huge deal in the manga world, which makes its subpar anime adaptation feel all the more disappointing.

Blue Lock Season 1 was largely pretty well-received. The first half brought all of our favorite characters to life, the voice work was great, but the season faltered towards the end, when the animations for the important matches started to see a noticeable dip in quality. Instead of actually animating the most crucial bits, much of the Blue Lock anime resorted to using freeze frames and stills to illustrate what was happening during the matches. When we did get to see actual animations, the CGI effects often felt off and made the character models look cheap and stilted.

With Blue Lock being lauded as one of the best-selling manga series back in 2023, a lot of fans — myself included — had hoped that this would mean better production quality for the upcoming Season 2. Unfortunately, Blue Lock Season 2 hasn’t improved much over the first season, if at all.

While Blue Lock‘s first couple arcs were very compelling, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the series really hits its stride once we get to the U-20 arc. This is where things start to get serious. The Blue Lock project is on the verge of getting shut down, and in order to keep things going, these rough, unpolished players need to band together to take down Japan’s prestigious U-20 team. To make things even more challenging, the Blue Lock team is comprised entirely of aspiring strikers, which means their odds of winning against a highly organized team are extremely low.

This is the first time we get to see the Blue Lock players showcase their skills on a national stage. The stakes have never been higher, and the manga absolutely knocks it out of the park with stunning art, new moves, and longstanding rivalries that develop in incredible ways. The U-20 arc went on for one year in real-time, but it still stands out as the manga’s strongest arc (though the current NEL arc has the potential to top it as well).

It was important that the anime adaptation knock it out of the park with Season 2, but unfortunately, that just hasn’t been the case from what we’ve seen so far. If anything, the overall animation quality seems to have taken a step back from Season 1. Whenever the characters are about to take a step forward to start running across the field, the show cuts to a slow pan of their face or some other slow-motion shot. We rarely ever get to see the games in motion, which is a huge part of what makes the Blue Lock manga so compelling.

For a series that’s clearly so beloved by the manga community, having such a low-quality anime adaptation is a travesty. We’ve still got a handful of episodes to go in Season 2 as we wrap up the U-20 match, but with the way things are going and how the anime has been received, it’s possible we might not even get a third season after this. And that would be a damn shame.

Blue Lock is available to stream on Crunchyroll.