Ao Ashi

[MFauli]

Ashito Aoi is a young, aspiring football player from a backwater town in Japan. His hopes of getting into a high school with a good football club are dashed when he causes an incident during a critical match for his team, which results in their loss and elimination from the tournament. Nevertheless, he catches the eye of someone important who happened to be visiting from Tokyo. How will things turn out for Ashito?

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Episode 3:

Haha, just when they're down, another bad news. I guess it all comes down to whether they can score one goal for the honor of it, but actually winning the match seems out of question.

Anyway, I like this anime, although the pacing could be faster. Not sure where this can go with only 12 episodes. Even 24 wouldn't be a lot. But whatever, there's good potential in this football anime, best in a long time.

[MFauli]

Episode 4:

What a thing to say as a mother lol. Totally unnecessary.

The goal was nice, but in terms of football, this anime goes for a little too much realism for my liking. Barely getting in this one, after all those maneuvers, phew. My favorite sports anime in terms of "satisfying accomplishments" are probably Baby Steps and Major. For Football anime, Kickers and Captain Tsubasa are still the best.

This anime is just a little too slow paced. Only a little. That scene in the cafe at the end was great, but I would have liked more of that. But there was no time.

[MFauli]

episode 5:

Spending a whole episode on his farewell, when nothing much actually happened, eh. This could have been done in half the time, then spend the other half on his arrival in Tokyo.

Also I gotta say I don't like Ashito. His voice and attitude is annoying, and his voice sounds like Asta's from Black Clover. The crying at the end of this episode was kinda ruined because of his comical, overacted crying.

Fortuntely, I'm interested enough to see where this goes on the football side of things.

[MFauli]

Episode 7:

Yeah, this anime is turning out to be rather disappointing. The pacing is way too slow, we're at episode 7 (of 12?) and still only training matches. And not even regular training matches, but still in the testing/evaluation phase.

Plus, I really don't like Aoi-san. At first I found his attitude refreshing, but now he's still the same, just an egotistical prick, always annoyingly shouting lika Asta.

Not sure if this gets interesting eventually.

[MFauli]

episode 8:

"I'm really enjoying it!" is not convincing when half the episode was him sulking and being depressed.

Otherwise nothing new. Mediocre anime with slow pace.

[David75]

I'm not sure if he's 12 or 14/15. But either way the stop and go, and the chest to place the ball in the direction you go next are moves I've seen done by very good players even before they were 10.
And I'm talking no name school football for fun during recreation time. I would not say all brats could do this. But each year at least one or two were able to.
MC has seen lots of matches of all level either on the field, from the stands or on TV. Very surprised he never caught those moves and try them for himself.
After all trick moves are fun and easy to train to death.

[MFauli]

episode 9:

Lol, fuck the coach. Just tell him what he did wrong ffs. Nobody give me a "it's important to find out by himself". No.

While it was nice to see some success for Aoi in the first half of the episode, there are two things I really hate:

1.) Aoi was introduced as football genius to us. Now, near the end of the anime, I'm supposed to feel excitement over him learning to stop and pass a ball?! wat

2.) Wtf is this dumb "kill it and kick it" line?! I googled it There's NOTHING. Who made up this nonsensical, cringe line? I closely listened and they don't say anything about "killing" in Japanese, the word that is used is a bog-standard "tomeru" aka "stop". If "kill it, then kick it" were a famous football phrase, I'd get it, but since google doesn't come up with anything, it's not. So did Crunchyroll's translator just invent this line for no good reason? Ugh

[David75]

So we know he doesn't have the basics yet.
But he has an incredibly good peripheral vision, probably kinetic vision too and he knows where everyone is and might be for the next 20 seconds (I use an arbitrary value here). He probably will become a clutch player.
Maybe they will make him the Larry Bird of soccer ?
But that's only by season 57 of ao ashi...

It's a little jarring they plague MC with such basic flaws when young soccer players like him all have access to tv and now the internet to watch any action in every possible detail and they can train to mimic most moves.
Even in the 80's it was already possible to do so if you had a tv and a good kinetic vision like MC.
So why plague him with something that implausible ?
What MC should lack is team play, strategy, build, stamina. But not something that basic.
Pretty sure Tsubasa had these basics down younger than MC, and Captain Tsubasa story was long ago.

Now, I guess not having those basics makes it impossible to use your special powers at will.

[MFauli]

So we know he doesn't have the basics yet.
But he has an incredibly good peripheral vision, probably kinetic vision too and he knows where everyone is and might be for the next 20 seconds (I use an arbitrary value here). He probably will become a clutch player.
Maybe they will make him the Larry Bird of soccer ?
But that's only by season 57 of ao ashi...

It's a little jarring they plague MC with such basic flaws when young soccer players like him all have access to tv and now the internet to watch any action in every possible detail and they can train to mimic most moves.
Even in the 80's it was already possible to do so if you had a tv and a good kinetic vision like MC.
So why plague him with something that implausible ?
What MC should lack is team play, strategy, build, stamina. But not something that basic.
Pretty sure Tsubasa had these basics down younger than MC, and Captain Tsubasa story was long ago.

Now, I guess not having those basics makes it impossible to use your special powers at will.

Tsubasa is like the Super Saiyajin of football compared to Aoi, even when we compare eachs' starting level ;>

[KrayZ33]

This guy has no control and no basics. On top of that, he is an egoistic bitch. If he has been playing for so much, you'd think he could at least control the ball properly when it comes to him
Super unfun to watch due to that because him getting "scouted" for a tryout is unbelievable.

His "special ability" is kinda stupid as well tbh because it's not something he does passively as he can be seen having no awarness of anything at all, but it's why he was scouted and he was able to explain it to the coach at the beach... so CAN he remember stuff or CAN'T he? Very inconsistent. Not to mention when he "walked" towards that one player in ep7 he was like 5 meters offside - and unless I remember it wrong, they were playing with offside (if they didn't then the defense line would've made no sense)... so the anime doesn't do a good job portraying player positions while they are playing either.

Compared to Oofuri or Haikyuu, this is pretty shit imo.

[David75]

My guess is that his special power is that he will prove unpredictable for opposing teams, but his teamates will understand how his power works and freely/naturally play its strengths.
And we'll get a 4 episode explanation of why in the end it's far better than being able to voice and think all of your actions to update your teamates, because although efficient, it makes you too predictable and easy to counter by other teams.

[MFauli]

episode 11:

congratulatons, Aoi finally learned how football works /s

man, such an unlikable main character. Wanted to punch him for the bs he said during the break in the team quarters.

At least now it seems like he's turning around to become an actual hero, but let's see how this proceeds.

[MFauli]

Episode 13:

"How to crush your student ENTIRELY" lol, this dude

Also I fucking laughed out loud at that line: "From the moment you were born (*shows scene of him as a newborn with his mother*), you were never going to become a forward!" rofl

Well, I have to admit that at least it was an interesting plot development for once. I hope Ashito doesn't just complay, but works on a way to convince the coach of letting him stay a forward. If I go fanfic a little, I'd make it so Ashito trains as a defender during regular training, but ALSO trains to be a forward at night/outside of regular training, so that at some point he'll have an amazing, epic scene where the coach is like "omg, when did he ... is that really Aoi?!"

[David75]

I'd say it's a test.
Ashito vision is so restricted by his will to be a forward that he doesn't understand much about anything else.
Playing a while as a defender will give him another point of view about how an happens and how the team reacts after a failed atempt.
Ashito's true worth isn't a forward, but a play maker organising the attack and defence, getting balls from defence and distributing them to forwards. But to do that he needs to understand how defence works, it will also improve hiw bird's eye view gift.


Regarding the comment about birth and all: destiny. Not his path in life.

[MFauli]

episode 15:

That's just me, but ... how about TELLING people about a plan instead of keeping them in the dark and psychologically torturing them? >_>

Just tell Aoi that he's supposed to become a playmaker and he'll be happy and understand.

[KrayZ33]

He is supposed to learn why things happen so they don't have to micro manage him as much in the future.
Also, his character would certainly make it worse if they told him he'd be the "playmaker".

I have no idea why a full-back is a playmaker... and since he was never allowed to attack, it means he wasn't actually the full-back in the first place. The playermaker is usually someone in the middle, which is just natural because he can decide which side the attack should start from - thus, "the playmaker".
Full back is a position that defends when the enemy has the ball and attacks when the own team has the ball.

Unless I'm mistaken but I'm pretty sure I'm not. But I guess since it was a 9v9 2 players are missing in the setup... but I'm still not sure if you can call that positon a "playmaker"

[David75]

I'd say it's a test.
Ashito vision is so restricted by his will to be a forward that he doesn't understand much about anything else.
Playing a while as a defender will give him another point of view about how an attack happens and how the team reacts after a failed atempt.
Ashito's true worth isn't a forward, but a play maker organising the attack and defence, getting balls from defence and distributing them to forwards. But to do that he needs to understand how defence works, it will also improve his bird's eye view gift.


Regarding the comment about birth and all: destiny. Not his path in life.

Somehow I commented this week's episode last week
I guess it also answers some of your questions Krayz

[KrayZ33]

Somehow I commented this week's episode last week
I guess it also answers some of your questions Krayz

But the trainer said he wants him to be a full-back. It's not "training" to get the pov down so he understands which side to attack from and what the job of a full-back is while attacking.

Unless of course it has all been a lie, which I would find to be stupid though because the lie wouldn't help anyone.

[David75]

It's not a lie.
It's a misdirection of sorts: like said before, if you tell the idiot he might become a playmaker, he will immediately think he's the new Zidane and skip important steps. It's a fact the idiot needs experience from any pov in a match, regardless of his ability that needs that kind of experience even more.

Of sorts because Fukuda probably needs a very good defender. But if the idiot overperforms, having a genius playmaker would be great too.

[MFauli]

Episode 19:

WTF, Tachibana, you hid a super cute, tanned tomboy sister WITH A FANG!