Those who dive into Eyeshield 21 and stick with it will most certainly have a nice payoff and will remember the series for years to come. Eyeshield 21 has such a wonderful story, good pacing and length, well developed and in depth characters, and fantastic art style that whether or not the viewer likes football is irrelevant. That fact alone often turns people away usually because they are not interested in sports and understandably assume a manga about sports would be uninteresting. It's a shining example of what sports shonen, and shonen in general, can be when it tries.Įyeshield 21 is a sports manga that focuses on high school students and American football. I would recommend trying it out to just about anyone, including the people who aren't normally predisposed towards manga. Not that Eyeshield is just decent - it's consistently hilarious, thrilling, and a whole lot of fun. High-schoolers passionately fighting tooth-and-nail over one inch of turf isn't going to get old anytime soon. Coming-of-age stories have been selling since forever for a reason, and the basic formula needs only to be applied correctly to produce a decent piece. Just because it's common doesn't mean it's a weak one. Secondly, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE BASIC FORMULA. Firstly, you can expect the Devilbats to lose quite a bit, and not just in the introductory chapters to their eternal rival. His team gets stronger with him in it and goes on to compete at high levels. The basic plot of Eyeshield itself is standard fare weak, bullied kid (Sena Kobayakawa) with hidden talent gets forced into a sport and ends up liking it. What's more, they often don't work, giving an added thrill of uncertainty to each play. This guy comes up with the most outlandish trick plays which are usually a surprise, totally outlandish, and always fun to watch. Possibly the best part of this manga is how the player confrontations are set up by a diabolical mastermind of a man, Hiruma Youichi, a gun nut with dirt on half the world's population. Odds are most, if not all, people will be able to find at least one character whose background they sympathize with.Īnd there are mindgames. The cast is, in addition to being in the triple-digits, extremely diverse backstory-wise, ranging from a kicker who quit his team to help his father's business to a tall reciever who's good and popular, but failing to catch up to the true genius superstar of his own team. This effectively splits up screentime among a truly massive cast in a way which neither weakens the mains nor benches the non-mains. We get lots of different individual, small group, and large group confrontations throughout any given game, which makes up for the fact that a game may go on for 20-30 chapters. 22 players, though, are a bit much to focus on at one time, and this manga acknowledges that, focusing only on small portions of the playing field at any given time. As a result, you always have characters other than just the mains in play, being far from useless. Football is a large sport, requiring 11 players on each side, each with a different distinct role.
I have a lot of praise for the way the sport being played is used in ES21. The American Football played in Eyeshield 21 is an interesting and ultimately successful combination of the two formulas, mixing the group dynamics of a genuine team with lots of hard-on action. The downside with teamwork sports manga is that it can sometimes feel like competition-lite, and it lacks the quantity of guts displayed in martial sports. At the very least, the main team of a team sports manga will haveĪ lot of fleshed-out players. The teamwork sports manga (featuring baseball, basketball, etc.) usually sport a large, well-developed cast. This type of sports manga also often suffers from overemphasis of the main character and weak side characters who only serve to show how awesome the lead is by comparison. The martial sports manga (featuring boxing, judo, etc.) usually sport characters with grit and guts struggling against one another. Sports manga in general (with a few notable exceptions) branch off into two main groups - the martial group and the teamwork group.
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