There’s something special about a new anime opening that makes you want to watch it again the second it ends. Sometimes it’s the music, sometimes it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot that manga readers immediately recognize, and sometimes it’s simply seeing your favorite characters back in action. Mission Yozakura Family Season 2 Part 2 is giving fans…
There’s something incredibly exciting about watching The Apothecary Diaries expand beyond the walls of the Imperial Rear Palace. Maomao’s adventures have always been at their best when a seemingly insignificant detail turns into a much bigger mystery, and the upcoming movie, The Apothecary Diaries: The Late Lady’s Treasure, looks ready to take that formula to…
Every so often, a Weekly Shonen Jump manga gets an anime announcement that makes you stop scrolling and immediately start imagining how its best scenes will look in motion. That is exactly the reaction I had to the news that Kota Kawae’s Nue’s Exorcist, also known as Nue no Onmyouji, is getting a television anime…
Ao Ashi is the kind of soccer manga that makes you appreciate football on an entirely different level. Sure, there are spectacular goals, heated rivalries, and players who seem capable of pulling off the impossible. But what really makes Yugo Kobayashi’s series special is everything happening between those big moments: the positioning, the split-second decisions,…
There are plenty of sports anime that make football look exciting. Ao Ashi does something a little different: it makes you understand why a single step in the wrong direction can ruin an entire play. That’s what keeps me coming back to Ashito Aoi’s story. The matches are important, obviously, but the tactical details and…
Some football matches are remembered for spectacular goals. Others stick with you because of what they reveal about the players involved. In Ao Ashi, the showdown between Tokyo City Esperion FC Youth B-Team and Tokyo Musashino FC Youth A-Team manages to do both. It delivers the tension of a proper football battle while pushing several…
There is something special about a sports anime that lets its main character fail. Not because the protagonist suddenly loses a match at the last second, or because an opponent pulls off some ridiculous move nobody could have predicted, but because the character realizes that he simply isn’t good enough yet. That kind of failure…
I still think one of the smartest decisions in Ao Ashi is the moment Coach Tatsuya Fukuda tells Ashito Aoi that his future isn’t at striker. For a sports anime protagonist, that’s practically heresy. You expect the main character to become the team’s ace, score impossible goals in the final minutes, and eventually carry everyone…
Some football matches are remembered for spectacular goals. Others stick with you because they change the way you understand the game. For me, the Tokyo Musashino match in Ao Ashi belongs firmly in the second category. It takes everything the series has been building around Ashito Aoi — his stubborn personality, raw talent, and incredible…