Shoot! Goal to the Future First Impressions

“Remember this! I’m never playing soccer again! Never talk about it in front of me again!”

While I go into most reviews pretty blind, I knew just enough about Shoot! Goal to the Future to not be particularly optimistic, which is to say I knew two things about it. I knew it was an anime about soccer and I knew it was produced by EMT Squared. That didn’t instill me with a ton of confidence, and the opening of the first episode may have provided the worst first impressions I’ve had this year, assuming Skeleton Knight in Another World is disqualified from the running due to what I will euphemistically call an “offside offense.” This is an episode that approaches its subject matter with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, while taking itself way too seriously. Seriously, Ao Ashi, which premiered last season, may have a few issues, but it is a legitimately good series, so if you’re looking for a decent soccer anime, I’d recommend it a million times over before I’d recommend this. Shoot! Goal to the Future had the potential to be good, but this first episode has too many issues with writing, tone, characters, pace, and production that I can’t envision it recovering.

Shoot! Goal to the Future is a sequel to Shoot!, a manga series that ran through the 90’s into the early 2000’s. While references are made to the original manga/anime, the show is designed to stand on its own with a new cast of characters serving as the primary leads, not unlike Genshiken 2 albeit with a bit more of a time jump. Our main character is Tsuji Hideto, a high schooler who used to play soccer in middle school, but now has mental breakdowns at the mere suggestion that he play soccer. The exact cause of his trauma isn’t made clear, and my initial theory was proven false by the end of the episode. However, everything about his character reeks of capital “D” iDiocy… I mean, Drama. Even if someone died or Hideto had been publicly humiliated, I don’t think such a motive would have justified his excessive whining and aggression. Then again, no one acts naturally in this show. Most of the conflict comes about when a member of the high school soccer team, Kazama Jo, spots Hideto smirking at the team as they’re losing, and decides to confront him later. Hideto is dismissive of the sport, which only enrages Jo further, leading to him challenging Hideto to a match. The mere suggestion is enough to cause Hideto to retch, and he runs away. Everything Goal to the Future does is devoid of nuance and subtlety.

I mentioned that I’d gone into this first episode with slightly adjusted expectations given that EMT Squared, the studio behind last season’s I’m Quitting Heroing, was going to be helming this show. However, I think it’s fair to say that, even if I had no awareness of the studio, I’d have expected the worst within the first minute of the show. I referred to this episode instilling a terrible first impression, and I was not exaggerating. One of the first hints at Hideto’s trauma is provided in the opening scene where he is playing a VR game and starts ranting about how the other players weren’t backing him up. This is interspersed with brief flashbacks of soccer, but the aspect that hits the viewer out of the gate is how terribly the video game is presented. Nearly all the shots in the game are from the first person perspective, and they’re all a muddy gray mess of CGI. Again, if it wasn’t for the content warning that flew out of a woman’s cleavage in Skeleton Knight’s opening rape scene, this would be the worst opening clip of the year so far. The rest of the show’s animation isn’t bad, but it falls firmly into the average category. The structuring of its scenes seems borderline incompetent, though. The show loves to jump to flashbacks with appalling frequency, and will either refer back to a flashback we’ve already seen or to events we were shown mere minutes before. Furthermore, they confuse the sequence of events, because the show will even interrupt climactic moments so that it can cut away to a flashback.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• I was struggling to decide whether this or The Knight in the Area had a dumber first episode. For those unfamiliar, The Knight in the Area was the story of a high schooler who gets a heart transplant from his brother, and also appears to get his soccer talent. Ultimately, I think The Knight in the Area was dumber, but Shoot! Goal to the Future is worse.
• I’m not clear how much involvement the mangaka of the original work, Ooshima Tsukasa, had in the development of this sequel. I haven’t found any references to him actually working on this, and the director and writer are both relative unknowns to me.
• The team’s new coach is a former team member from the first series. The character Jo states his fandom of said team was the driving force that led him to attend that particular high school, but aside from those elements, the references remain pretty minor.