Anime: Aoki Densetsu Shoot! 4w4b50

The art and animation is poor. The art does not really distract if you are into soccer anime, since animes often have unique styles and you can get used to it given you like other parts of it. The animation suffers a lot during soccer play/games like most, if not all, soccer animes do. Movement is very unnatural. At times they want to crowd several players onto the screen making the soccer pitch seem tiny. The animation lacks variety since they keep re-using animations a lot. Aoki densetsu shoot is a lot worse than Whistle! and Hungry Heart Wild striker animationwise (I actually think Aoki densetsu shoot is worse on all parts, but most people should agree with my opinion about animation since it is not as much based on taste).

The story is okay if you like soccer anime. Overall I did not enjoy the show even if there were a few highlights. But there is one episode that is quite epic. I would recommend people to watch the first half of the series just to experience that one episode.

Aoki Densetsu Shoot

It's unfortunate that 'Legendary Blue Shot!' doesn't create a story that makes up for the overall poor quality of this older anime TV show. I don't mind the older animation style but this story and it's characters have to make up for poor quality and "Shoot" really falls short. I'd give this show a miss since there is much better out there, like the sport anime "Touch" which is old but a great anime story about baseball.

The story is mostly the viewpoint of "Toshihiko Tanaka" one of the Kakenishi golden trio for their role in making their junior high's soccer team into a force to be reckoned with. "Toshi" is a new freshman at 'Kakegawa High' and we follow him and his two best friends as they try to make it on to the regular team at Kakegawa High. Their first hurdle is be able to play against the regular players and prove that freshman should be allowed on the team as players because they are really good players.

With this great story setup 'Shoot' however fails to give you friends and a story that you can care about easily. The soccer game strategies and natural excitement of the game are done in a way that make the game less exciting than it really is. The characters are flat and predictable. The manga might provide better plotting but the anime show fails to give you the reasons to like or care about these high school freshman and their team. It all feels like a badly done copy that is trying too hard to mimic other sports shows that had great success.

Episode Seven has our heroes and their team come up against a new 'seeded' team whose coach is going to be fired if their team loses this game. This threat of losing his job is the basis for this new coach character to create a 'underhanded' strategy to keep the ball away from the best player on the Kakegawa Socccer Club team, 'Kubo' Three players are assigned to keep the ball away from the star player 'Kubo' at all times. We then see flashbacks of this away team and are shown why they didn't want to play this strategy yet they end up going along with it since their star senior player agrees to do so.

When the strategy is clearly not working the coach tells the team at half-time that it's his fault and then the female student manager interrupts to tell the team that the coach will lose his job because of backstabbing school board politics and that was why he used that underhanded strategy. This now motivates the team to play regular soccer without the triple tag team up on star player 'Kubo'

This motivation fails to make sense and if I was on that team I'd be so pissed at the coach that I'd want to fire him too. We don't see a great coach here that we want to root for betrayed by the school board, we see a man worried about his job and showing us that he is not the coach he once was and should be fired.

The story is so rushed and badly told that you have to think the manga had to be much better. Pretty typical of how the first eight shows tell the story. If this story interest you I'd suggest you read the manga and forget about the anime version.

If you like this genre of sports anime take a look at "Touch", a great story that more than made up for low production quality.

Aoki Densetsu Shoot! (Legendary Blue Shot!) or also known as just "Shoot!", is the story of Toshihiko Tanaka, Kenji Shiraishi, and Kazuhiro Hiramatsu. Three high school freshmen who have become best friends during their junior high years while playing soccer together. There they were known as the Kakenishi golden trio for their role in making Kakenishi Junior High's soccer team into a force to be reckoned with. After junior high, all of them decided to go to the same high school, Kakegawa High, a school only founded a year before, because of their star soccer player, Yoshiharu Kubo, whom they had idolized.

This young man led Kakegawa High Soccer Club to the best 8 of their prefecture in their first ever appearance with a freshmen only team almost single-handedly. He refuses offers from a number of foreign professional soccer clubs so he can stay at Kake-High to lead them to the All-Japan High School Championship. As the three of them start playing soccer for Kake-High, they experience hardships, romance, and losses on their road to becoming the best Japanese high school soccer team - a team of legends.

Aoki Densetsu Shoot! is based on the award winning manga Shoot! (1994 Kodansha best manga of the year award). The anime was based on the first series of what became a total of 4 series of Shoot! manga that covered a total of 66 volumes. Shoot! 1: 33 volumes, Shoot! 2: 5 volumes, Shoot! 3: 12 volumes, and finally Shoot! 4: 16 volumes, with the last series ending only in 2003. A live action movie was also produced in 1994 starring the famous j-pop band Smap.