Now I'll be honest, I never watched the original Inzauma Eleven anime so I came into this show kinda blind. While you can get through this show like that, I think some things were lost on me. Mainly they mention characters from the series before quite a lot. While the story mostly holds up even if you don't know who they are, it's still kinda confusing and well I'm willing to bet less dramatic. I ended up having to google some names and reading the Inzauma wiki while watching the show at least three or four times just because I felt out of the loop.
The show itself has the most zany over the top presentation, where soccer is literally the most powerful force on Earth. A bit like Yu-Gi-Oh, everything seems to revolve around and is resolved by games of soccer. The over the top moves and actions made the show lots of fun but the show is really repetitive. Which is perhaps the greatest flaw of it.
Sports animes have a certain partern. Start out weak, win a game, recruit new members, train, win another game, etc etc. And on top of that shonen battle mangas; which this series emulates so much with the over the top powers; are quite repetitive as well with constantly growing powers and new enemies. And oh boy let's not forget how every game in the series is a come from behind victory with a motivational speech somewhere in the middle.
But with Go all these things didn't really matter too much and the show still ended up being pretty entertaining. The theme song starting up whenever the characters make a big speech in the game and start turning around the score, the new powers they unleash, their friendship wining out at the end of the day. This was all good fun, even if it wasn't anything too special or warranted.
I really liked the ending of the show where the main cast won the last game with just their techniques and their love for soccer against a whole team of Avatar users. Avatars being the new powers introduced in Go and ended up being an end all be all for quite a few games in the series. So it was refreshing to see the final game won not because the cast has Avatars but because they grew strong together as a team with their love for soccer.
The final two episodes of the series really were a bust though. The second-to-last being a recap of the whole show and the last being a recap of important events from the original Inzuma. The last episode still baffles me since really this recap would of been much more useful during the show when new comers had no idea about all these old characters. All in all though, I found this show lots of fun. I'll write about its Sequel show Inazuma Eleven Go: Chrono Stone some time in the future.
