PASS: A DRUDGE STORY
1/10 or 10/10?
*FULL SPOILERS*
One's enjoyment of this anime will completely depend upon the lens used to view it. The story begins with delinquents perhaps in their late teens or early twenties bullying elementary school children and preventing them from playing futsal. A skilled high school player shows up and challenges them for rights to the court. Shortly thereafter a professional break-dancer arrives via crashed bicycle to join in against the delinquents. He beams with confidence touting 0 experience and 100% obsession with the sport. For whatever reason, the bullies agree to this instead of just beating them up. These dudes have no issue harassing 7-year-olds, why not fight teenagers? Anyway, the "heroes" defeat the delinquents. They relinquish the court but slash the break-dancer’s tires on their way out.
At the end of the day, the leader of the delinquents shows up, who happens to be a 30-year-old man in stiff jeans and leather jacket. He starts calling out the futsal team claiming they "gave it to his boys and he's here for payback". A passing student, who turns out to be the best character later, asks what his revenge plans are. The blunt answer is, "a futsal match", as if the question was stupid. So now we have these clear adult gangsters playing a futsal match against high school freshman and sophomores as a means of exacting vengeance for...losing earlier...If you are entertained by the absurdity of the premise when this is in no way a parody show, then definitely start watching.
Now these adults don't change into sports attire like the futsal boys. Yeah, the entire team is now participating in this farce. The captain decides to take responsibility for 2 freshmen who he’d not known previously and joined the team 10 minutes ago. These goons have little skill and simply resort to aggressiveness/cheating. You're following right - some degenerate adults called out high schoolers in order to defend their honor on the futsal court, but somehow cheating doesn't conflict with their code. The ref watches impotently as the team captain tells him to ignore the fouls. The ethics are all over the place. Futsal boys manage to squeeze out a victory utilizing the break-dancer’s precision hand spin kick into the goal. Since this rivalry reflected villains of a children's cartoon, I expected this hilarious matchup to continue, but the gang is never seen again T.T
Again, if the plot seems dumb to you so far, don't worry the players are equally dumb. Break-dancer, whom I will refer to as Red from here on, is OBSESSED with futsal. It's all he wants to do, he falls asleep with “Futsal Magazine”, and futsal games on TV. Guess how many professional players he knows. One. He created this fantasy where he competes against a single pro, who is also in high school, despite having not played the sport before and...not knowing any rules. Apparently Red has the learning capacity of a goldfish.
He isn’t alone in his idiocy, however, as the skilled prodigy mentioned at the beginning doesn’t know HOW TO PASS. He shall now be known as Blue. We see an example of his pass into the corner and it’s a good 5 body lengths in front of the recipient rocketing out of bounds. The captain (Green), who spent the entire summer training in Spain, decides it’s for the good of the team to not utilize his own skills and force people into positions they’re not good at. He moves his second-year home boy(Yellow), who was the main play setter, into goal and makes Blue take his spot. We literally see Blue reading a Passing For Dummies knock off later that day. He can’t figure out that drilling the ball as hard as possible out of bounds is bad. He explicitly states, “I can’t do it.” Green is committed to his stupid plan despite being an otherwise totally reasonable human being. Guess how many episodes it takes to resolve this team chemistry issue. The entire season. Any other popular sports anime, you see progress within the first couple episodes. I can’t even say it's resolved by the finale. It like happens once successfully and Blue dives full force into the metaphysics of his pass. Anyway, let’s go back to their second practice where Green says, “Oops, there’s a tournament…TOMORROW.”
Another important character not mentioned thus far is Silver. He’s a little dude rocking a side-pony tail and was known as Wittle Dragon or something because of his signature shot where he leaps 15 feet in the air to kick a lob from himself. He’s flamboyant and energetic much like Red, but he actually knows the fundamentals of the sport. Recognizing that Yellow is a noob in goal, he wants to recruit someone who used to be on his team. Here’s where we get the best drama of the show. Silver approaches a tall blonde beefcake with earrings named Taiga. He’s working solo at a French restaurant, so he’s 15 and probably a Michelin star chef. I’m guessing he has multiple dependents be it siblings and/or children since he’s the man. Silver attempts to recruit him, but Taiga tells him he will never put gloves on again. Finally, some mysterious backstory I can bite my teeth into!
Sadly, we move to the tournament with Taiga supervising his restaurant, but then meet the most ridiculous character of the show. For the record, there aren’t adults anywhere. The only adults we’ve seen are gangsters who bully children. The stands are full of other high school students. The announcer for the tournament is this creep show rocking Harajuku fashion named “Hurricane”. He knows all this personal information about EVERYBODY, including what they did in middle school. He has no references since he’s just standing in the middle of the stadium with only a mic. He even knows the names of their special moves, which are basically regular shots but from an outer space backdrop, but half the characters don’t shout them out. He had to either ask these boys about it or more likely stalk them. There hasn’t been a clearer pedophile since Hisoka licked his chops watching Gon in Hunter x Hunter.
The tournament is going poorly. Red is all excited running around like a buffoon still not knowing the rules. Blue passes once to fan 50 ft. out of bounds then gets mad nobody received it. Yellow is getting owned in goal since he’s never played before and was forced into it. Green thinks his plan is still brilliant and again stands around passively despite spending all of time training internationally. Silver is praying for Taiga to change his mind, so we get to see what happened in the past. Silver is dribbling and about to shoot when the opponent flagrantly fouls him. The wipe out is straight up ragdoll simulator. The initial impact is on his THROAT. He for sure would’ve snapped his neck and then he rolls over hard bending his spine the wrong way before rotating 5 more times in 2 seconds. It was obscene, for sure manslaughter. Silver starts holding his knee like that was somehow the focus of his injuries. Taiga comes out of the goal to call him on his nonsense. THEN THIS KID INSULTS SILVER FOR BEING SOFT. Bruh. It was attempted manslaughter and then he has the gaul to throw shade on the victim. Taiga takes his gloves off and beats the shit out of this fool. He’s somehow the only one ejected from the game. His team’s reaction is to ostracize him for coming to blows. It makes no sense whatsoever. Taiga swears to never put his gloves on again because of the unearned shame thrust upon him.
Mid-tournament, one of the opponents lightly trips Silver, and comically says, “Oops.” The animators decide to reuse this horrendous wipe out over a minor tap for some reason. Fortunately, Taiga telepathically senses Silver’s injury because we unofficially view a romantic relationship between Taiga and Silver. SO he abandons his Michelin restaurant despite no other staff present and rushed to the tournament with gloves in hand. Yellow is subbed out immediately since he’s trash in net and Taiga blocks a shot by transforming into a lightning tiger and jumping 20 ft. in the air, well above the net. If he had simply stood still this shot would’ve missed by a mile, but we had to see how good Taiga is and what better way than to catch a wild miss?
Anyway, that’s the whole show. Red manages to learn 1 other pro player’s name. We waste 9 more episodes with Blue as the focus moaning about passing. He switches back and forth between not understanding how to pass and straight up refusing to pass. Green decides to put in moderate effort in the final tournament for the first time. There’s random fan service in the middle, I think? The players go to the beach and have a BBQ, but they’re all mostly clothed still. There’s an entire team of models that anybody would be insane to like. Taiga is the only one who does and says awesome things. The special shots go down in quality. There’s a striker duo who uses a skill called “Twinkle Twinkle” and it’s literally them running up field sending obvious basic passes back and forth with a galactic backdrop. Given the idiots trying to stop them, I buy it being unstoppable there. Maybe the most reprehensible special shot is called “Rose” and the dudes just punts it from the opposite goal with rose pedals exploding out. It speeds straight by everyone into the net and nobody even moves. Why? Even dumber, his teammates point out, “Wow, haven’t seen him break that out since challenging squad x.” Also, why? If you have a shot with no conditions that automatically scores from anywhere, why are you waiting? Other anime will also establish how taxing such an ability is or something. This guy just doesn’t bother using it?
The execution of characters, plot, and futsal are so abysmal that it circles around and becomes entertaining. I would recommend watching this with friends where you can criticize everything together or perhaps while inebriated. It’s a learning experience. You’ll need to pinch yourself to make sure it’s real.
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