Days

The best anime ever. You will never see something of this quality again. What do you want? Suspense? Sadness? Happiness? Romance? Passion? It has it all. It is a unique story.
This anime changed the life, not just mine, of Japanese football.
Perfectly developed characters, quality seiyus, 1st level animation.
And it is not cliché at all.
Tsukushi Tsukamoto is the best character of all. You love him from the first second of the first chapter.
I write this with tears of emotion falling from my eyes. They have to release the 2nd season RIGHT NOW.
Eternally grateful to the best anime ever.

I think there's a lot of merit to judging an anime not on what it tells you, but what it shows you. Days, an anime about football, or American Soccer as it's called in the rust belt, wants to tell me that football is an exciting daring sport where any boy, beefy or lanky, can play his heart out. However, the message it shows is that football is a boring sport only Europeans could love. What's far, far more important is boys' love.

Look, there's only two reasons why anyone watches sports anime: to watch hot muscle boys fight each other, and to watch hot ... boys almost kiss each other. This anime flat out fails at the first and somewhat performs on the second. If there's a second season, we need more boys falling awkwardly on top of each other and looking into each others eyes. It's a football game, it should be happening like every other minute already.

You'll be too busy keeping a tally of the times the main characters almost kiss to notice anything about the sound design or the artistic direction. I can't even remember very much about the actual sports matches, and sometimes you'll see a football in the screen and think "Why is this in my Boys' Love anime? Is it supposed to symbolize something?" and then remember that this is supposed to be a sports anime.

This succeeds at being an anime. I can honestly praise it enough for that, and I probably have already praised it too much. I'd suggest watching this anime if you want to lose interest in football forever and make a transition to a sport less humiliating like lacrosse. I'd also suggest watching this if you're into boys' love because, boy oh boy, there's a lot of boy action in this anime.

Do you remember that family guy joke, where the truck with chocolate crashes into the truck with peanut butter, and makes reeses peanut butter cups? Stop watching family guy, throw out your football, pick up a lacrosse butterfly net and watch this anime.

This show is so cringe-worthy. I feel I should spoil it to save people the trouble from watching it.

Jaded soccer "genius" spots a momma's boy and apparently decides to pass the time by introducing him to soccer, cause apparently there's merit in bringing a "good guy" into soccer/football (genius is a closet momma's boy). Nevermind the fact physical sports are where alpha personalities and big egos clash to enforce superior social standing above others through displays of athleticism...

So basically this sheltered momma's boy is not only a complete beginner, but also is a complete idiot. His stupidity doesn't tell him that he has no business ... being in the sport; the opposite happens, he determines it to be his calling. He does show that he has tenacity, probably the only redeeming trait that allows others to tolerate him. Seeing this soccer newbie enjoy the smallest things somehow reignites the passion in the no-longer-jaded soccer "genius", and the school soccer team goes on to become a force to be reckoned with.

Rather than being bullied by the alpha guys, he's bullied by a single girl, and everyone treats it as normal. The girl even gets involved by becoming a manager.

The show *forces* this boy into being given air time whenever possible, and prepare to cringe from watching how people react to him. Apparently, his simple-mindedness resonates with muscle-heads, and they sort of create a weird kind of rivalry that accelerates the progress of the momma's boy, evolving him into a freak that poses some sort of unconventional threat.

I don't like the cringe feeling, but I'm not disgusted for some reason, and end up continuing to watch. I know I can drop a high school romance the moment a cringe-worthy awkward moment pops up, but I can't figure out WTF is up with this show that got me to continue. Well, on the plus side, this anime helps set the lowest standard in anime that I could actually complete watching.