…anyway. The weirdness here is probably all intentional in order to draw the audience in. After that the plot starts to kick in, like it did in R+V. It seems we’re joining the Ghost Bureau and adventures await. How very Japanese, in mangas you always join a bureau. No to loners!

…well, if we don’t go too far on that route, let’s see what happens when Kai ”enters” our heroine. Well, she gains an outfit, powers and… Kai becomes A BLOODY CARTOON SCYTHE!!?? 😳

However, on tankōbon the reading direction is OK and works well (thankfully). Other weirdness: the main guy Kai is a lolicon and repeatedly tells our heroine Chloé that he wants to enter her body. Uhh-huhh… 😑 It’s almost like this was a metaphor for something else! 🫢

As in Rosario + Vampire, the art is pretty slick. Saiké is good at drawing the split-seconds of action and letting the reader’s eye fulfill the movement. This is of course standard practise in fight mangas, but this series has also a couple of fun decisions…

I wasn’t able to take a good video of the wall in action, but it was impressive on site.

All in all, the manga is very nice! I’m wondering if it is even better than YLiA… 🤔 The matches are exciting and the characters are great. Have a hearty recommendation, duckies! 👏 (Duckies is a pretty fun choice of words. Seems to show up often in Kodansha’s publications…)

But football is not everything. One fun part of the series shows that Soshizaki is quite an otaku for anime series inside the series: Heartthrob Kaikoku.

The manga also goes deep into the football tactics + there are many real-world references. Learning about those gave me more appreciation for the sport, and it was refreshing that tactics also affected the game enough that it wasn’t only a few genius players battling each other.

The story also looks at girls’ football as a phenomenon through the eyes of two Warabi coaches: a bored but skillful tactician Fukatsu and a former superstar player Nōmi. They have more good banter about the sport during the later part of the series.

As is tradition, the manga is as much about girls playing the game as what the game means to the girls.

They meet a lots of other soccer enthusiast girls in the team, and then it’s game time! Arakawa’s kinetic and expressive art brings the game really close to the reader. You can almost feel the kicks!

This is a sports manga about girls’ association football that begins when promising athletes Soshizaki and Suo go to the same high school and join a fledgling high school team, the Warabis.