English Dub Review: Aoashi: “EAGLE EYE”

Overview: Aoi (Ciaran Strange), Asari (Mitchell Stephens) and Kuroda (Ry McKeand) finally begin to find their footing as they improve their game. 

Our Take: It is incredible how many things we can block form our mind or filter out soon after it enters as unnecessary information. Seeing that aspect in Aoi goes to show how much of a selfish player he was in never really listening to his team’s strategies in practice games. Utilizing team tactics shows how fast of a learner he is, much to everyone’s amazement, in seemingly mastering the triangle strategy instantaneously, scoring goals with Asari and Kuroda.  

Ashito processing his ultra instinct is amazingly ridiculous in its concept but awesome to see unfold. Although, what makes it feel more grounded is the logical way his other teammates point out the absurdity of such a technique, while never fully ruling it out in his phenomenally learning, memorization of all his teammates positions and predicting what they will do along with their opponents. The extraordinary nature of Aoi’s eagle eyed power being akin to that of crows, along with the team’s commentary, adds to superhuman theatricality of his power. Crows actually speaking to one another about human limitations, and the spectacular outlier in Aoi, is charmingly wacky yet cool and stylistic with such a mundane animal having almost spiritualistic essence and abilities. Aoi’s progress, thankfully, has him finding a nice balancing act in terms of progress in being a team player but still maintaining his goal oriented playing as well. 

Aoi’s mending fences with Asari and Kuroda is sweet as all hell, especially in how shy they all are. What makes it even more adorable is the ever bright and friendly Tachibana advocating for it so enthusiastically, and honestly more mature than most boys at that age. Anri Kaido leaves Aoi with an intriguing task of using his amazing analyzation skill on popular up and coming player, Kuribayashi, and seeing what he can glean from that task. Kuribayashi and his incredible skill has been teased before so it will be interesting to see what all the hubbub is about surrounding him and his gifts.