The Shrine

When Eyeshield 21 was hitting around 200 parts serialized, people are joking that it must end soon or it will be cursed by Slam Dunk and fall into oblivion. That is because Slam Dunk has set a precedent for sports manga, that if you beat the 'final boss' team/player, the sports manga must not continue, at least it must not continue in the same timeframe (can always write about X years later with no problem). If you beat Brazil in soccer, you don't write about how there's really all these teams better than Brazil that are still left in the same tournament.

Well, in ES21, the Devilbats (main team) beat the Nagas (though the manga refers to them as the God team, a not so subtle indication of their power), which is clearly designated as the last boss team. It has long been indicated that all the remaining team in the tournament will get blown out by the Nagas by a score of something like 100-0. Yet the tournament inexplicably continues to be challenging. Eyeshield 21 seems to be pride itself in being *fairly* realistic but here being realistic makes the manga far worse. This is supposed to be where you break out the 100X gravity rooms to explain why all these teams who might not even score on the Nagas are suddenly able to give a team that beat the Nagas trouble.

The quality of the manga is still good, but it can't possibly make any sense at this point. In the current bracket, whatever team the Devilbats face after the White Knights is strictly weaker than the White Knights, which means this is probably the first manga where the hero team fights progresively weaker enemies in the tournament. The sad thing is that the whole thing would make perfect sense if the order was merely reversed from Nagas -> White Knights -> Whoever to Whoever -> White Knights -> Nagas.

In the Devilbat vs Naga game, it was alluded as a game to 'challenge the Gods', and it also challenged the very rules of any fighting based manga (when has there ever been a manga where you fight the last boss and then fight the underlings?) Unfortunately while the Devilbats are victorious against the Gods in the manga, I do not think the manga itself will be victorious. People will remember Eyeshield 21 as the manga that dared to defy the heavens, and fall apart because of that.

I thought the White Knights were the final team in the tournament? They were on the opposite side of the tournament list.

The bracket right now is White Knights vs Devilbats, and Gunman vs Dinosaurs. I really don't see how this can possibly work out because we already know Gunman is far weaker than White Knights, and the Dinosaur team looks to be weaker still. I suppose they could always have the real Eyeshield 21 on the Dinosaur team but they don't have anyone that remotely looks like it'd fit that description on the team.

At the level Devilbats are playing right now, the only way White Knights would even have a chance is if Sena or Hiruma got injured. White Knights can't even stop the Shotgun plays from Gunman, and Devilbats have an even better passing game. Supposedly White Knights got an improved running game with the Ballistae play but I have a real hard time seeing anyone beating Devilbats in the running offense/defense consider the whole point of the story is that the Devilbats have the best running offense/defense (by the virtue that Sena is the best running back and capable of guarding any opposing running back). While Devilbats don't have a good passing defense, White Knights have basically no passing offense to begin with. Even with Sakuraba's inexplicable powerups running the Everest plays, I don't see how it can be worse than say against Gunman where they needed Hiruma + Monta + Sena to guard Tetsuma at the same time and still can't stop their passing. Hiruma by himself is quite capable of guarding Sakuraba if Sakuraba can't just miraclously jump out of bounds, catch a pass, and then inexplicably land back in bounds. I mean sure with the way Sakuraba plays right now he could catch a touchdown on every play against anyone by just running out of bounds at the end zone and catch a pass there because he can always land inside bounds somehow, but Eyeshield 21 has at least some respect to reality so I don't see him doing that for much longer.

I think the author didn't realize that in the process of beating Nagas, the role of the underdog is totally reversed. Right now it is the White Knights who are totally overwhelmed in every matchup against the Devilbats, but he still writes as if the Devilbats are the underdog. This game would make a lot of sense if the Devilbats cruise to a 2+ touchdown lead throughout the game, and then the White Knights used their secret Ballistae/Everest plays at the end to catch up. At least then it might be believeable that there is a sense of urgency. Right now the White Knights already used all their secret plays and are only up 6-3. For story purposes they'll probably score another touchdown or 3 before Hiruma finds a way to stop the Ballistae/Everest plays but there is really 0 suspense at this point because White Knights used up all their secret plays and Devilbats, for once, starts out as the better team. It doesn't matter that Devilbats will most likely win by 1 point on the last second again. The outcome of this can only be a Devilbat blowout no matter how much the author tries to make it exciting.