Rematch is quickly becoming one of my favorite games of 2025, despite it still feeling a smidge like it’s in early access. The choice to transform the fantasy of playing football (soccer for the American folks!) from the traditionally tactical experience seen in most other football games into more of a high-action, mechanically complex throwdown with an emphasis on pulling off acrobatic plays and heroic saves is very cool. It’s led to incredibly rewarding moments and crushing defeats, and riding the wave of those two extremes is a big reason why I enjoy games like Rocket League or Apex Legends. It’s also why I love Blue Lock, a manga/anime often cited in comparison to Rematch.
“We did see A LOT of players referencing Blue Lock, more than we expected, actually!” Rematch creative director Pierre Tarno told me via email. “We didn’t really know it was so popular–it wasn’t a major inspiration for the game, though internally some of us do enjoy both manga and anime!”
For the unfamiliar, Blue Lock is about 300 Japanese high school football players getting locked away in a black site training facility overseen by the mysterious mastermind Jinpachi Ego. Ego tells the group they’ll be put through a series of trials, all in hopes of honing one of them into the world’s best striker–someone so egotistical that they’d sacrifice Japan’s irresponsible emphasis on teamwork to selfishly score goals no matter what and lead the Japan national team to victory. The other 299 failures will never be allowed to play on any Japan team again, ending their football careers in the country.
A lot (and I do mean, a lot) of what you can do in Rematch is similar to what characters do in Blue Lock (who themselves are written to emulate the flashiest, most well-remembered traits of famous football players, turned up to 11). Like Meguru Bachira, you can master dribbling and fast step-overs to cut through the defense single-handed, only passing the ball to teammates who challenge your imagination of what you can do. Like Seishirō Nagi, you can pull off skillful ball takedowns and utilize misdirection, ball control, and acrobatic flair to become a goal-scoring genius. And like Shōei Barō, you can intercept passes meant for teammates (or outright take the ball from them while they’re trying to dribble), scoring the goal yourself to steal the show as the match’s heel. The opening cinematic of Rematch might highlight the opposite values, but the mechanics of the game allow you to play with ego.
Even the rules and setting of Rematch emulate Blue Lock–one of the earliest (and fan-favorite) arcs focuses on 3v3, 4v4, and 5v5 match-ups where every player is trying to score, there are no off-sides, and the high-tech facility that all the players are contained in verges on futuristic.
A quick search for “Rematch Blue Lock” will reveal a ton of clips on TikTok and YouTube of people emulating the manga/anime by doing something really cool solo and not passing the ball to their teammates, even when the entire defense collapses upon them. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve been up against or playing alongside someone who has used the character creator to make their player incredibly pale-skinned with short, stark-white hair and a black uniform sporting number 11 (like Nagi), or to give their tan-skinned player dark, medium-length hair with dyed yellow tips and a blue uniform with number 8 (like Bachira).
Obviously, not every person playing Rematch is doing so because they like Blue Lock. I’m sure most of them are like Richard Wakeling, who reviewed Rematch for GameSpot, and came to Rematch because they loved playing the sport in real life (or are just fans of Sloclap’s work!). But there is clearly a not-insignificant portion of the playerbase that is jumping into Rematch to embrace their egotistical Blue Lock fantasies and play the hero of the match who scores all the cool goals or pulls off clip-worthy dribbling.
And yet, despite all those clear parallels, Rematch is not developer Sloclap’s attempt to emulate Blue Lock. It’s not the team’s attempt to emulate really any singular story centered around football.
“The setting and art direction really came from the pillars of the game, rather than from specific pieces of media,” Tarno said. “Rematch is a game about the joy of playing football with your friends, about how individual talent is necessary but never sufficient, and at the end of the day, it’s the collective that matters. The focus on teamplay and positive sportsmanship is what drove our choices on setting and art direction: a colorful, positive vision of the future.”
Sloclap is hoping Rematch has a positive future itself, and the team is already working on updates to the game beyond the soon-to-come cross-play.
“Emergent strategies and mechanics started appearing [during the beta], but they consolidated during launch week,” Tarno said. “Most of them are valid and should not be removed, but one exploit we’ll be removing is the ‘dolphin jump,’ in which players exploit the outfield dive to move faster even when they’ve run out of stamina. We’re considering advanced ways that could be used to optimize movement speed and stamina usage, but this one looks really weird and will be removed!”
Much like other online multiplayer games that came before it, Rematch is evolving as more players jump in, and Sloclap has noted that its vision of Rematch may change to match players’ expectations. That probably doesn’t mean a Blue Lock crossover is coming (but we live in a post-Fortnite world, so who knows), but other aspects of the game are changing to reflect a shift in focus–such as the way 5v5 has ceased to be the “standard” mode, despite Sloclap setting it up to be the default way to play ranked matches.
“The initial vision we had for the game was a 5v5 experience, which features more tactical configurations, more challenge in making precise passes, and [more development of] your vision of the game dynamics,” Tarno said. “The 3v3 game mode is very popular, however, and we’re seeing a lot of players requesting a 3v3 ranked queue, so it’s really a matter of taste for players.”
On that, I agree with the herd. I know Sloclap wants 5v5 to be the experience for Rematch, but the game feels a lot more tactical and strategic when played on the tighter 3v3 and 4v4 fields, and it’s easier for the player who’s keeper/sweeper to call out the action, stay engaged, and feel useful on the smaller field.
Maybe just give the keeper the ability to pull off a last-ditch shachihoko fish kick to save the ball like Blue Lock’s Gin Gagamaru? That would be cool!
