All Out!! Review: The Rugby Manga Where the Smallest Body and the Biggest Body Need Each Other

When I was a kid I was the smallest one in my class, and in every gym class I learned the same lesson over and over: there are sports for bodies like mine, and there are sports that just laugh at them. I gave up on team sports early because of that. So the very first chapter of All Out!! hit me somewhere old and tender. A 159cm first-year named Gion Kenji discovers a sport where being small isn't a disadvantage to apologize for — it's a position. Nobody tells him to grow. They tell him where to stand.

I came to this one expecting another shonen "small kid with big dreams" story. What I got was something gentler and more honest: a manga that genuinely believes a team is built out of the specific shapes of the people in it, not in spite of them. By the second volume I wasn't reading it for the matches. I was reading it because I wanted to be on that team.

Quick Take

• A high school rugby manga that treats body diversity as the actual structure of the sport — there's a position for every build, and the story means it
• Gion's fury and Iwashimizu's fear are mirror images, and the friendship between them is the emotional spine of all 17 volumes
• Age rating: T (Teen) — rugby is a contact sport and injuries matter to the plot, but nothing here is gratuitous

Story Overview

Gion Kenji arrives at Kanagawa Prefectural Jinko High School short, loud, and tired of being treated like a child. On his first day he runs into Iwashimizu Sumiaki — 190cm, soft-spoken, hanging around the rugby club but not playing — and gets pulled into a casual game that sells him on rugby's one irresistible truth: whoever has the ball is the main character. He joins on the spot.

Jinko's rugby club is not a powerhouse. It's a struggling team kept alive by two third-years: captain Sekizan Takuya, who plays number eight and carries an intensity the whole roster orbits around, and vice-captain Hachioji Mutsumi, the gentle "team mom" who personally recruited half the club — including Sekizan himself, whom he wore down over months and finally lured in with taiyaki. The series follows this team through brutal training and the Kanagawa prefectural preliminaries, where the prize is a spot at Hanazono, the national tournament.

The turning points are the matches that refuse to be clean wins. The game against Hiratsuka Gakuin — a slick, pretty-boy team that isn't above playing dirty and baits Jinko into early penalties — is where the series stops being a feel-good recruitment story and starts asking what these boys are actually made of. Gion has to learn that aggression without discipline gives points to the other side. And underneath every match runs Iwashimizu's slow, halting climb back toward being able to hit someone at full strength.

Characters

Gion Kenji — 159cm, instantly enraged by the word "short," and converted into a flanker. His size is never magically fixed; the manga's whole point is that it doesn't need to be. His arc is learning that his real value to the team isn't just speed — it's that his refusal to back down drags better rugby out of everyone around him, once he learns to aim it.

Iwashimizu Sumiaki — 190cm, plays lock, and is the most carefully drawn character in the book. In his third year of middle school he broke a teammate named Miyuki's shoulder in a practice match before the prefectural finals, and the guilt gutted him. He quit rugby for about half a year. He recovered from the incident long after Miyuki recovered from the injury, because the wound was in his head. His arc across the series is the agonizing, non-linear work of being able to use his own body without flinching — of learning that holding back isn't kindness, it's a different way of letting the team down.

Sekizan Takuya — The third-year captain and number eight, the strongest player in the club and the one with the most overwhelming presence. He leads by sheer demanding example, keeps his thoughts to himself, and sets a standard the team isn't good enough to meet yet — which is exactly the point of him. He's the model of what it costs to carry a team that hasn't earned its confidence.

Hachioji Mutsumi — Vice-captain and the emotional glue. His teammates call him the team mom, and it's earned: Gion, Sekizan, and others are all on this roster because Hachioji refused to stop asking. He's the proof that recruiting a team is its own kind of heroism.

What I Love About It

The position system, and the way the manga turns it into a philosophy. Rugby has fifteen positions, each with its own physical demands — and Amase builds the whole story on the idea that this is a feature, not trivia. Gion's smallness makes him a flanker. Iwashimizu's height makes him a lock. Sekizan's mass makes him the number eight. Nobody on this field is asked to be a different kind of person than they already are. The team is literally assembled out of mismatched bodies that only work because they're mismatched.

That landed on me hard, and it's why I rate this above most sports manga even though it never got a flashy English print run. So many sports stories quietly teach that you win by overcoming your limitations — by becoming taller, faster, more like the ideal athlete. All Out!! teaches the opposite: you win by finding the one place on the field where your specific limitation is actually the requirement. For a kid who spent gym class being told his body was wrong, reading a story that says "no, your body is a position" is something close to medicine. The rugby itself is drawn with real tactical clarity — you can actually follow why each player is where they are — but it's that underlying belief that makes the matches mean something.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The Iwashimizu material is what stays with me. Knowing the full reason he hesitates — that he once put a teammate's shoulder out of commission and then spent half a year unable to touch the sport — recolors every moment he pulls a tackle short or steps back from contact. So when the story finally puts him in a competitive match and he stops protecting everyone, including himself, and commits to a hit at full strength, it isn't a power-up. It's a man letting go of a guilt he's been carrying since middle school. The page doesn't read as "he got stronger." It reads as "he finally forgave himself enough to stop holding back," and the team becomes something more than it was the instant he does. I've reread that arc more than any single match in the series.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Body diversity isn't a theme bolted on — it's the structural premise of the entire sport and story
• Iwashimizu's trauma arc is patient, non-linear, and emotionally honest
• The Gion/Iwashimizu friendship — small and furious, huge and fearful — is one of sports manga's best complementary pairs
• Rugby is explained clearly enough that you need zero prior knowledge

Cons

• It can slow noticeably between match arcs
• Some of the positional and tactical explanation is dense if you just want the emotional beats
• Rugby is a niche sport in the West, so it never got the mainstream English push it deserved — that's either a barrier or a hidden-gem appeal depending on you

Is All Out!! Worth Reading?

Yes — especially if you've ever felt like your body was the wrong shape for the room. It's a complete 17-volume story (in both Japanese and English) with a clear thesis, two of the most complementary leads in the genre, and a rugby framework you can follow from a standing start. It drags a little between matches and leans technical, but the payoff in the Iwashimizu and Gion arcs is worth the patience.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How All Out!! Differs
Haikyu!!	Volleyball; height as the central obstacle to overcome	All Out!! treats every body type as a position rather than a problem to beat
Eyeshield 21	American football; comedic, high-energy role specificity	All Out!! is quieter and more psychological, centered on guilt and self-acceptance
Slam Dunk	Basketball; a delinquent builds a team from nothing	All Out!! splits its heart between a furious small lead and a gentle giant terrified of his own strength

Official English Translation Status

Kodansha Comics published the complete series in English — all 17 volumes are available, primarily digitally. The English release is finished, so you can read the whole story start to end.

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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