This is the story of a young man, and a young woman, who meet each other on a train. The boy, Makoto Ito, has found himself unable to tear his eyes away from a beautiful girl he sees every day on his way to school. He’s attracted to her heart, which is of course why he keeps staring at her chest. Little does he know that after a while, this girl... Katsura Kotonoha... notices him admiring her, and is flattered by the attention. They develop an attraction to each other from afar, but neither has the courage to step forward... And that’s where Sekai Saionji comes in. Makoto’s friend from class, Sekai encourages Makoto to approach Kotonoha and make his feelings known, and after Kotonoha accepts his confession, she even coaches them on their relationship... But she’s also harboring a secret. She also has feelings for Makoto, and when his relationship with Kotonoha starts to move too slowly for him, he notices. So begins a love triangle that will turn all of their lives upside down, as it slowly becomes clear that the journey they’ve embarked on isn’t actually a love story... It’s a horror story.
School Days was produced by TNK, a studio I’ve actually run into several times before, and their output... Well, let’s just say they don’t have a great track record. They mostly do ecchi work, and while they’ve dabbled in sci-fi and fantasy concepts, their work still falls largely into the same label. They’ve had their fingers in the pots of countless other studio’s productions, but out of the titles I’ve been able to find credited mainly to them, their best looking property is probably Highschool DXD, and while DXD isn’t necessarily a bad looking show, animation and over-all visuals are not among it’s strongest attributes. Still, compared to UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie, Wandaba Style and arguably the ugliest season of the already consistently ugly Ikki Tousen, and with even their most recent productions looking over-produced and squicky despite their improved budgets, High School DXD is probably their magnum opus.
Unfortunately, I’m not reviewing DXD today, I’m reviewing School Days, and if TNK didn’t boast such an impressive array of cheap looking anime, I’d call it a contender for their worst production. You’ve probably heard the term ‘shoestring budget’ before? I’ve seen actual shoestrings that looked more expensive than this anime. It was originally based on a visual novel, and while I can’t find any confirmation of this, I would not be surprised if the anime was made for the specific purpose of advertising it’s source material. I’ve seen cases like that before, with one particularly memorable example being the first Hellsing anime. If this is the case, then it would explain a lot of the more questionable direction choices throughout the course of the series, as the visual novel did have a few infamous quirks to it that I could see this anime trying to introduce people to.
Either way, this is a butt-ugly show. The color palette is dull and muted, playing mostly with black, shades of brown and dark blue, and any other color that shows up feels like it’s being dragged down and transitioned into the dullest form of itself. The character designs are generic to the point that if I wanted to, I could recreate every single named character in Kisekae in less than 20 minutes. I probably will, too, because projects like that(with export codes included) tend to blow up hard on Deviantart. On-screen movement is extremely limited, with characters freezing in place during conversations and only slightly shifting their posture every other sentence or so, and these key frames linger way too long so that when someone’s face or body goes off model, you’re forced to stare at it in all it’s scuffed glory. There are occasional budget spikes, like in any low budget anime, but it never reaches a level higher than ‘barely competent.’
The music is slightly better, by virtue of the fact that there really isn’t much of it, and none of it’s particularly annoying. The situational music is as bouncy as it would be in any other slice of life anime, but it keeps a low volume and stays in the background where it’s barely noticed. What’s not so easy to ignore are the piano tunes that play during the more somber scenes, and they’re actually pretty good for what they are. The opening is aggressively generic(both the song and it’s cliche-filled video) but the insert songs are surprisingly fire. There is the obvious choice, a song from episode 12 that I guarantee you won’t be able to listen to without imagining the scene it was attached to, but there’s also a slew of awesome ending themes that I’d honestly recommend checking out. There’s no English dub, and while even my ignorant monolingual ass can tell there are some really bad performances in the original sub, I lack the experience or knowledge to critique them, so let’s just move on.
Why am I even talking about School Days? What is there left to say about it? You know it. You might not have seen it, but you know it by it’s reputation. You know what happens in it. You know how it ends, and you know damn well it’s one of the most infamously panned anime of all time. It’s been torn to shreds by everyone and their grandmother, and the nicest thing anyone ever says about it is that it’s ‘so bad it’s good,’ or ‘the ending saves it.’ That ending, by the way, is without a doubt more famous than the show itself. I bet most of you have said at one point or another, “What was the name of that one show with the nice boat?”
Two years into my old anime blog, I attempted to review this show. It was going to be a gag review, pretending it was one of the great anime masterpieces, and it was going to be published around April Fools Day, but then halfway through I realized how objectively stupid an idea that was, and I abandoned the project. Trust me, it sounds like it might have turned out funny, but it wouldn’t have. Ever since then, I always kind of had this show stored away in the back of my mind, with the assumption that I was going to give it a proper write-up eventually, but the project never materialized for the simple reason that I didn’t have anything to say about this title that hadn’t already been said by a million other people... But now, I think I do.
First off, let’s go over a literal interpretation of the plot of this show. I’m going to be going into spoilers for the rest of this review, and it’s not out of laziness, or because I don’t know how to talk about this show without spoiling it. Believe me, I could write pages about this anime without even once mentioning how it ends, but the reason I’m not doing that is because this is the only anime I’ve ever seen where I truly, genuinely believe you’re better off going in spoiled than blind. If you disagree with me on that assertion, that’s fine, but this is not the review for you.
Our story begins with Makoto and Kotonoha becoming infatuated with each other. Sekai, despite liking Makoto herself, supports and encourages him in their relationship, and even lets him practice certain things on her. Makoto, realizing Kotonoha is uncomfortable with her boundaries being crossed too early, gets bored with her when he realizes he can go further with Sekai. This creates a highly destructive love triangle, where Sekai is torn by guilt, Kotonoha is in denial to the point of delusion, and Makoto is too cowardly to properly break things off with Kotonoha because all he cares about is getting laid through the path of least resistance. As this situation drags on, Sekai and Kotonoha keep feeling worse and worse about themselves, as their classmates interfere with the relationship from several different angles and for several different reasons.
Frustrated by Kotonoha’s desperation and Sekai’s demands for him to take her seriously as his girlfriend and break up with Kotonoha, Makoto instead cheats on them with several other girls, basically jumping into bed with anyone who has a vagina and a pulse, including one who confesses to him at the school culture festival... and they literally have sex at a festival attraction, where they are unknowingly filmed. Sekai sees the footage, realizes she’s been cheated, but oh no, she’s also pregnant! She reveals this to Makoto, who was already distancing himself from her, and now he definitely wants nothing to do with her, and he goes full circle by returning to Kotonoha, who is now a broken husk of her former self. He chooses her, vowing to do right by her from now on. Sekai is infuriated by this, so she murders him. Kotonoha then confronts Sekai, murders her, and lives happily ever after with her boyfriend’s disembodied head. Nice Boat.
Now that’s a lot to take in, right? And it plays out exactly how you think it would. The tone of this story is consistently dour in a way that would feel more appropriate in a soap opera than in a melodramatic high school drama. There is not one likeable character in this entire cast. Every decision someone makes is either the worst, or close to the worst. I can’t even call Kotonoha likeable, because while she may be the only sympathetic character in the cast, she’s still frustrating as all hell. Yeah, there’s an element of realism to a girl as pure and inexperienced as her not understanding that she deserves better than the first douchebag to try and get in her pants, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch. The rest of the cast is every possible combination of cruel, selfish, entitled, mewling and manipulative, and that’s not even including Makoto himself, who might actually be a genuine sociopath for as little empathy he shows, and how little interest he shows in being loyal or forming long term connections with people.
It’s not fun, it’s not emotionally resonant and it’s sure as hell not sexy, despite all the actual sex that happens in it from beginning to end. There is no joy to be had in this series, it is objectively terrible, and it’s honestly... Kind of perfect. I like this piece of shit, like a lot, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but I believe beauty can exist at the bottom of the barrel. It is rare, but when you find it, it can be just as rewarding as the anime at the top. Perfection doesn’t have just one definition, because if it did, everything that was perfect would look the exact same. School Days is the perfect bad anime. I don’t consider it ‘so bad it’s good,’ because for me, those kind of titles are the ones that are entertaining because of how hard they failed at being what they wanted to be. I think School Days is exactly what it was meant to be. Remember when I said before, how I thought this show was intended to advertise the game it was based on? I can't think of a more brilliant way to advertise that kind of game than by showing people just how brutal and off-the-rails a bad ending can get, as well as just how much of an irredeemable shit-stain you'd have to be in order to see it.
It’s a show about awful people being awful to each other, taking place in a setting where most of us probably remember a lot of that going on. It’s high school drama amplified to an extreme level, where every single turn of the page makes the situation worse and worse, and while some plot points might not make any sense... The ‘break room’ being a yearly tradition is probably the biggest offender... The focus is kept tightly on the repercussions of every awful choice and how they build upon each other.
It is the ultimate schadenfreude anime, and while it is true that this is the sort of thing you have to be in the mood for, if you are, School Days was designed to be Your Trash. If you can get behind the bleak, mean-spirited premise, you might actually find that the tone is consistent, the plot is honestly kind of compelling, and you can’t really be mad at any of the litany of shitty things the characters do, because the rest of the cast is just as awful as they are, and you’re just glad to not be them. There’s a terrible person in all of us who wants to watch the world burn, and the best way to do that without having to feel guilty or suffer consequences to ourselves and the people closest to us is to watch everything go to shit in an anime. I’ve heard plenty of otaku say that the ending justifies the series, and I do completely get where they’re coming from, but I was reaching for my popcorn way before that.
There’s also the fact that, I’m sorry, I think it’s aged pretty well, and for two reasons. First of all, it doesn’t teach any bad lessons, and it doesn’t reward or encourage any of the shitty behavior it showcases. You spend the series feeling angry at the bad guys, sympathetic for the one legitimate victim, and fairly neutral for the few characters who get caught in the middle. Second, the harem genre just needs an anime like this. Because what is every harem anime like nowadays? You have one average dude who was supposed to be a self insert for the sexy fantasy, but ultimately comes off as boring to most viewers, attracting female attention like a magnet. Girls throw themselves at him, thirsty as all hell for some main character dick, and in ANY other anime, the dude breaks out in a cold sweat and runs away in fear.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a man refusing sex... Hell, I’m asexual myself... But every single one? Even the perviest harem leads turn out to be all talk. Makoto is to this genre what Brightburn is to Superman. He’s the one inexplicably attractive harem protagonist who uses his powers for evil. He says yes to every single proposition he receives, has no remorse for his actions, and even when he’s chiding himself for being a selfish prick, he’s still being a selfish prick. I’d feel more sympathy for his harem waifus if they felt even remotely like real people to me, but there is nothing real about the way harem waifus act. I won’t say wether I condone or condemn his actions... I kind of don't care... But it still feels cathartic to see one of my least favorite harem tropes get subverted with such ruthless prejudice. And the best part is that even if I did feel guilty watching all this unfold, Makoto’s ass gets brutally murdered and all is right with the world. I have my cake, and I’m eating it.
School Days is available from Discotek media. It does not include any of the OVA episodes, but that’s fine, because they’re all worthless garbage even by my standards. The manga is not available stateside, and the only physical copy of the visual novel you can get is an old Japanese PS2 import, at least as far as I'm aware.
School Days is a really difficult anime to pick a rating for. On the one hand, the legends are correct, and it’s a legitimately terrible anime. On the other hand, it achieves so much in it’s awfulness that I can’t help but recommend it, especially if you have a dark sense of humor, or if you're in a sour mood and just want to see some people suffer. If there were a 10/10 version of School Days available, I wouldn’t trade the one we have to get it... Hell, I’ll take this one step further, if there was even one thing that was genuinely positive or uplifting about it’s story, it wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. It has nice music, and as bitter and unpleasant as the story might be, it is told pretty well if you’re on board with it. It even has a decent little niche in today’s harem genre market as the dark subversion of a million titles that do the same damn thing. I can’t call it a good anime, but it does such a flawless job at being a bad anime that I can’t bring myself to give it too low a score, so I guess it lands somewhere in the middle?
I give School Days a 5/10.
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