If you told me that this season I would find 2 series which are basically shows that look like they were written in 2015 and that I would have them as some of my favourites shows in 2023, then I wouldn't believe you, but here we are, and while I had no plans on writting a review about Temple because I can barely think of what to say besides that "it was a very fun show", on the other hand there is Eiyuu Kyoushitsu. I'm not surprised by people being very negative about it, after all, it is basically one of those magic school harem series that were the trend before isekais came around, and while watching the first episode I immediatly thought "this looks like it was written in 2015" and I was (not really) surprised to see it was, in fact, a light novel from 2015. But what exactly made me like Eiyuu Kyoushitsu? Well, because unike most of the light novels from those times, this one was actually fun to watch.
The protagonist Blade gets to the school and asks some people to be his friends, because his goal is to have many friends, and the reason is because he was a hero that couldn’t live like an ordinary person at all so he wants to try it now that he doesn’t have those duties, but he is terrible acting normal because he has never experienced such thing, and that’s basically what the show goes about. Since this is a light novel, the format on which it works on is that a different girl has the spotlight for the adaptation of a volumen, and the very first moment we get to the school we see a speedrun of the tsundered redhead with fire powers with Earnest, the thing with her is that while her fire powers make her strong, they come from a sword with a demon inside which she couldn’t control and her hair became red because of it, over time she starts acting less tsundere-ish once the thing with her sword is solved, as the show basically deals with the kind of stuff you would see in these magic school series adding just some minor stuff. As per usual, there are a lot of female characters since, to no one’s surprise, this is also a harem series, girls like Sophie (whom I like to call a Rei Ayanami clone) or Maria (who is the daughter of the demon King Blade defeated in the past) and even a dragon loli are in here, and while their characters aren’t complex they can be fun to watch. I was even surprised when the minor characters that I thought wouldn’t matter at all, the ones that Blade first contacted in the school, actually reappeared across the series multiple times helping Blade on whatever he was doing and had some moments for themselves, even if some of them were as simple as being interested in a girl and wanting to do whatever to get her.
I know this is going for the anime director because there's no way this kind of stuff is working into a written medium this easily, specially because many of them require visual cues, there are a lot of jokes that are references to different series and that is incorporated into the humour. There is some classic stuff like Shaft-like headtilts and Shokugeki no Soma's foodgasms, but the first time I was pleasantly surprised with these references is when I saw fricking Galeon from GaoGaiGar (a 90s show most people outside Japan don't even know) spouting water from its mouth in a mixed bathing to the point it was even recognized by that series' writer Yuuichirou Takeda in a Tweet, in another episode there is someone screaming "STAND ALONE COMPLEX" to name her plan of getting a soul into an android, and others that were easily recognizable like recreating the "Congratulations!" from Evangelion and the final scene of Ashita no Joe, this series has unironically better taste in anime than most anime fans I have seen.
Aside from references to other series the comedy itself is solid, as while some scenes definitely look more exagerated than they should be, some others hit me just right. This is the kind of series that can change from having a big fight with a huge monster to a very heartwarming moment celebrating someone's birthday where he is happy for being born, basically think about what Spy x Family does but actually good, it just has this very nice atmosphere all around. Take for example this scene where the MC and the Rei Ayanami Clone decide to go on a date and, since both most definitely don't know how to have one since they are utterly unaware of how normal humans act, they proceed to have one of the most autistic dates I have seen in an anime, and I loved that shit, and by the end of the episode, where Sophie tells Blade her backstory, it ends in a more heartwarming note.
However, this suffers from the same thing these adaptations used to suffer, obvious censorship in fanservice and bad animation. I mean, the animation in this series doesn't look good at all, it is barely animated at times and the characters aside from the main cast look like main characters from Boku no Hero Academia. And the censorship is obvious, the girls are literal barbie dolls, while I like the fact they aren't feigning they have nipples by hinding it under impossibly glued hair covering the breasts, it still looks kinda weird, and in other scenes like the mixed bathing? Would you really guess this series actually makes the girls wear bikinis instead of making them go naked? I don't know about the novel or even about the manga, but I'm sure you bathe naked.
Eiyuu Kyoushitsu is actually something I had my doubts at the beggining, I mean, how I could not with magic school harems? They have been dissapointing me a long time, but after watching it for some weeks, it became one of my favourites shows of this season, being very fun despite its obvious flaws in production.
Thank you for reading.
19 out of 24 users liked this review
