Review of School Days

Watching School days... and enjoying it requires a special type of person. The sort that that can view the suffering of fictional characters like a curious (or evil) scientist who conducts social experiments on a bunch of unknowing test subjects (victims) with intense academic interest (while cackling madly). The entire anime is essentially a social experiment taken to extremes. What happens if you take a horny teenage guy with little self-restraint, and give him the temptation of almost unlimited sex? What if you add into the mix a group of fangirls, who tend to always regard sleeping with the guy who sleeps with themost girls as a sign of social prestige?

School days takes this scenero to its shocking conclusion... and in doing so, has created some of the most despised anime characters ever known. In this goal, School days succeeds brilliantly. The insert songs, ending themes are some of the best in any anime, the story's dark twists will eat at you, and the characters are capable of invoking the most primal emotions of hate and disgust.

That's not say that school days achieves that goal flawlessly. Animations were medicore, relying on more stills that it should. Meanwhile, the second to last episode that portrayed the protogonist final descent to oblivion was rushed. Had the director cut out the 5 wasted minutes devoted to blatant upskirt fanservice per episode and fleshed out the story development, I would have scored the story a 10. Nevertheless, despite the shortcomings, School days achieves what it aimed to do.

If you're the sort of person who wants to throw your notebook off the balcony whenever some guy on TV does something dumb or evil, this ain't the anime for you. However, if you're more the sort that want to watch the downfall of a community with morbid curiosity... then there's really no better anime for you.