Review of School Days

This review contains mild spoilers, viewers who have not seen the show or haven't heard about its reputation are advised to look elsewhere. You have been warned. High school isn't a particularly rare setting in anime. No sir, in fact, high school seems to be freaking everywhere. How many times have you heard someone whine and complain about how anime is always set in high school? How many times will you hear that Japan can't let go of anime in high school, how people whine from season to season about how anime (modern or in general) sucks, how the cliches are tedious, how that one tsunderefrom that one anime is insufferable, how shows which are not in high school are automatically given points or credit or any of that? If you've been an anime fan for longer than a few months, you've definitely heard these complaints from someone, somewhere.

Harems in particular take the cake. Seriously, there's the quiet girl, the tsundere, the tomboy, the random best friend, the sister of one of the main characters, the best friend who only exists to say dumb sex jokes...and sometimes several of them overlap with one another.

So what happens when a harem tries to break out of the mold, and instead of the guy being unable to get laid and is seemingly oblivious to all of the girls liking him, the guy actually wants to get laid with everyone and is fully aware and uses that to his advantage.

This should be an interesting series, was my first impression. I didn't buy into the hate that everyone was giving this show; after all, a deconstruction should avert tropes and make them apply in a more realistic manner, right? If you think of it that way, this show should've been really interesting to watch, right?

While many people agree with the logic present above, I am here to say that that simply isn't true. School Days doesn't only fail as a stand alone show, it also fails as a deconstruction.

The story is stupidly written and has some of the strangest logic I've seen in my life. Some would argue that the show's first few episodes are cliche harem, while the rest is pretty bad melodrama, but I personally disagree. The first few episodes are every bit as stupid as the rest of the show, maybe more so.

Let me provide you, reader, with what I mean.

How does the whole thing start off? Here it is (try not to laugh, like I did when I discovered this); the first episode starts off with a rumor saying that if you take a picture of a girl, and keep it as your wallpaper on your phone for a week, that girl will fall in love with you.

I was in high school. I also am aware of how normal, fully functioning human beings (high schoolers or otherwise) think. If your instant reaction while reading the above paragraph wasn't that that was one of the stupidest things you've heard in your life, then I suggest going to a doctor as quickly as possible.

You see, School Days isn't exactly a show with bad ideas. Its ideas are actually quite captivating and interesting. The problem is that the road to get there is filled with drama. Not the good, well-written and well built up kind of drama. Do you know shows like Gossip Girl, where every interaction between the characters is written simply to add drama for the sake of drama, and contradicts logic present in the show earlier on? Yep, that kind of drama.

But wait, you may say, the characters have to be interesting and captivating for this to work. Even if the side characters are forgettable, all can be forgotten if the show focuses on the main leads and develops them in a great amount of detail, you may say.

You are right, but this is not a show with interesting characters. Hell, I don't even know if these guys can even be called characters, much less human beings (and unless the characters were never the point, the moment a work of fiction fails is the moment when the characters don't feel human).

This is why the show fails so badly at being a deconstruction; for a show that is averting so many tropes related to harem anime, it fails to avert the most important one. That is, failing at making the characters more humanized, and simply being satisfied with them being darker takes on the archetypes that the characters follow.

The main lead is still boring and has the personality of a brick, the main shy girl is still very bland and way too dense (not to mention her breasts being more memorable than her personality), the main best friend character who is secretly in love with the main character is still dumb and incredibly illogical about her actions (this is taken up to 11 here) and so on.

None of the interactions feel human, none of them resemble something an actual human being would do or say. Yes, we all say and do stupid things in high school, but we still have some kind of logic that we follow. This show has none of that, it only wants to stall for time until we get to the ending, and wants to add more drama and walking character archetypes while its at it.

The artwork is unremarkable at best and outright terrible at worst, since every face looks exactly the same (to the point where I was confusing several characters with each other). This wouldn't be a problem, since a lot of shows have faces which look exactly the same and where the coloring is done well enough, to the point where we don't notice this or even feel it. The coloring in this show is terrible, however, and everything feels like it's intentionally shaded in a darker color (not black either, it's this strange purple-lack color), to the point where the blood that I saw over the course of the show looked no different than the color of one of the main lead's hair.

The animation is no better, with very little movement and what little movement there is feeling clumsy and awkward, almost like I was watching flash animation and not a fully budgeted anime series with actual professional animators responsible for it.
There is a clear improvement in the animation in the last episode, but even that looks average at best and still doesn't improve in any way my opinion of the show.

Overall, School Days fails on every single level that I can think of. I couldn't even get angry at this show; hell, I was laughing my head off at many of the more "serious" moments present throughout the show. The only reason I give this a 2 rather than a 1 is because, however I feel about the show's quality, I can at least give it credit for entertaining me from the beginning to the end. Hell, I bet it would make a pretty good drinking game with friends, but I'm not entirely certain I'd want to do that, since I wouldn't want to constantly choke over my drink.

That's exactly what this show is, overall; a joke. This is the kind of thing you'd give to your friends or people you hate and have a laugh about later. There is nothing I can recommend about this show unless you want to have a laugh, want to rage on something or simply watch bad anime because why not. If you don't follow any of that, I propose you stay as far away as humanly possible from this show. Do take a good look at the character art or something though, you wouldn't want to get pranked into watching this.