Review of School Days

Warning: I will try my best for not to spoil things in most of this review, but in the story and characters section, there WILL BE spoilers both to the anime and the visual novel, so be warned and read at your own discretion. And also, this will be a LONG review. I want to open this review saying that people who don't like School Days probably are the type of people who always want a happy ending no matter the situation. But sometimes, there is no happy ending. Sometimes, all the people involved in the story are awful people trying to make what's best forthem and failing miserably in achieving it in a way that many would consider "moral". And talking about them, let's start with the characters.

Characters - 8

There are secondary characters that appear here and there, like Setsuna, Taisuke, Kotonoha's sister, Hikari, but they're not that relevant for the anime (they are more important in the VN), so I will not waste my time talking about them, and instead, talk about our trio of protagonists, Makoto, Sekai and Kotonoha.

Makoto is the main character through which we see the story. He's shy, kinda socially awkward and quiet in the classroom. He grows a crush on Kotonoha, who takes the same train as him everyday, so following a charm that's popular in his city at the moment, he takes a photo of her and use it as his cellphone wallpaper. By doing so, if no one discovers it, by the span of 3 days, she will fall in love with him. Or so the charm says. Anyway, this is the initial basis of the character, that could also be described as the generic harem protagonist.

Then, there's Sekai, Makoto's classmate. She's extroverted, happy and kind of stubborn. When she discovers that Makoto has a crush on Kotonoha, she offers to teach him all about the nits and grits of how to handle a relationship and send him off prepared to Kotonoha. But... things don't go quite as she planned...

At last, but not least, there's Kotonoha. She is even more shy than Makoto is at the start of the anime, and suffers bullying at her class, causing her to be very insecure about herself. At the time that Makoto took her photo at the train, she already had a crush on him, but couldn't bring herself to actually confess to him, fearing that he would laugh her off, as everybody do. When Makoto asks her to be his girlfriend, she is pleasantly surprised and accepts right away, but she couldn't foresee that the train that she accepted to enter was going to completely derail and violently crash not long after.

Let's not waste anymore of your time, you and me know that none of these characters that the start of the anime treat as innocent, funny and normal are not even close of being at least a pleasant human being, all three are severely flawed both in character and personality, and this is actually foretold by the name of the characters meaning ironically the opposite of what they actually are. "Makoto" in japanese means something along the lines of "truthful", "faithful", and he's a cheating liar that breaks the trust bond of almost everyone he knows in the school through the course of the anime. "Sekai" means something along the lines of "world", "vast", and she's a narrow-minded person that fails extremely hard in foreseeing where her actions could lead into. "Kotonoha" means something along the lines of "word" and she's the most quiet person in her class, to the point that she barely can make any decision by herself.

All of them are terrible human beings. You and me know it. But that is where the beuaty of School Days lie. This is NOT your typical romance story. This is the tale of how can a case of love triangle descend into the worst outcome, because in real life, not all relationships are all flowers and chocolate. Some end terribly. And School Days portray the hypothetical scenario of "how bad can a relationship end" pretty well. These characters are the soul of the story, and you're supposed to dislike them. Your reward for enduring it will be the tragedy at the end, Makoto's and Sekai's death, a moment that we, as spectators, truly were wishing for.

Art - 3

But let's talk about the awful character designs of this anime. I dare you to look that a picture of Makoto's face and Kotonoha's little sister's face side by side and try to tell the difference, it is barely noticeable. One of the worst aspects of this anime is this generic-ass character design that take the already generic character designs from the visual novel and somehow make them even more generic than they already were. There's not even that much to elaborate on the art of the anime because almost all of it is generic. Let's move on.

Story - 9

Alright, I already dipped my toes in the story on the characters section, but here I will elaborate further upon. The story is great, but... with asterisks. Aside from the rushed pace and some mangled storylines at the second half of the anime, School Days has a good story that tried to do what few romance anime do (and achieved it quite well in my opinion), that is to adapt all the worst choices you could make in the original visual novel. Every single thing that Makoto does is the absolute worst decision that he could make at the moment, and a scene that perfectly encapsulates this is when he breaks up with Kotonoha. If you think about it, everything that he did up to that point was awful shit: he broke Kotonoha's trust bond, cheated her with Setsuna, Sekai and Otome, and even ignored her messages when Taisuke was about to rape her. And to top it off, he tells Kotonoha that he doesn't like her anymore and breaks with her in the most insensitive way possible, with Setsuna right by his side. That's sounds like what would be if you were actively trying to pursue a bad end in a visual novel, doesn't it... oh wait, it is exactly that.

As I wrote earlier, School Days is the story of terrible human beings that try to make the best for them and achieving it in the least "moral" way possible. What causes so many people to shrug this anime off as bad is that it plays with the concept of morality and all the grey areas that lie between "moral" and "immoral". The same character who would act "morally" in an episode, would be quite surely acting "immorally" in another episode. There's no black and white morality here, just grey. And to top it off, it adapts not the true or best outcome, but all of the bad ones mangled (I will return to this in a bit), which is quite rare for an adaptation to do. This is a lot for a newcomer to the anime media or a normal romance fan to endure. And that's probably why the staff decided to address the issues of these people into the original ending that this anime have, instead of choosing one of the bad ones from the novel.

To summarize, none of the novels endings kills both Sekai and Makoto and have a insane Kotonoha that let her trauma overcome her sanity. One of the endings that Kotonoha gets mad, only Sekai dies; the ending where Makoto dies, both Kotonoha and Sekai are pregnant; in the other ending that Kotonoha gets mad, she kills herself; in one ending that Sekai gets mad she didn't killed Makoto, but Kotonoha instead... you get the picture. For the story that the anime was adapting, none of those would fit quite well, or even if it fits, it would probably be not that much satisfying, so they went for an original ending that became quite memorable for being quite over the top. And to be fair, that's a valid criticism of the show, the ending is really over the top and graphically exaggerated, I can understand someone being thrown off by it.

I also would like to add that you can interpret School Days as a manifest against relationship abuse. If you think about it, Makoto was heavily punished for his cheating and lying behaviour. Sekai was punished for encouraging him to maintain this behaviour (except when it was with her). Kotonoha was a way to show how bad one's mind can become destroyed by not only cheating, but also rape and bullying. By showing us, the audience, the worst possible way to handle these situations, the writers were actually trying to say "DON'T BE THIS GUY!" as loud as they could. And I think that, considering this purpose, it fulfilled.

But enough about the story, let's talk about the sound.

Sound - 4

They were not even trying. I only maintain a 4 in this section for the op and the endings, they were the best part about the "audio" part of this audiovisual media. The sound design is basic as fuck, even the crowded voices are kinda cheap and whatever, the OST is ok AT BEST, with some highlights being the track that plays behind the main event that happen in episode 12 and the track that plays when Kotonoha got traumatized. If you could call these tracks highlights, but compared to the rest, they were good. And I said the op was good, but it is not that great. Is a catchy song, but not thaaaat good. Is just that compared to the rest of the OST, it is passable. The endings were legit good tho, don't skip any.

Enjoyment - 6

This one is hard to elaborate, because School Days don't try to be a enjoyable series to watch. It is very similar to the likes of polarizing movies of the recent decade as Joker or Mother, that they simply don't care about your feelings as a spectator. That being said, it is not like School Days is comparable in terms of quality to Joker. It has it's fair share of problems. As I said that I would return to this later, just what the hell happened in the later half of the anime, up until ep 11? It was a fucking clusterfuck of routes of the visual novel entangled together in a chimera-like beast. Seriously, I could spot events of SEVEN different routes in that later half, roughly from eps 6 to 10. What the hell were they thinking? Just stick to the main heroines routes, guys! You were doing a good job! I was seriously baffled when they included a bit from one of the harem routes of the game, like... The focus until episode 6 was on the main girls, and then all of a sudden everyone wanted a piece of Makoto, exactly like in the harem routes. But in the game, that doesn't happen in the main heroines routes.

But I digress. This review isn't supposed to compare the anime with the visual novel, it's supposed to evaluate the anime as a standalone piece of media. That being said, my final score for School Days is 8.

School Days is polarizing. Is a anime that don't try to please it's viewer in any way, always presenting the worst possible outcome of a decision-making process and progress further and further into the worst (but most satisfying) ending possible for that story. And it was a worthwhile ride. School Days may not be an enjoyable anime to watch, may not have a happy ending, may not have a well paced story and, most importantly, may not have likeable characters. But that doesn't mean that the story it try to tell is bad. Please don't be deceived by the close-minded people who view this anime as bad just because Makoto is a piece of shit and because the ending was tragic, view it as a deconstruction of the harem genre that criticize the fetichization of relationship abuse that the genre commonly has. And even if you end up don't liking the anime, understand it's reasons for it being the way it is and don't enter the hate train. Be fair.

Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk. Peace!