School Days

Taken from an earlier review of mine.



Title: School Days スクールデイズ

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Horror, Psychological, Romance, Slice of life

Plot Summary:
Makoto has been admiring Kotonoha on the train to school every day. His new friend Sekai has taken an interest in his love life and offers to help hook Makoto up; and reluctantly, Makoto accepts her gesture and quickly is able to befriend Kotonoha. Eventually Makoto musters up enough courage to confess to Kotonoha and she returns his feelings – Makoto finally has a girlfriend! Deeply grateful to Sekai, he asks her what he can do to return the favor; she asks him to close his eyes, and gives him a deep kiss. A stunned Makoto is left watching Sekai take the train home. His feelings, which were set on Kotonoha, were moved by Sekai's kiss; what should he do now?

Review: If you're looking for some innocent High School Romance show, move along, you're at the wrong anime. The only thing that’s innocent about this is the title.

But if you don’t mind disturbing, sometimes shocking, but nonetheless always interesting shows, it’s a show very worth watching.

For me, what really stands out is the character development (or degeneration) and the emotions portrayed. Take Kotonoha, for example. One can almost follow her mental state throughout the series: venturing from normal girl, if a bit shy; to getting weird and obsessive; till a final breakdown into murder and insanity. The same can be said for Makoto (or THAT BASTARD, as some call him), who goes from shy to uber pimp in just a few episodes. Seriously, you can count the characters who haven’t slept with him on one hand (including the guys). The Voice Acting was also great, adding tension and enhancing the atmosphere of the setting.

Just about the only thing that bothered me was the censorship. Seriously, black blood sounds good in theory, but looks stupid on the screen. Then again, if they didn’t censor the final episode… , to keep spoilers to a minimum, lets just say that people would be a lot more shocked and / or mortified.

At any rate, School Days is a haunting, captivating, soap opera-esque anime, and undoubtedly one of the best shows in its genre (harems). It tells a story of romance from a perspective so rarely seen among today’s anime. It speaks of the heart’s ability to be treacherous and cruel towards its own kind, just so it can satisfy itself. I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve played or heard of the original PC game.

So, after all that,

Story: 8/10
Characters: 10/10
Animation: 8/10 (for a 2007 anime, it wasn’t the best, but not the worst either)
Sound: 9/10
Overall: 8.75/10