I’m a bit late on this, but to be fair, there aren’t any subs out yet, so ahead of time in -MY- schedule. School Days has a lot of acclaim as a fully animated H-Game and so far it’s translating decently into anime form. What will be the make or break point for School Days is whether it delivers on the much anticipated BAD END. The lead up might be as great as in the games, but what sets School Days apart is its unorthodox and often violent ending scenarios, without one, the anime adaptation may fall into the generic romance drama/harem bin instead of the epic win it has the potential to be.

Episode Rating: 9/10

The episode quickly introduces us to our male lead, Makoto Itou, and his love interest, Kotonoha Katsura. Itou first notices her when he realizes that she takes the same train as him to school each morning. The beginnings of their romance start out modestly, with Itou acting quite stalker-like, sneaking quick glances at Katsura and even taking a keepsake picture without her knowing.

Convincing himself that he doesn’t stand a chance in the face of such a beauty, Itou contents himself with looking from afar and not actually making an effort to get to know Katsura.

But when his classmate, Sekai Saionji, catches him looking at Katsura picture and puts two and two together, he is more or less forced to advance. After promising not to tell anyone about his unrequited love, Sekai actually offers to help Itou get closer to Katsura, and as luck would have it, the two happen to be friends.

Things start off slow at first, Itou barely having the courage to eat lunch with Katsura and Sekai, but as that becomes more of an everyday thing, he begins to loosen up around Katsura. Sekai also gives Itou some insider tips about Katsura love life, it seems she doesn’t have a boyfriend, but does have someone that she seems to like.

Itou thanks Sekai for helping him move forward, without her he would have remained an indecisive wimp, doomed to be an observer forever. But with her help and encouragement, he’s managed to become good friends with Katsura and finally has the courage to ask her out on a date.

The next morning Itou goes through with the confession when the two meet at the train station. Later that day Katsura tells Sekai what happened with Itou and that she accepted, the two of them plan on going on a date in the evening. Katsura thanks Sekai for all she’s done, if it weren’t for her she would have never gotten to know Itou as well as she does now, it turns out that the person that Katsura liked was the guy who had been watching her on the train everyday, who ended up being Itou. So it was mutual love at first awkward glance!

That evening after school, Sekai meets up with Itou at the train station home and congratulates him on his success with Katsura. He thanks her once again, but can’t help but wonder why she went so far for him, Sekai says that she just likes to meddle. Itou promises to repay her one day if she ever has a request. After thinking about it for a second, Sekai takes her reward, stealing a kiss from Itou. She boards her train waving goodbye to Itou and wishing him good luck with his date, leaving the poor guy confused and flustered at what just happened as Katsura hurries to meet him for their date.

Thoughts

Hmm…maybe I was a little too harsh when I said School Days would end up a generic romance drama without a BAD END. Having rewatched the episode, I must admit that it’s better than a lot of the trash that lumps itself in the same genre. Even from the first episode, the characters are easy to identify with, especially for anyone who is going through or has gone through the angst fest that is high school romance.

Take Sekai for example, I can’t help but feel sorry for her. Her intentions were obvious from the very beginning, no one goes through this much effort for someone else without having an interest themselves. Too bad Itou is your typical dense male lead who doesn’t figure it out until she kisses him. She’s a stereotypical cheery on the outside but CRAWLING IN MY SKIN on the inside, but the added confusion she’s contributed to plot already distinguishes her from others of her type, who are typically doormats.

I can’t say much about Katsura since we haven’t gotten to see much of her personality yet, but I have a feeling I’ll be cheering for her rather than Sekai. Katsura deserves some sympathy as well, she’s in for one of the most angst filled experiences known to mankind, a love triangle. They rarely ever end with everyone being happy, so there’s going to be some measure of pain for each girl through the course of this dilemma. Itou initially comes off as your typical indecisive male lead, but I wonder if he’ll be able to choose one of them right from the beginning, instead of debating it for 20 episodes before making up his mind, causing hurt feelings along the way.

Aside: Also, to all those people who have watched KGNE and called Mitsuki a backstabbing whore, you all have no choice but to hate Sekai for the same reason, or be labeled a hypocrite. Her circumstances are the same, but she made her move MUCH quicker than Mitsuki ever did. Sorry for going off on that tangent, but it was an opportunity to fight back against Mitsuki haters, I don’t pass those up.

On the technical side of things, School Days is looking pretty good so far. The animation isn’t what I would call stunning, but it does its job and I haven’t seen any glaring instances of QUALITY just yet. Plut the character designs are great and don’t resort to ridiculously impossible body proportions or a rainbow of hair colors, making it seem just a little bit more realistic.

Music was pretty good, there wasn’t really an OP to comment on, but I actually liked the ED enough to listen to the whole thing, a rarity for me. It was a generic sounding song, but it fit well with the ending scene, so I couldn’t help but get caught up in it. One thing I did like was the lack of ambient music throughout the episode, it was effective on keeping the dialogue the center of attention. And when the soft piano score started playing, the impact of the scene was heightened in contrast the the silence of the rest of the episode.

Click image for full size.

Having been linked to the first episode of the game arc (thanks Kanon_fan82!) that the anime chose to follow, here are some comparison shots between the two (anime on the left, game on the right). As you can see the backgrounds and character designs are MUCH more detailed in the game. And some scenes were altered a bit, for example when Itou confronted Sekai about keeping his secret, in the game he ended up pushing her down, giving us a nice pantsu shot, whereas in the anime he just shoved her against a railing. The rest of the episode is pretty much the same except some dialoge discrepancies and differences in shot angles.

Unfortunately it looks like it’ll be a looooooong time before subs for the rest of the game episodes are released. There’s a translation project going on at Sekai Project, but due to the difficulty in altering in game video files and reverse engineering the script files, it doesn’t look like it’ll finish any time soon.

School Days has left a pretty good first impression, and I like it enough that I’ll definitely keep blogging it. I can only hope that the development of this love triangle manages to offer something unique, for once I’d like to see something other than the three protagonists sitting in their room lamenting on their problems while doing very little to solve them. Some sort of all out war between Sekai and Katsura would be great to see. Thankfully, this blog now has spoiler tags, so those out there who have played the game, PLEASE USE THEM.

~ Shirukii ~