Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou

Roaming the halls of the all-boys Sanada North High School are three close comrades: the eccentric ringleader with a hyperactive imagination Hidenori, the passionate Yoshitake, and the rational and prudent Tadakuni. Their lives are filled with giant robots, true love, and intense drama... in their colorful imaginations, at least. In reality, they are just an everyday trio of ordinary guys trying to pass the time, but who said everyday life couldn't be interesting? Whether it's an intricate RPG reenactment or an unexpected romantic encounter on the riverbank at sunset, Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou is rife with bizarre yet hilariously relatable situations that are anything but mundane.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Tabata, Hidenori Main

Sugita, Tomokazu Japanese

Tanaka, Yoshitake Main

Suzumura, Kenichi Japanese

Tadakuni Main

Irino, Miyu Japanese

Yassan Supporting

Hikasa, Youko Japanese

Ringo Supporting

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Karasawa, Toshiyuki Supporting

Ono, Yuuki Japanese

Motoharu Supporting

Namikawa, Daisuke Japanese

Vice President Supporting

Yasumoto, Hiroki Japanese

President Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Tadakuni's Little Sister Supporting

Takagaki, Ayahi Japanese

Tanaka, Shou Producer

Takamatsu, Shinji Director, Sound Director, Script, Storyboard

Yoshimura, Ai Episode Director, Storyboard, Assistant Director

Kawamura, Tomoyuki Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Mar 27, 2012

kurosaki_kabuto

Recommended

"Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness." F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Oh youth and the epic journey called growing up. Most people tend to, in a way or another, be deeply defined by their teenage years. High school is a fond memory to some and a painful one to others, but I think everyone can agree that it is a unique and special period of our lives, one that has no equal. Most people quickly relate the words High School with friendship, as the friends you make in that period of time seem to leave a permanent mark in your memories and so ... does the time you spend with them, most of which is filled talking about something random or even stupid, laughing at simple and normal things, sharing mutual interests and hobbies, talking about the opposite gender in a playful or perverted way and worrying about the weirdest things. Yes, those years you spend in High School are special in a simple and silly way and it is that way that Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou (DKN) tries and successfully manages to recreate in a hilarious manner.

[Story] - 8 - Daily Lives of High School Boys. That's basically it. It is a standard slice of life type of story, but one that works amazingly well. The episodes are divided into segments and focus on a big number of characters, each of them with his own peculiarities, as he endures daily tasks. To portray something so simple in an amusing way is not easy at all and I think most animes that actually try this end up filled up with dull boring moments that just kill the mood. DKN avoids that in almost every single scene which is quite amazing and even in its worse episode you'll still laugh out loud quite some times. Most segments are short which gives the comedic tone light, random and fast paced giving it a tremendous enjoyability. To sum things up, it isn't an amazing and complex storyline since it is a slice of life, but the setting and the execution of the comedy match and fit each other so well that you just can't care about how simple the story is.

[Art] - 8 - Not much to point out here. The art was acceptably good. It didn't need to be better anyway. The character design was adequate with a pretty good worn on some characters' expressions.
The animation was good enough for it. It didn't particularly shine, but I never felt like it needed to be better, so I guess they did a good job with it.

[Sound] - 9 - Alright, so I had to give the 9 here for two specific reasons. First of all the soundtrack was very fitting and comedic. The Literature Girl Song cracked me up every single time, it was absolutely perfect for those moments and just hearing the song alone will make you laugh so that's a great job there. Then the second reason lies in the voice actors. Since I'm not an experiences anime reviewer I wasn't sure about where I should talk about this, so I'm just including it within the sound for obvious reasons. Yeah I have to admit I'm a Gintama Fan, so having Sugita (probably my favorite voice actor) and Suzumura playing two of the main characters made the anime that much better. Sugita's voice fit Hidenori too well and his natural ability of making everything he says funny was perfect here. Other than them I also have to positively mention other very fitting voices like Motoharu's (Daisuke Namikawa), Ringo's (Aoi Yuuki) and Yanagi's (Yuu Kobayashi). Indeed a great selection of voice actors.

[Characters] - 9 - Probably one of its strongest points, since most times the punchlines rely completely on the characters as the humor is very character-driven on most scenes. Something very good about this series is the fact that the main character doesn't monopolize every scene, in fact it's just the opposite - he doesn't even show up in two or three episodes at all. The secondary characters are hilarious, each of them playing right into a character stereotype but adding a sort of twist to it. Motoharu, the delinquent who's supposedly badass and mature, but still get's manipulated by older girls and is strangely deep and introspective, also having an above the average sensitivity and fragile spirit. Literature Girl, the mysterious silent girl who stands by the riverside staring into the horizon lost in thought, but she's actually just a naive wannabe novel author looking for an ideal encounter with a guy by the riverside. Among many others.

[Enjoyment] - 9.5 - Maybe I'm exaggerating here but I feel that the 10 is appropriate. Most episodes went by extremely fast and I laughed like a mad man at most scenes from beginning to end. If a comedy that achieves that doesn't deserve the 10 in enjoyment then few animes do. I really enjoyed this very much and agree with people that relate its sense of humor to Gintama and Nichijou - which I also liked quite a lot. It really surprised me, since I didn't watch any trailers. I just saw a new anime called Daily Lives of High School Boys and thought "well I have 20 minutes free so why not? It'll probably be filled with female-targetted fanservice though...". Then the first episode blew me away. It's actually very easy to tell if you'll like this series or not - just watch the first episode. If you dislike the first episode you don't need to see more as you most likely won't like it at all.

[Overall] - 9 - Overall a solid comedy anime that any comedy fan should check out. Get some friends together one afternoon and watch a couple of episodes, it'll probably feel even better!

I hope you decide to give it a shot and thank you for reading!

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Feb 27, 2013

Snakeskins

Mixed Feelings

M'kay, this kinda bored the crap outta me, now I know that there are those of you out there who totally love this type of genre but I wasnt feeling this at all.
Imagine some camera crew following you around all day filming everything you do, now maybe that would be awesome; but if your life isnt any more exciting than mine, it would be a pretty shitty show. So this is supposed to be daily lives, but as a highschool boy (or near enough) I know that my experience was waaay different from this and I wasnt able to relate to anything going on.
The ... story, thinner than anorexia; the characthers, pretty boring; the overall enjoyment, I didnt really feel any.
Well, right now Im being a big downer, so lets get to something positive. The ending was actually really good (perhaps because I was just so happy to be done with this) it was surprisingly touching, the only problem is that you have to sit through six hours of boredom before you get there.
As an ending note: I might have been a dick and offended some people in this review, if I did, it was not my intent.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Nov 16, 2024

Worm_Death

Not Recommended

Funny

Maybe expecting this to be anything even similar to Nichijou was a big mistake, but I had hoped this anime would be something similar to it. Still, I think there's a lot of appeal in just reliving the high school days and the unique experiences it allowed us to have with friends. And I got none of that with this anime. For a final comparison to Nichijou, despite it being insanely more whacky and outlandish, I found it way more relatable than this anime.

Daily Life of High School Boys is really frustrating because it continues to be on the cusp of something fun and ... relatable. But my hopes really started to die away by the first episode. I thought it was charming that the characters would just decide to randomly pretend they were in an RPG regardless of how dumb they looked, and I think that's an important quality to highlight. High school can often be a time when we try to hide and abandon our true selves and/or our favorite hobbies for fear that it may make us look dumb to our peers. So, a true friendship where they can just do what they want is great. One thing I liked about this anime was the real sense of friendship. At first, I thought the student council might in some way be the antagonists or bullies to our trio, but they're not. They make jabs at each other, but at the end of the day, they're friends, and it's very refreshing.
But here in lies the problem. As nice as it is to be reminded we can have fun regardless of how we're judged, they do it near constantly. They really can seem like elementary school kids at times. And shouldn't have taken up the bulk of the scenarios. Unless this is just what theater kids do to kill time? I remember playing RPGs with my friends over, and we'd make up our own silly voices for the characters as we played and had a lot of fun in that, so there's definitely something nostalgic it could have tapped into, but it missed its mark.

Now for the comedy itself. I probably exhaled air about 5 times during the whole run of this series. There are some "cute" jokes in this that I found mildly amusing, and that's about it. Episode 1 was probably the funniest, mainly because you don't know yet that the series will never try to stray from the very simple jokes. And that's just it; the show is safe and doesn't really try to make a lot of unique jokes. And unfortunately, when they do make a good joke, it's oftentimes that they just drag it out too long, and it loses any punch it had. I enjoyed the joke about the characters slipping into puddles, but after the 2nd or 3rd time, you know what to expect; there's no subversion anymore. Repeating the joke does not make it funnier. Then a lot of the time I can barely even identify the joke. I understand the show can be very lowkey, but it's to the point where I can't even figure out where I'm supposed to laugh. There were a lot of times a scene would end, and all I was left to think was, "ok..." and it gets hard to watch that over and over again.

Characters: I'm gonna say it straight off the bat: I really do not like the way basically any of the female characters are written. Yassan is fun, and Ringo is cute and probably the best-written of them, but that's about it. I get it. It's an anime about high school boys, but I get weird objectification vibe from them. I hated the skit where the entire point was just to look up Ringo's skirt, and that's the entire joke. I don't care if they feel ashamed afterward; that's something you don't do. The other girls are just really annoying. They all attack the boys for literally no reason. The scene where they try to shave Motoharu's beard is so weird? Like this literal toddler-type behavior, it's so weird. I'm not asking for these girls to act like your typical dere girls because I'd probably hate them even more, but it's just weird how randomly hostile and loud literally all of them are. There were some real missed opportunities. I liked that at the start, Motoharu seemed to have a great relationship with his sister, which was a bit healthier than most siblings, but then she also turned out to be crazy. It would have been a nice example to show that it's cool to have a great friendship with your sister. Something, again, can easily be made fun of in high school. Anyway, the post-credit funky high school girls... They're super obnoxious, and they don't end up tying into anything by the end, purely pointless. All they do is try to make themselves more appealing to boys, which, again, goes back to that weird objectification. It's taken to the 11th degree, so sure, it's still comedy, but it's just awkward. Plus, they make the same K-on movie joke twice, which is wild to see them just casually not address.
The guys aren't much better, they're all so bland and they all blend into each other. I thought the main trio was gonna be fun to bounce off each other at first, but then they barely showed up together for the entire series, and I think that led to a lot of the show suffering because I think a decent dynamic could have been built off of them. It was annoying going into a lot of the different skits because you first had to try and figure out how the characters would react to each other. A lot of comedy revolves around you knowing the characters and their personalities; personalities bounce off each other, and that's what makes for some fun dynamics. So when you don't know what boy A thinks of boy B then you just sit there and watch the joke blandly play out.

Lastly, art and music. The art is really bland. Some of the characters look cute, but most of them are average. Some of them look really ugly, some unintentional. I think it was more of a time crunch thing vs anything else, but still, there are a lot of not great shots in this. Because of this blandness, it makes it even harder to determine who's who unless they have some obvious distinguishing factor. Why do the student council boys look so similar to the main trio? There's no point. The girls aren't good either, a lot of them have very similar hair styles so a lot of the time, the characters had to directly say who they were before I understood anything. Also really hated how basically all the girls didn't have eyes. Except for Ringo and Yassan. Just why? It got pretty distracting and only made telling them apart harder. And for the music, it was pretty annoying. So much of it was repeated throughout the series, and it gets grating, especially the skit transition music. A lot of the music I wouldn't mind I think it sounds fine, and I actually like the heavy use of electric guitar, but there's not enough variety. The OP and ED are fiiiine. The ED has a weird charm to it for me, but I know that's just my incredibly weird tastes in music saying that, and to the average person would probably find it rather eargrating.

Anyway, this anime is crazy mid, don't watch it. It's just a waste of time.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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