High School Fleet OVA

Before reviewing this short but entertaining OVA, I would like to clarify few things.

High School Fleet, or Haifuri in short, isn't just a CGDCT anime. Rather, I would say it is fairly heavier with its themes and does a good job at presenting them. So I would suggest you to give the original series a watch. There's a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Haifuri OVA, just like the original series, also succeeded at entertaining me with its light-hearted and well executed narrative.


Story (5)

As a result of its final conflict with the rebellious Musashi, Harekaze receives critical damage, which leads to the possibility ... that it won't be able to sail again. To rub even more salt into their wound, rumors about the Harekaze class being disbanded start spreading around the entire school.

Haifuri OVA revolves around how the Harekaze girls, led by Kouko, try their best to solve this arising problem.

As you would expect from an OVA, the story isn't anything special. But it doesn't mean that it isn't enjoyable as well. Although it was obvious that the rumors aren't actually true, it's quite entertaining to see the girls trying to find a way to stop their class from being dissolved. I even became a bit emotional at the end of the OVA.


Art (8)

There are OVAs of some shows that suffer from the problem of having worse animation than the original show. But in High School Fleet's case, the animation in the OVA is just as decent as the original show. The artstyle of isn't very unique, but all of the characters look very adorable and have decent character designs. As a result of having such a big cast of high school girls, however, very few of them share somewhat similar character designs. It's not that big a problem, though.


Sound (7)

The soundtrack of both Haifuri and its OVA isn't quite memorable. Though most songs are sort of entertaining to listen to, they aren't spectacular in any way. The opening song and the ending song are decent, but I wouldn't exactly call them great.

The voice acting is great, though. All the VAs performed very decently. They were able to decently express the personalities of the characters, which definitely added more to my enjoyment of the OVA.


Character (7)

What High School Fleet lacked the most in was its characters. With such a big cast of characters, the show failed to develop all the characters properly, which irked me a little. So, does the OVA solve that problem?

No, it doesn't. Would you really expect an OVA to do what the show wasn't able to do within only 2 episodes? But I would say the characters are quite decent nonetheless. The OVA also gives more screentime to some of the characters that didn't get much screentime in the show, which is a really admirable aspect.

As I said earlier, I even became a little emotional at the end of the OVA. Why, though? The story isn't even that sad. Yes, it's true that the story isn't that sad. But still, I couldn't but help feel a bit emotional as I was fairly attached to some of the characters and cared about them quite a lot.

Among all the characters, Kouko receives the most screentime in this OVA, which I honestly didn't mind at all since I think she's very likeable. Despite acting a little weird at times, she is an entertaining girl to say the least.


Enjoyment (7)

I had almost the same amount of fun watching Haifuri OVA as I had watching its original show. As I mentioned before, a quite decent amount of effort was put into its animation and voice acting. I was pretty entertained watching the OVA almost the entire time. The Mahjong and the Shogi/Japanese Chess part was quite confusing for me, though, as I basically don't have any proper knowledge of either of these games.


Overall (7)

Overall, Haifuri OVA is quite entertaining. It isn't best OVA I've watched, but it's still pretty decent. Suffice it to say, if you enjoyed the original series, you're most likely going to enjoy this OVA as well. So, I recommend watching this OVA to all of the people that enjoyed watching the series. And if you haven't watched Haifuri yet, I also recommend you giving it a try.

I'll give Haifuri OVA an overall score of 7, the same score I gave to Haifuri.