Youkoso Jitsuryoku Shijou Shugi no Kyoushitsu e
Classroom of the Elite

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You-Zitsu, otherwise known as Classroom of the Elite in english is a novel series that I had heard about for awhile (mainly because of the anime), but didn't read until recently last year. The reason that I even started reading this novel was because I noticed it at Barnes and Noble and decided might as well give it a try. I am so glad that I did because CotE has become easily my favorite light novel of all time and I will try to attempt to tell you and convince you why. (This is my first review so my bad if it is not up ... to par.)

1. Story (10/10)
The story of Classroom of the Elite is easily one of the best parts of this series. When I started reading it, I also watched the anime as well as soon as I finished the parts that were adapted and was surprised at how much different the cores of the story were different from each other. If you watched the anime, which adapted the first 3 volumes, you probably watched what is in my opinion the worst (although not worst as in bad, just relative to the rest of the first year) part of the first year. Although, if you watched the ending of the anime or have read the third volume, you may have noticed a major shift in the story. I'm not going to spoil anything but from volume 4 on the story completely changes from its original Oregairu vibes and becomes more and more interesting. Not only do we get to see more and more interesting exams, we have long build ups and create even better pay-offs. Additionally, in the end of the 5th volume, we get another added aspect to the story that will slowly build up and become a major factor in the future volumes and even more so in the second year. I don't want to say too much, but one thing I will say is that everything that happens in the story makes sense, I don't recall one moment that I though to myself that the thing that just happens makes no sense or is an asspull.

2. Art (10/10)
Usually, light novel artworks don't particularly impress me, especially when compared to manga artists. However, I think that Tomose Shunsaku is the first LN artist that has made me change my opinion about this. The character design of all of the characters in this series is AMAZING. I was so impressed with the artwork that I bought both of the artbooks by Tomose Shunsaku and they are currently some of my favorite books that I own. The hair color, the body designs, the way the eyes are drawn are all so well drawn, and if you enjoy that you can check out more of Shunsaku's works because needless to say they are pretty interesting.

3. Character (10/10)
I know I said the story was one of the best parts, but I would be lying if I didn't say that the characters within CotE were not incredible as well. First off, lets start with Ayanokouji. Ayanokouji is probably one of the most interesting protagonists that I have ever read in a light novel. When I read/watch that first 3 vols/12 episodes of CotE, I am blown away that I am seeing the same person at all. If you are a person that has only watched or read that first part, and were concerned about him as a protagonist early on, let me just tell you the development that he has throughout the course of this first year is well worth the read alone. Also, his backstory is one that actually suits the story and actual makes sense unlike a lot of backstories of these type of light novels. Not only Ayanokouji, but every single student that has development has their reasons and backstories to fit why they were put in this school and why they were put in their respective classes, which is a super interesting thing to find out as you read. Aside from Ayanokouji, there is so many great characters that have a crazy amount of good development as well. Characters such as Ichinose, Karuizawa, Horikita and a lot more get so much attention and character building, it makes it so hard to pick a best girl. Additionally, characters such as Ryuuen and Koenji add such a dynamic aspect to the story, and their unpredictability makes such a great cast of characters fit together. I could go on and on about the characters, but I promise that if you read this novel, you will definitely find atleast one character to like from it.

4. Enjoyment (10/10)
I have never read a novel series or been excited to start the next volume in any other light novel series. I am really glad that I started so late that I could binge all of it so fast. The build ups that occur during this novel and the developments of the characters are some of the best that I have experienced reading novels so far. Not only was this first year really good, it set up the next year to have the potential to be even greater. With a concept like CotE, I could see how recurring elements could end up making this series kind of boring, however with the set up that happens over the course of this year, the second year brings a whole lot of interesting developments that are going to be exciting to experience. If you can get past the somewhat slow of a start that the 3 volumes are, you will not be disappointed in how the story progresses and builds.

5. Overall (10/10)
You-Zitsu will likely be my favorite novel series for a long time and with the second year just getting started, we are likely in for a long and while ride. This was my first review, so if you read this far thank you for reading and I hope that I could convince you to read without giving to much away about the story.

Welcome to Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School where we take in the most competent among the elite students for the sake of Japan's future. Or at least that was what the story was supposed to do. Instead, we are left with an incoherent group of students who competes for the title of Edge Lord.

Honestly, I enjoyed Classroom of the Elite. This light novel series intrigued me enough to complete two volumes a day. I don't usually find stories set in school enjoyable, but this was indeed a page-turner. But although engaging, is the story in its ... entirety good? My answer would be no. My enjoyment is, after all, subjective, and not everyone would have the same experience. Enjoyment does not equal being objectively good, and it took me a while before I decided to write a review so I could remove any bias I may have. I don't want it to look like I dislike the story (Which I don't), so I'll say this now; this review is mainly criticizing the flaws of Classroom of the Elite. Spoilers are mentioned further in the review.

The story takes place in a school supported by the Japanese government to raise students to lead the country in the imminent future. Basically, a standard school's vision but put to the extreme. They don't accept students with academic superiority alone but students who are also competent in separate fields like judgment, physical ability, and cooperativeness. So everyone has a chance to enter the school. This sets up the first flaw, which is the students present in the institution. It just seems too easy to be accepted. Each year 160 students from Japan can enter the school, meaning that 160 out of millions of students in Japan are selected to enter the country's top school. This part makes me question why students like Ike, Sakura, and many others got accepted in the first place. With the school's standards, I can understand why Sudou got in and why students like Koenji and Horikita are in class D despite their overwhelming competence. But students with straight C's and even B's in all the fields by logic should not have passed the school's standards. Mediocrity being allowed in the country's best school doesn't make sense. It's the same flaw I find with My Hero Academia, with students like Mineta and Hagakure passing UA High school and in the hero course at that. It may look like I'm nitpicking characters, but it's clear that students incompetent in all fields of ability are present in the institution.

After passing the entrance exams and the interview, these said students are assigned to a class decided by their competence. Many institutions use this method in real life, but what makes this interesting is that this is the part of the narrative where the author associated the question involving equality, but inherently, does that even matter? Are the different classes representative of hierarchy? The higher classes as a representation of those with power and the lower ones as powerless? The first scene of the story shows an exchange of words showing a brief social commentary that explains the topic. However, once the story arrives at the school, it doesn't matter anymore or, at least, fails to bring correspondence. It's just a poor attempt to use the flawed school system and characters as an analogy of society.

Yes, the school is indeed flawed. Firstly, how rich is Japan? The school gives free money to the students each month and supplies the items in each store throughout the school, including an entire mall. Not to mention that the school hired all the employees for all the stores, owns crews ship, and gives extra class points and private points given as awards for tests.

The amount of money used for the school brings up another question; is the result worth it? Using this method to create "Elites," I mean. Half of the graduates would probably just work jobs that ordinary graduates could do. With wasting millions of Yen on students' allowance, billions or even trillions on infrastructure, employment, and miscellaneous. Japan is just going to add more to its debt before any of the students here makes a change for the country's economy. A competitive school environment where students are left to their own devices isn't needed to make these elites. If anything else, the white room seems to be a better place to use that money.

Let's see, what else... A student council that has all power over the school, check; rules left with holes to be bent for the sake of the plot, check; that's about it, I suppose. Tell me if there's anything else I've missed.

Now for the characters. Firstly, Kiyotaka Ayanokouji; Arguably the only character worth criticism, but I'll still tackle the general cast later. Ayanokouji is portrayed as this super-genius, well-hung kid, but he chooses to hide his genius to fit in with the rest of the students and have an ordinary student life. In doing so, he purposely scored a half-perfect score in all subjects of the entrance exams and a few others after that. He should have at least tried to have an arbitrary set of scores for each subject so it wouldn't look painfully obvious. In addition, his scores would have been more believable if he hadn't answered the hard questions correctly while he answered wrong to some of the easy questions. In any ordinary school, his performance wouldn't have been that important. However, in his environment where competence is needed and filled, or supposed to be filled, with other geniuses, wouldn't appearing to be competent be a better way to not stand out?

Ayanokouji's initial motive was to live as an ordinary student, but this was interfered with due to being caught up in other people's business. He got the attention of highly acclaimed students and competition, and Chabashira sensei threatened him to compete for class A. Of course, this could have been avoided if he didn't stand out too much due to his test scores and going overboard on special tests like the race with Manabu. That's all my criticism for our protagonist, everything else about his character is very thought out, especially his development in connotation to his past and initial personality, from a very apathetic person to slowly developing feelings for someone and accepting his friends. However, that does render his infamous monologue in volume three irrelevant.

Now for the general cast. We have the perfect stereotypes to create a generic high school classroom. Sudo, A tuff guy who can't control his temper; Hirata, the class' heart rob and representative; Kurizawa; an annoying girl who is in a "relationship" with the said handsome class representative; Suzune Horikita, the class genius; Kushida, our yandere with big fucking tiddies; girls in the "hot girls" clique, a few introverts, and a bunch of morons who have no significant qualities (As I have already mentioned, these idiots shouldn't even be in the school, to begin with). Also, why do some high school students look like divorced fathers in their forties? While generic, that doesn't mean all of the characters are inherently bad. There are a couple of exemptions; Sudou and Kurizawa.

Sudou's character is great to show the audience of the school's standards (If it wasn't for other idiots, at least). The school's description in the light novel places high emphasis on not accepting students who are only intellectually competent. In Sudou's case, it's his athletism that got him admitted. And his development on slowly improving his grades, whether having his motivation (Suzune) or not, makes him an even better character. I only have a couple of minor problems with his character, that would be that he was too dumb initially, and the other being his sudden affection for Suzune Horikita. I wish there could have been a gradual development to his feelings rather than "If Ayanokouji doesn't like her, then I'll like her instead." Kei is also a decent character, but that was only prominent after being Ayanokouji's tool. Loving someone she hated might seem like an overused cliché, but her relationship with Ayanokouji prior to the confession scene makes it work.

Despite my criticism, I would actually like to recommend this to anyone, unless they absolutely hate edgy characters and pseudo-intellectual dialogue. Yes, it's filled with flaws but, the author was able to make it engaging, especially to those fond of power fiction in the shape of an intellectually prominent setting. If you believe I may be wrong with any of these statements or if I left something out, feel free to discuss it with me as my main objective is not to hate on the story but to give voice to the minority.

Classroom of the Elite peaked at the first chapter. Yep, you’ve read that right, literally the first chapter is the best this novel has to offer, and it only goes downhill afterwards. I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm not writing that as just some clickbait introduction sentence, that is very much my honest opinion.

It offered interesting points about ethics and morality, piquing my interest in the series. Commendably so, as it managed to have meaningful content in a scene that’s just about whether to offer your seat in public transport or not. The problem is that this chapter is set in real world, while ... rest of the novel isn’t. Not to be misunderstood, Classroom of the Elite isn’t some sort of isekai, what I mean is that the core setting is a controlled environment clear of outside influence with a fake “society” set up. Which in turn makes the attempted portrayal at psychology of the character and social commentary fake also, as it doesn’t relate to actual realistic society.

Now, that could still work if the story had interesting characters that could engage in some intriguing chemistry. Unfortunately that is not the case. I’d like to start with the protagonist, who is the most interesting character in this novel, but that isn’t really saying much, just that the rest is much worse off. It’s an interesting concept – a character that looks average to the observers but is in fact very capable and hiding as an average joe is part of their calculations. It’s not an original idea, sure, but sounds interesting enough. The problem with Ayanokouji is that his character seems to be crafted this way just so the readers could roleplay and imagine themselves and someone who is actually not average like the reader is in reality but super great awesome person. Yep, the plague of light novel world, the blatant self-insert is in motion once again, together with the “lone wolf” aesthetics so popularized by Oregairu.

The problem with Ayanokouji is the difference between his character setting and his actual portrayal in the story. Exhibit A: to not attract unwanted attention he poses as an average student, intentionally hiding his true abilities. To do that he answer the test literally 50% correctly and to achieve that he answers some very difficult questions correctly while also failing some easy ones. This of course brings unwanted attention to him, the opposite of desired result. One doesn’t have to be genius to think of just simulating what an average result would mean, which does not mean literally 50% correct. Another example is more of a theme carrying though the whole novel than just one instance. You see, Ayanokouji’s behaviour as not so capable regular student is supposed to be just a camouflage, while his real personality is not regular at all. This idea crashes on the novel being told from his point of the view most of the time. He should have no need to continue this act in his inner thoughts but he is actually portrayed as boring character without interesting insights in the narration with just few exceptions. Those moments where his “true” personality comes out are good, but there’s just very few of them. I’m not against the concept of unreliable narrator and the mc appearing as normal to the reader even through his own narration up to the first reveal would be good writing, but there is no need to still keep his narration uninteresting for rest of the novel. There’s also the thing of lack of description of his mental process, but more about that later.

Another illogical character is Chabashira-sensei. A person that is described by an extreme desire for her class to be succesfull, but also letting her class to get the worst start ever, effectively shooting herself in the foot for no reason other than the feeling of emergency being added to the plot. Is she clumsy? Short-sighted? Or just forced to make blunders that contradict her real goals? Who knows, her character is a mess.

Rest of the characters can be grouped together. Why have I singled out Ayanokouji and Chabashira? Because those two are the only ones whose names I remember without looking up if I’m right. And for Chabashira it’s only because I think her name sounds funny. Yes, lot of the characters just kind of… merge together. Multiple times I had to look up a name to find out who is the novel even talking about. Now, I won’t lie, I’m usually bad with remembering names, but usually I can still differ between the characters. Here, most of the characters don’t have personality interesting or individual enough to be able to be identified by different means other then their names. That is not something that’s supposed to happen. Even if the reader is bad with names (and I’m hardly the only one who is), they should still be able to tell the characters apart.

This if course ties to the ultimate problem of Classroom of the Elite which is that the characters just didn’t intrigue me enough for me to care about what is happening to them. I didn’t become invested in the story and there is no character for which I could care less as to what would happen to them. Ultimately I couldn’t find any reason to continue reading this other than my completionist compulsion.

The story itself is way too cyclic. Most the volumes are just the school making some exam with stupid rules that end with the protagonist (sometimes with help of Horitaka) causing his class to survive the ordeal. There is no sense of emergency as you know that even if everyone is fucked it’s not like the protagonist is in any actual danger at being expelled (and it’s not like I’d care even if he did, the whole cast could drop dead and I would only rejoice I don’t have to read any more of this). I’d even go as far as to say that for most volumes you could read the start and the finally, completely skipping the middle part and you wouldn’t miss out on anything important. To come back at what I hinted in the character paragraph, the problem with Ayanokouji is also that the process of creating his plans isn’t exactly… described. He just has a plan that he came up with offscreen and is revealed to the reader at the end of the volume. We don’t see him struggle with making it or even thinking about creating it, he just magically poofs it into existence because he is a genius with answer to anything. This makes me think that the author is unable to write the process and he’s pretty much reverse engineering problems to solutions he himself wrote. Such is the problem when mediocre authors attempt to write a genius character, it just isn’t believable. This novel feels pseudointellectual in a sense that it tries to appear intelligent, but it also aims at average readers as the demographics, so it only has to maintain an illusion it is something of value instead of actually having to be well written. No offense to those that enjoyed this literary work.

Just as a small side note about the setting – the system of the school doesn’t even make much sense. It’s supposed to create/recruit elite that would stimulate the country. But it keeps trying to expel people that don’t excel in every way. Why is there a need for someone who wants to the best baseball player to complete the same requirements as a talented mathematician, and vice versa? I’d expect teaching methods more focused on individual value in a so called elite school. Like, you could face being expelled if you fail a damn glorified popularity poll lmao. Sorry to break it to you fictional version of Japan, but people that excel at literally everything are quite hard to find, to the point of it being a miraculous occurrence. Good luck filling a whole class with that. Well, it works in the world of Classroom of the Elite, because the classroom isn’t actually filled with elites – most of the students are pretty much regular people that are mooching of the leaders of classes to get through the school year with the help of schemes of somebody else. Is that what the future elite of the nation is supposed to be? I don’t think so. It’s actually funny how in comparison the system Hope’s Peak Academy makes much more sense if the goal is to bring up the best of future generation and nurture their talents (however tragically that ended up). And Danganronpa even doesn’t take itself seriously all the time unlike Classroom of the Elite (and thanks for that, as it gives it its unique charm).

And as more of a footnote about the illustration, do the spreads really have to be so fanservicey? I know that illustrations sell, but reducing the characters to their racks isn’t exactly helping with portrayal of the story as something of value. No surprises here though, as other works by the artist are mostly straight out porn.

Originally I was going to give this 6/10 because, well, it’s not exactly bad, it just isn’t isn’t good either. Then I thought about how much I had to force myself through most of the volumes, how I didn’t look forward to reading more at all and how it just felt as a waste of time, so I felt it would be unfair to put it on the same level as some of the other titles I’ve rated with 6/10. So 5/10 it is. If you want to read something with intellectual battles full of scheming and outsmarting, there’s plenty of other works like that, some of them even being actually good. Death Note being the most popular one, there’s also Legend of the Galactic Heroes for which the original novel doesn’t get nearly enough attention it deservers or for example works by Fukumoto Nobuyuki in general. If you want something about a character that looks generic on the outside but is in fact highly irregular, there’s Zaregoto Circle by NisiOisiN. All those examples actually portray mind process of the protagonists, and that's how mentally gifted characters should be written. Of course, if you’re satisfied just with characters magically outsmarting everyone effortlessly because the author said that they are supposed to be smart, you can go watch Code Geass or something.