The plot of School Days follows Makoto, a first year High School Student. The plot is a rather typical romance and he became particularly interested with a girl named Kotonoha. Through becoming acquaintances with Sekai, the girl that sits next to him in her homeroom who was very interested in Makoto’s crush. Sekai hooked those two up but despite this, she developed feelings for Makoto himself leading to a series of conflicts. The plot of School Days does not follow the typical harem. Makoto starts off as the typical indecisive and innocent character like most harems but his paths does not follow the typical romance. In fact, School Days is about how indecisiveness corrupts someone. Makoto’s indecisive nature led him to have an affair with Sekai and to also date her while not ending off her relationship with Kotonoha. This led to a multitude of problems as Makoto indecisive nature led him to trick Sekai as well and end up being adulterous with other women and going on cheating sprees. This led to chaos is his romantic life while he hurt both Kotonoha and Sekai’s feelings leading the majority of viewers to despise him and the anime as well as the harem is so atypical and unpredictable and the constant cheating does get dragged on at certain points and felt boring at times though this was curtailed through the final murder of Makoto. The atypical and unpredictable nature of School Days help us reevaluate the harem genre rather successfully deconstructing it.
The characters in the anime are all rather despicable, at least a lot of them end up to be despicable. As we all probably already know, Makoto went on cheating sprees due to his indecisive nature. Sekai after hooking up Kotonoha with Makoto fell in love with Makoto herself and took action upon that feeling and Kotonoha seemingly infatuated with Makoto and denying the fact that Makoto is cheating with Sekai while being completely emotionally devastated. There is also Setsuna, Sekai’s best friends who protects Sekai ended up falling for Makoto himself before leaving for France. Perhaps one of the most crucial thing in this anime is how the characters develop especially with Makoto. Makoto starts off being this loveable innocent young man to slowly transitioning to this despicable lusty sex-addicted devil because of his nature for a typical male character which is indecisiveness. Meanwhile in most harem romance, the main male character does not develop much and suddenly overcome his indecisive nature at one point or sometimes even not and somehow end up with one of the main female characters. Many people claim that the characters are the worst part of School Days, however, I would disagree. The characters in School Days though very despicable are very well executed and completely serve their purpose. Despicable characters do not necessarily demonstrate low-quality characters.
School Days also did a rather average job with its sound with more than 42 soundtracks including openings and endings. Most of them fit the anime rather well with some of them being rather out of place. The voice acting however is a bit disappointing at times as some of the characters’ voice sound unpleasantly whining and annoying especially with Makoto’s, however they are done with a purpose. Sekai’s voice however is just awesome while other characters do not have the same effect. The quality of the sound also is not really high-budget and doesn’t sound completely crisp and clear.
Finally, School Days did a horrendously lazy job with its animation with a lot of notable shortcuts in its animation techniques. Though the animation seems acceptable, many of it was extremely lazy and the laziness was quite notable. Sometimes the movement seems completely unrealistic and hilarious. Overall, the animation wasn’t completely awful and was OK to look at. But sometimes they pay more attention to details that don’t matter much and less attention to facial expressions. One thing that School Days tend to do is rotate images to one side which lacks purpose but personally does not bother me though it might bother others.
Despite School Days being hated, it is definitely not as bad as one thinks when carefully analyzed. It successfully serves as a deconstruction of the harem genre and does not follow the typical route of any other protagonist in the harem genre. The main issues with School Days is its fairly low budget leading it to an unfantastic job with its sound and animation.
