The premise itself is about as generic and uninteresting as it gets: some alien invaders more or less conquered Earth and humanity is on its last ropes. The story then takes place at a remote high school where the students are trained to fight the extraterrestrial invaders. Sounds reasonable enough, except that humanity's last hope now rests on a group of teenagers in needlessly skimpy mecha suits powered by eroticism. Because you know, that sounds like a very reliable solution when the actual worldwide military's missiles, lasers and artillery shells evidentially weren't enough to stop them.
In any case, we have our protagonist Hida Kizuna being sent to this school one day by his sister, with the purpose of literally fondling all the girls in it. Basically, the mecha suits in this show, called "Heart Hybrid Gears", can be artificially powered up by sexually stimulating its wielder, enabling them to actually stand a chance at victory against the alien threat. And that's more or less what the anime is about: the MC consistently ends up in erotic situations with various girls and makes them orgasm in order for them to be able to help protect mankind. Perfect.
Now I just want to make something very clear here: ending up with consistent sexual interactions is by no means a bad thing on paper. It's been proven many times in the past. The problem primarily lies with the underlying reason for why those scenes actually happen to begin with. Let's be real here, almost no one actually cares about the generic story when watching an anime like this. We're in it for the tits and ass and nothing more. So I have to ask, why do you need to go to these ridiculous lengths just to set up a scenario where sexual encounters can happen on a consistent basis? There's no reason it should have to be this complicated. Just look at something like Kiss x Sis for example: almost the entire anime revolves around two sisters lusting for their stepbrother and ending up in borderline hentai situations with him all the time. Why? Because they love him. That's literally all there is to it. We didn't need some alien invasion or mumbo jumbo ero-power or anything like that; all it took was affection, and it worked out great. But in Masou Gakuen we end up with a scenario where literally everything except for the ecchi scenes is absolutely terrible, and as a result it ends up severely dragging down the enjoyment of said ecchi scenes as well since they become so far-fetched and forced in the process.
Another huge make-or-break factor for ecchi/harems is of course the heroine cast, and this anime is is also a big disappointment on that front. They're all extremely shallow and stereotypical, and pretty much solely exist for the sake of being someone for the MC to get his hands on. They're the kind of girls whose entire characterization can be summarized by their breasts, and speaking of which, more than half of them also have these horrible physics-defying watermelon boobs which I'm getting seriously fed up with by now.
One comment you end up seeing fairly often from ecchi haters is that "ecchi anime is useless since you could just watch hentai instead", and while I don't agree with this logic since there are multiple other reasons to watch ecchi anime beyond just to get off to them, in Masou Gakuen's case I'm almost inclined to say it'd probably be true. Because seriously the ecchi scenes in this anime are not seductive, creative, fetishy or anything like that; they're basically censored porn. Like they're not actually having sex but we pretty much get finger banging, cunnilingus and more, and the girls are evidentially orgasming as a result of it. I mean it's literally the kind of explicit stuff that belongs in hentai, merely that we don't get to see genitalia directly. On top of that the girls are treated like nothing more than sexual objects rather than respectable characters, which is also something you'd expect to find in hentai instead. They're like walking manikins whose sole reason for existing is to be molested. Honestly I find it genuinely disrespectful, and I bet feminists would have a field day with it if they gave this anime a shot. So whenever I was watching one of the "bonding" scenes of Masou Gakuen, I just couldn't help but feel like there really wasn't much point to it given the available options.
On top of those scenes though, the anime also has some more generic and lame ecchi content such as the aforementioned skimpy mecha outfits they're all wearing. I've always wondered whether anime creators expect their viewers to be masturbating or being hyped when they put these half-naked anime girls into life-or-death battles so often... you can't both have the cake and eat it after all. Also sometimes it feels like the anime is seriously trying to enforce ecchi content when it really shouldn't, for example there's this one scene where the bad guys have captured one of the girls and are supposedly going to torture her for information, so what do they do? Of course, they decide to strip her and try to make her climax in the hopes that that'll make her talk. Not only does this make no sense from a logical standpoint, but also do you really expect me to be turned on from some cringeworthy and irrational torture scene? Like seriously?
Ultimately I just can't understand what the actual intention is behind anime like this. If they're trying to turn people on, why does the mecha fighting and cringeworthy plot elements even exist? And if they're trying to create an exciting post-apocalyptic action show, there's obviously no need for all this facepalm-worthy "ero power" crap. If you wanted to come up with an ecchi anime where the MC has a legitimate excuse for doing sexual things to girls on a consistent basis, you could just do something like a show with a normal guy in a normal high school who one day gets cursed so that if he doesn't do something erotic with girls on a frequent basis then something bad will happen to him, or something like that. I'm not saying that would be an amazing anime, but on paper it already sounds a lot better than what Masou Gakuen is doing, and that took me like 5 seconds to think up. The bottom line is: if you want to do a show revolving around sexual encounters, just keep things simple. Just do enough in order to make the scenes not feel forced and leave it at that. Proper execution of the ecchi scenes is literally all most of the viewers actually care about after all. Doing things the other way around is just naïve and ignorant.
So is there anything good about Masou Gakuen in the end? Well the OP and ED were both pretty decent so that's something at least, but that's hardly enough to carry it. I guess if you're a diehard fan of all things ecchi and don't care about execution quality at all then you might want to give this a shot, but otherwise I really wouldn't recommend it.
Oh and as the cherry on top we get an inconclusive cliffhanger ending followed by “To Be Continued”. Could it possibly get any better?
