Let’s start with the fact that this work doesn’t look promising from the synopsis, because the story of protagonist enrolling in a new school is well known for it’s wide usage in shows that prefer to slap your face with a “plot” instead of working on story or developing characters. And like that was not enough the show immediately slaps us with the second clishie (all girls school become co-ed) to justify the amount of “plotwearers” per centimeter, but, oh, the harem and echhi tags are nowhere to be seen! Was I misjudging it the whole time? Let’s move on and see.
And now we are moving on to the part where I can finally express all the mixed feelings that I got from this show.
Story – 3:
There is no much meaning chattering about almost nonexistent story in the show, which simply reusing shounen formula (character finds a rival, defeating him and befriending/getting him out of the MC way) to create a minimal sense of progression. And yeah, sure one can argue that closer to the end we will get ideological fight between old rivals, but that does no change the fact that all show might be described with one sentence without loss of information.
BUT there is a wide space for discussion it’s structural flaws and where it fails and succeed in it’s tries to achieve the goal of being an entertaining show: And first step in this is actually find out what the show tries to deliver to the audience, as you might’ve seen or guessed the comedy + shounen mix, does not necessarily need a deep and complex storyline to shine, so the trouble is obviously not in the shallowness of the story, but rather in a way it working with a tension and delivering… well trying to deliver atmosphere to the audience: from the very beginning the MC looks like a underdog, but manages to surpass any difficult situations he faces, and while this is a typical for the shounen genre to come with that type of fights this show in particular over exaggerating the fact that “good” character are underdogs by such a degree that instead of tension it builds us the comic atmosphere, which looks rather depressing from the viewers perspective. Which might be considered a good thing in a situation, when show by itself comes with a playful attitude it’s just enhances it. Unfortunately, when it actually tries to create a dark or tragic atmosphere it fails miserably due to that simple mistake, as a result most of the fight scenes looks dull and boring.
Graphics – 2:
This is the part is one of the most essential parts in a shounen series, because without a good graphical part it is literally impossible to create satisfying fight scenes. And this is the place where you going to slap yourself into the face a few times, because oh boy it feels like the author does not know anything about fighting or artistic ways of creating a fighting scenes. So what do we have here? The artstyle is pretty simple, the action scenes are quite slow and unartistic, big thanks to our beloved typical anime troubles such as “compulsive technique name showing (yep, not even screaming showing)” and total misrepresentation of the weapon damage, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for ultrarealistic fights with structural damage after just a one sword hit, but this time around the anime represents weapons as something utterly useless, because the ultimate bladed weapon in this show is bare hands… I’ve seen a lot of weird things but in anime before, but this is just too much… And if you ask me why it got into graphics section? The reason is simple the problem is exactly in the way they draw the wounds.
Sound – 1:
Music is not only essential for almost all genres, but it is pretty much a defining feature of anime as a whole. Shounen genre in particular wants the flashy backgrounds for the fighting scenes, but instead of juicy epic soundtracks this show provides us with literally nothing, but disappointment. The OP an ED songs are the essence of the word generic, the BG is almost not existing.
Characters – 5:
Despite all characters of this show is suiting the whole theme of 100% clished, they provides enough for he show to fulfil it’s needs. Some of them are even getting some actual background info in the later parts of the show, which does not help the to evolve from onetrope effigies state, but at least gives the viewers some reasoning behind their actions earlier on.
Enjoyment – 6:
With all that said show still manages to look good due to the unpretentious needs of it’s genre mix and provides an interesting experience, when you are seeing that the show is terrible by the nature, but still continue to watch, because it’s manages to amuse you in a special ways, which is not available for the good shows (such as constant “can it become even worse?” question in a positive way).
With all that said I think that you have already got pretty accurate idea of what show will give you, so I feel that forcing my opinion onto you at the very end would be a bad idea.
