It's supposed to be a winning combination: Make a new anime, sort of like the hit series Girls und Panzer, only with warships. Surely it'll be better than KanColle because it's not flippin' ridiculous!
Or so I thought.
The characters are cliche, but mostly in a good way-- uber optimist airhead skipper, straight-laced XO (cue manzai combo), quiet gunner, scaredy-cat helmswoman, "kill 'em all" ("hot-blooded" as they say in Japanese) torpedo officer and chief engineer. Yeah, they kinda seem one-dimensional at first, but in a way that you could have fun with it and laugh at them. The Harekaze captain and XO's conflict could have been better written (too cringeworthy and a little overacted), but honestly, I've seen much worse. I really wanted to like the log officer, but unfortunately the dramatizations/impressions got way too old (I yelled, "YES!!" when her shipmates told her it wasn't funny-- I'm glad the writer doesn't take himself (herself?) too seriously).
I do like the character designs, even though some of the girls look too young to be in high school. I'm not a huge military history buff, but the ships looked really good and well-modeled to my untrained eye, and the battle scenes were well-animated. Seeing the refit of the Harekaze from old IJN guns to USN 5-inch guns was a nice touch, I think-- subtly hinting that there was no Pacific war because Japan didn't need to expand (yeah, it's fantasy, I didn't say it was believable). Watching the bridge crew members discuss armor penetration oddly reminded me of Star Trek episodes, so that was fun.
The show's premise and story are a little weak for a production that's shooting for more of a drama than a comedy. The idea that this alternate universe never developed powered flight is poorly told (a couple of lines of dialogue and probably the website), and is designed to set up a mano-e-mano showdown between a battleship and a destroyer. That's really sloppy writing-- find some other way to put the carriers out of the picture, thanks. Better yet, come up with a good story that involves carriers. I feel that, along with a battleship shrugging off salvo after salvo of modern torpedoes, took a lot of air out of the climax's sails, so to speak. The show seems to me to have had a lot of difficulty trying to balance out the serious drama and the humor, never really knowing whether to take itself seriously or not. One moment it's "OMG we're wanted for mutiny!", the next, "Uh, girls, aren't you a little too relaxed for a ship on the run?" Then there's the final scene of the show, which makes Girls und Panzer's tank physics look downright realistic.
Despite that, I really liked the "antagonist" of the show, and I wish that the mousers got more action, if only to hear Tsuruoka (Huh. He sounded like Jouji Nakata. Had me fooled.) act like a cat in his own unique way.
The greatest weakness, IMHO, is the soundtrack. Come on, guys, after hearing the soaring melodies of Strike Witches and the fun marches of Girls und Panzer, you couldn't find someone who could write decent music that didn't depend heavily on the synthesizer? The "derp" scenes are too accentuated by the BGM (this is a serious anime... right?... guys??), and because there wasn't enough work put into matching the digital instruments with the tunes, the battle music stuck out like a sore thumb as a result. It's frustrating as a musician to hear this. I watched an AMV of High School Fleet set to Anchors Aweigh, and frankly, I'd prefer that to the soundtrack even though none of the ships featured are American. There's only one tune that I could listen to, and it's the one that was worked on the most: the BGM played when the fleet sets sail.
Despite its flaws, I enjoyed the show, and the follow-up OVA was a wonderful way to tie up loose ends.
