Reviews

Jan 19, 2019
Classroom of the Elite follows in the footsteps of anime like My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU and Assassination Classroom that offer a more jaded perspective on high school life. For this anime, school life for the students runs on a merit-based system where students earn points to cover everyday living expenses based on their grades and behavior on the campus. The main character of focus in this series is Kiyotaka Ayanokouji, a seemingly ordinary student who is part of the first year D class where the school's inferior students are placed.

Classroom of the Elite's jaded approach on high school life is that equality's a sham and it's showing the students that life is completely unfair. The school system within the series is deliberately set up to weed out students oblivious to the manipulative and deceitful nature of many of the staff and students, valuing only those with the intelligence and abilities to see through them. Much of the anime's focus is on Class D overcoming the school's adversity to improve their academic performance and behavior, as the points they earn for their livelihood is dependent on everyone working together cohesively as a class. An interesting element to relevant characters introduced within Class D is that each student has some sort of personal flaw that led to them being entered within said class, such as Horikita's inability to trust others and Kushida's genki gal personality being a facade. There is gradual growth from some of these characters to overcome their personal flaws, though not to a sufficient degree due to the anime having an inconclusive ending.

Another entertaining element to the series are the games of strategy that the classes have against one another. Classroom of the Elite runs on a few episodes arcs where the members of Class D often have to plan and sort out how to overcome a specific crisis facing their class. Each arc devotes enough time to explore how the characters are thinking through developments and the plans they have in mind to either avert the situation, swing events in their favor, or allow more to be revealed about the circumstances of the current situation. For the most part, the series did a great job dropping hints, and offering concise logic and motive with the actions performed by the characters within each arc.

These solid story elements aside, Classroom of the Elite does have its fair share of hiccups. The series does usually get derailed by some fan pandering that detracts from its more cerebral focus, in particular an episode ran in the middle of its run that is mostly an excuse to feature fan service from showing the characters in bathing suits for a pool episode. Kiyotaka's very character is also a bit of a double-edged sword. While shown to have hidden intellectual talents that he's obviously hiding from the class and hints dropped of having an ulterior motive for being at the school, the series doesn't dabble too much into his character's backstory and never really has a chance to develop due to the anime's inconclusive ending, an obvious dilemma due to its light novel source material still being ongoing as of this review. The very premise of the series could also prove to be a barrier for some viewers, as many characters in the series can be quite unlikeable at many points to go along with the anime's more cynical perspective of high school life.

Overall in spite of its mixed reception, I actually found Classroom of the Elite to be rather solid in the execution of its premise exploring the struggles of Class D and showing some solid psychological focus on some of the characters thoughts and machinations. While having its flaws, its premise is still unique enough where I'd at least recommend checking it out at least once.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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