Master of Martial Hearts is to this day the worst piece of trash I’ve ever encountered and reviewed in a long winded, but justified rant. Being a poorly constructed, disgustingly hypersexualized, nonsensical trip through what amounts to an uninspired story that leads to something that is number one on my list of things that are vile. Not helped by how unwarranted the descent into such a mean spirited turn is the most contrived piece of narrative bullshit that has come from a respectable studio. School Days was viewed in my mind as the sister series to Master of Martial Hearts, and is the pee in face compared to MOMH’s poo in the face.
School Days Review
Studio: TNK
Length: 12 episodes
Availability: Subbed on CrunchyRoll
School Days’ plot is akin to it’s title in terms of a dull set-up. Male protagonist with little to no noteworthy features (Makoto) is infatuated with a big breasted, but quiet girl who he sees on the train (Kotonoha). However, the boy lacks any means of forming a relationship, so he is assisted by the girl he sits next to in class (Sekai). Okay, maybe not as equally bland, but very low key and basic from the starting point. Which unfortunately leads to a series of relatively uninteresting episodes to kick off the series as Makoto is kept as a guy who really wants to be with a girl, but doesn’t quite get how relationships work, Sekai being the very cookie-cutter form of energetic, and Kotonoha wanting to take this relationship slow.
However, as time goes on, namely the end of the third episode, it is revealed that Makoto went from being satisfied with just looking at a pretty girl to wanting to break it off. Being a friendly sort, Sekai tries to make her more affectionate, but Makoto is greedy and demands more than she is willing to offer, so he has sex with Sekai. From that film length starting point of five episodes, Kotonoha ends up going into an inhuman level of denial that gets increasingly worse as time goes on. With Makoto’s lust growing to the point where he starts going around the school and banging girls he knew in middle school or just normal high school girls who wish to have sex with him because… I think he just has a really big penis to be quite honest.
That is, until the sex tape that was placed by the girl’s Basketball club leaks depicting Makoto with another woman, sending Sekai down a path of isolation while Makoto blazes a trail through some vagina. Which lasts until Sekai’s best friend, whose importance is represented by how she’s only coming up now in the synopsis, needs to move away and leave her best friend who she didn’t tell about this arrangement. The best friend offers her virginity to the plucker of cherries so that he would remain faithful. The next scene, he is seen waking up with a minor character.
Sekai then returns to school, and reveals to Makoto and the entire class that she is indeed pregnant with Makoto’s child. Makoto views himself as stuck with her as she now wants to live with him and make him dinner every night, but he has needs and wants to get all the sex he can. No girl wants to talk to him though, so he eventually stumbles into Kotonoha, who has gone completely bonkers as Makoto has ignored her, making her both unable to comprehend Makoto not being her boyfriend. Makoto then tries tells Sekai to get the hell out of his house, getting pissed at her for possibly getting pregnant, as he returns home and makes out with Kotonoha in front of Sekai. Seaki considers this along with the news that Makoto was in a relationship with her best friend, and how Makoto texted her the address of a “clinic” as justification to murder him. Kotonoha then comes to see Makoto’s body that apparently has ink for blood, and chooses to cut his head off, shove it in a bag, kill Sekai, and go on a sailboat into the sea. The End.
That might sound like I am skimming through a lot, more than would be permissible from a summary. However, that is pretty much what happens, and I could leave my review right there, so all could understand the low score that I attach to it… but I hyped this review up too much to leave it at five hundred-ish words. Where to begin… Makoto. In terms of his actions and his reasoning for it, he is an unnaturally sexually active teenage boy who demonstrated no remarkable skills and seems to only care about getting laid after being scared to talk to a girl. Which is an interesting change that has potential, but so much of his character arch is missing, taking large leaps while Makoto is still portrayed as the everyman character that he started out as. When he’s the man who fucked a girl as collateral for him to remain faithful in a relationship, before having sex with another partner the next day.
While Sekai was apparently getting girl wood the moment she laid eyes on the sexual satisfactory figure that was and is Makoto. Planning on making him her’s, with Kotonoha acting as an introduction point that really does not make much sense no matter how I look at the plan. She kisses Makoto at the end of episode one, but then tries to direct Kotonoha into being more affectionate to Makoto, which just comes off as inconsistent. But not any more than her reaction to Makoto being with other women. She sees him in a sex tape where he bangs out with a girl he hadn’t seen for years and then goes into isolation. But when she sees Makoto push her out of his life to be with Kotonoha, she gets so upset that she kills him by stabbing him in the chest about six times before running away. This being a woman who was thrilled, delighted, and in bliss over the lie about her having Makoto’s baby, which was apparently a lie because reasons.
Oh, but Kotonoha is arguably the worst. The trope of a bookish attractive girl is in the whatever range in my book, and she does start out fairly realistic from what I can grasp about modern Japanese relationships. However, her utter devotion to Makoto, which in story lasts for somewhere between a week before the obligatory Culture Fair and Christmas-ish, is unexplained. The closest thing to an excuse I can find is how she was bullied by a group of mean girls who either stop mocking her as she tears up, or just trip her and laugh after she dropped her stuff. Even then, she becomes a goldarn zombie, unable to accept any reality except one where she is with Makoto, going so far off the deep end to caress his head before she dies of dehydration. All while having her disturbed state of mind ignored by, say, her minor character of a little sister.
In fact, this brings up something of a question I have about all of these characters. Where are their parents? The show keeps things relatively realistic aside from the ending and one scene involving mascots getting into a riot with school girls cosplaying as “Little Sisters”. Yet I can’t recall a single time where these children even mentioned their parents. Something that may just be part of Japanese culture that I am unaware of, but it is baffling how uninvolved and unattentive any adult in this world is. Hell, I can’t even remember if the one teacher shown had a character design to go with his voice. There was sex happening in your school during the Culture Festival, but twenty girls can see it without one of them telling?
Oh, and if you think there is a subplot explaining that chestnut, there really isn’t. It is a random bump in events that makes no sense regardless of how bitchy a certain group of high school girls may appear. The best reason I could muster goes back with the poor portrayal of the two female leads as somebody, or somebodies in the planning and writing stages of something in the production of this show had an utterly terrible understanding of women. Resulting in some of the most poorly written women I’ve ever seen in media, as it is so easy to see them as caricatures of crappy tropes attached to the female gender. Though, I suppose it could very easily apply to people in general, if Makoto is any indicator. Along with his friend who may or may not have raped with Kotonoha after telling her that Makoto doesn’t love her.
Which also helps support my utter apathy built for these characters, as they all come up as awful people to a certain extent. Betraying relationships for your own lustful desires. Devotion to a fault with no concern for others. Lying about your life in order to ultimately force someone to be your life partner. Leave your friend behind because you can’t bear to say goodbye, but are willing to take a penis in the vagina. Show sex tapes of people for the LOLs. Or rape a girl because they are in shock and you really wanted to. It is the story of terrible people, who meet a terrible end, resulting in a terrible story that has no redeeming values as it ends with one of the most jarring endings I’ve ever seen. Oh, and as for visuals, I did not recognize a character until she did her hair into buns, and I paused to look at a group of character, noticing how they all had the same face. It doesn’t do much beyond the expected levels of motion, and delivers little in regards to design quality.
School Days is bad. That is common knowledge among those who know of it’s existence, and while it is not the worst in my book, it is around number two. It begins innocent enough, eventually grows rather dull, and then falls into something that is not so much mean spirited and nonsensical, but rather a story told very poorly. School Days is, well, a girl murdering her father with an axe. Something you’ll probably forget in a week, but still unpleasant.
Poor (3/20)
Barely any good in the product, often just being stupid, boring, or unbearably uninvolving. Might have some neat bits to learn from, but the title is rarely worth your time beyond that.