School Days -- Review ★★★★☆

School Days isn't entertainment; it's an experience. And I kinda feel like the first rule of School Days is don't talk about School Days. But it's another great Hipster series, so I have to write about it.... Honestly, my advice to anyone lucky enough to not know anything about School Days is stop reading this, don't look up anything about it, and just watch it all the way through, and I mean really stick with it. And seriously, you should probably stop reading. Last chance...

I'll be straight with you. You probably won't like School Days. In fact, you'll probably hate it. It's not that the show is bad, but it will do bad things to you. This series gets under your skin like no other. That's why I'm so insistent about going into it cold. I ran across this series one day a few years ago and sat down to watch it on a complete whim, and the purity of that experience is why I have such reverence for the show to this day. School Days is great for the same reason that Evangelion is great (and it's no coincidence, I'm sure), in that both of those shows are so much more than meets the eye when you first start watching. It's not even so much that this show has a "twist", because saying that would completely undercut what School Days accomplishes. There's no hard left turn in this series, but rather a gentle, gradual curve that you might not even notice at first, but eventually you realize things are headed in a vastly different direction than you expected.

Really, this is all tied into the fact that School Days is based on a dating sim of the same name, and the game was remarkable in its own right, but the important thing is that the anime avoids the traditional format of other dating sim/harem anime in favor of a much more subversive interpretation of the genre. In the process, the series criticizes genre conventions, as well as the audience of such franchises. After all, main character Makoto is just behaving the way your average otaku would in any dating sim.

School Days certainly isn't without its faults. The overall production value is middling at best, and the writing isn't totally top notch, which can make some scenes awkward, especially as the story progresses. However, the sheer ambition of this series, and the fact that it coheres as well as it does while the plot gradually tilts off axis make this series well worth watching. At the very least, it's a show that will stick in your mind long after you finish watching it.

--The Anime Hipster