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[Massive spoilers ahead]

School Days' reputation precedes it, especially its infamous ending, it's no exaggeration to say that that's pretty much the only thing people discuss when bringing the series up and then say something like "the story sucked but at least the ending was satisfying" however is that really the case? Personally I have to disagree.
School Days is your typical goofy romcom series about teenage love, filled with laughs, cute moments and maybe a love triangle to spice things up right? The people behind it had a different idea and thought that they should make that romcom the most miserable thing ever.

Based on the visual ... novel by 0verflow, this dating sim adaptation decides to make a bizarre choice, adapt the bad endings, bad endings exist as a way to punish the player for making the wrong choices, nobody wants to watch Fate/Stay Night and see the protagonist die in the first episode because he made a dumb mistake, basing an entire anime around bad endings is a bold idea but it's obviously risky, and yet the risk paid off (in one way or another) and here we are with one very controversial series that took off in popularity precisely because of those writing choices however the real question remains, is it actually any good?

Production-wise, it's nothing mind-blowing. I don't know much about animation but nothing looked particularly bad to my eyes and it was competently made, the artstyle is interesting though, it does look very moe with the massive eyes and all but the colours look washed up with a lot of grey and brown which fits the tone of the series of being ugly on the inside but presenting itself as a cutsey time to the point that it reminds of the uncomfortable moe of Higurashi. The music is very good, the Opening theme is catchy and visually captures the look and feel of every dating sim anime ever while the Ending themes (which are 8 by the way, quite unusual for a 12 episode series) for the most part have a melancholic and reflective kind of vibe to contrast the Opening and fit the ending of each episode, they are also very good and insanely catchy but that's all there is to say about the production of this series, time to move on to the story.

The story of School Days begins innocent enough with our bland and awkward protagonist Makoto getting interested in shy girl Kotonoha, and cheery girl Sekai trying to bring them together until they both start dating and everything goes great........until it doesn't. Makoto and Kotonoha getting together becomes the catalyst for many events that make everything very quickly and very painfully spiral out of control, and right there lies the appeal of School Days, I like the final episode as much as the next guy but it's undoubtedly built on top of the things that happen throughout the story, you can't just watch the first episode or two then skip to the last one, the ending is only the icing on the cake. What I do find appealing about School Days however, is how things go horribly wrong, misunderstandings and awkward situations are pretty much a staple of all anime romcoms, there's just no escaping it yet the way they were used here was different because there is no happy ending where everyone laughs at how silly those were, everyone digs their own graves through their own idiotic actions and all the wrong decisions they make keeps entangling them like a spider's web until they pay for the things they do in the end and the things they do? Hooooo boy they sure do a lot of things.

The other reason why this series is so infamous is because of the fact that everyone, and I mean literally everyone, is either a scumbag or batshit insane which may seem silly or contrived yet I found it surprisingly effective.
School Days works because of its characters, sure they might be tropey and clichéd, but that's exactly why they work. Makoto is your typical bland and awkward main character that a lot of girls happen to fall in love with for some reason, Kotonoha is your typical shy and sensitive girl, Sekai is your typical cheery happy-go-lucky girl that is very nice to the MC in the beginning and helping him for no apparent reason and the side characters follow the same pattern: there's serious short girl, horny classmate guy and so on. They aren't very special and are simple archetypes but that's why they stand out, writing immoral characters is one thing but twisting the usually innocent archetypes into something darker is what makes it unique, it doesn't shove in some edgelord characters into a school setting and calls it a day but it takes an average school romcom and slowly and gradually changes it into something darker and that's why it's more effective than many other "cute but actually dark" shows, both the dark and the innocent sides are working at the same time, it doesn't feel like two different shows smashed together but it feels like the cute side progresses into something different, however that does carry the flaw of tonal dissonance, sometimes it just doesn't work very well and it's most apparent in the school festival towards the end because at this point the story has gotten so messed up that placing silly comedy hijinks was definitely not the greatest idea but I do appreciate the commitment.

Moving over to more specifics about the characters, they are all horrible people yes, but their motivations are understandable. Makoto has a legendary status as one of the most hated characters in anime history yet is it really hard to see why he does the things he does? Unlike most harem MCs who have otherworldly self control or are just incredibly dense and somehow always manage resist getting seduced by attractive girls because they only really love that one girl, Makoto on the other hand thinks with his dick, self restraint is an alien concept to him, he acts impulsively and doesn't think about the consequences of his actions. But again is that really all that surprising when he's surrounded by girls who are in love with him? That's not to say that his action are justifiable in the slightest and even he recognises how much of a terrible person he is and he probably knows that what he's doing is wrong but none of that is enough to convince him to stop as he doesn't think about the consequences after all, Makoto may be a disgusting person but at least he knows that he's a disgusting person. Which is more than what I could say for Sekai.

Sekai is a massive hypocrite. She develops feelings for Makoto while trying to get him and Kotonoha together, so when Makoto gets bored of Kotonoha and decides to cheat on her with Sekai, she doesn't outright refuse but simply tells him that "hey that's not cool" while still going along with him and even when she feels guilty for lying to Kotonoha, she apparently doesn't feel guilty enough to cut her ties with Makoto or to even tell her the truth yet when she gets a taste of her own medicine she flips out and plays the victim as she continuously tries to brush Kotonoha off.........speaking of Kotonoha.

Kotonoha is by far the most sympathetic character in the series yet she's not entirely blameless, her personality may seem cute because people (myself included) find shy girls in anime cute but at the end of the day that's because anime portrays a highly idealised version of the real thing where you see the cute moments without the real difficulties of dealing with someone with such a personality, more realistically it's going to be tiresome and awkward at times which is exactly what her relationship with Makoto is like, not to mention his aggressive and forceful nature, that causes him to become frustrated with her and causes him to cheat on her with the friendly and easygoing Sekai. That's not the only time when she screws up though, even when she knew that Makoto is cheating on her with Sekai and both are clearly avoiding her, her timidness prevents her from speaking out until it's too late and instead she keeps deluding herself into thinking that Makoto still cares about her to the point that it turns into an obsession, until classmate guy breaks her entirely that is.

Classmate guy in School Days is the classmate guy to end all classmate guys, you know how in every school anime the protagonist has that one perverted best friend who solely exists to be the butt of many jokes and nothing else? Some series like Clannad try to give him some kind of development or character arc but School Days goes even further, his perversion and crush on Kotonoha surprisingly end up becoming relevant to the story in an unexpected way, as he one ups even Makoto in terms of shittiness and decides to use Kotonoha's emotional shock when she realizes that she was dumped by Makoto to have sex with her. This is the finest example of how School Days uses familiar tropes and turns them into something unique and horrific, betcha you didn't see that one coming.

There are other characters like Setsuna the serious girl or the rest of the classmates but honestly I don't really care that much for them and while they often contribute to plot and its development, none of the characters besides the main trio (and classmate guy of course) really stuck with me and felt too bland in true generic romcom fashion.

Just before I move into the final part I'd like to talk about the things that I don't like, I have mentioned many times before that School Days sticks to essentials of average mid 2000's anime romcoms, and well.......maybe it sticks way too close to them because it suffers from similar problems as those series, we've got the bland cast problem I've mentioned moments ago, the arbitrary pool and school festival episodes that have been done to death even at the time, still I don't really mind them as I find them to be enjoyable and they generally fit the story but most people tend to think otherwise. Speaking of school festivals, the school festival is easily the worst part of the whole thing, the comedy disrupts the flow of the story, the lack of focus on the main trio exposes how weak some of the side characters are and it includes a very dumb plot element aka the "rest room" aka people have sex in the school and then they get recorded and that's how Sekai finds out Makoto is cheating on her? That's just way too ridiculous for me to take seriously, couldn't she find out in a more natural way which wouldn't even be that hard because Makoto doesn't seem to care much for secrecy anyway but this was just too silly of a way to bring the story towards its climax.

Now it's time to address the elephant in the room here and that's the ending, it's impossible to talk about School Days without mentioning its ending and as much as I wanted to downplay the ending's impact for most of this review, there's no denying that it's the most memorable part of the show and for good reason too. After building up the characters as those massive pieces of shit and then making them suffer from their idiotic actions, it all builds up to that moment when Makoto grabs his phone and gets barraged by messages as Sekai proceeds to stab him to death all while interjecting moments of their happy times together as the most dramatic song in the entire soundtrack plays in the background, Adding to the overall dreadful feeling of this messed up finale. It doesn't stop there however because the showdown between Sekai and Kotonoha after that is pure madness as they both plan to murder the other and it ends in the most satisfying way possible, she gets revenge against the girl who stole her boyfriend from her and then tried to bring him back by pretending to be pregnant and her cheating boyfriend got killed already, justice served right? As much as I want to cheer on for the death of bad people it's not that simple, as much as I hated their actions throughout the series, when I actually saw them die those violent deaths I felt sad because at the end of the day this entire tragedy was caused by reckless bad decisions, they didn't hurt each other intentionally but their poor handling of the situation is what did. Even a heartless bastard like Makoto felt bad after he saw the way everyone was acting coldly towards Kotonoha, sure he didn't feel bad enough to clear things up but still it's not like he enjoyed hurting her like that. The ending was caused by a bunch of poorly thought out actions where there is no one particular moment where it went wrong, School Days was doomed to have a bad ending from the very start and the only way to prevent a bad ending would be for the three of them not to meet in the first place, because even if Makoto somehow went for Sekai immediately and rejected Kotonoha, her obsessive creepy side might still pop up or if he stays faithful to Kotonoha there's no guarantee Sekai won't try to make a move on him and ruin their friendship and even if she does accept and watches them from the sidelines it would still be a bad ending for her, there's just no winning in this situation, what differs would be the magnitude of such a bad ending and well, we got the absolute worst ending where everything goes horribly wrong and by the end I wasn't happy that they were dead or that Kotonoha was a crazy yandere, all it left me thinking was "how did things go so wrong?".

Overall I'd say that School Days turned out to be much better than what I expected. It's not a snorefest with a random shocking ending or a trashy romance with im14andthisisdeep themes, it's a weird but unique concept that hasn't been done before or ever since and I applaud it for that. It is not perfect but who needs perfection when you have raw emotion, It left a strong impression on me and that's more than what I could say about a lot of other anime. Honestly the hate it gets doesn't feel justified even if you didn't like it like I did, at best you may find it a clever experiment that toys with your expectations of a generic school anime and at worst you may find it to be a generic school anime that is edgy and gets capped off with a bloody ending and while I found it to be the former, the latter doesn't sound THAT bad and certainly not "worst anime ever made" material, there is anime that earn that title because they're creatively bankrupt or plain incompetent but School Days is neither of those, there's anime that is much dumber and edgier, some that are far more frustrating and not on purpose and they lack the redeeming qualities of School Days, stories that feature immoral characters are nothing new to anime and yet people hate this particular series because its main characters are immoral people? I'm sorry but I don't understand the logic behind it, sure I can see that watching bad people ruin their own lives might not be appealing to everyone but I see a lot people criticize School Days for achieving exactly what it sets out to do, create an unlikeable cast of characters who do a lot of bad things and pay for it in the end, so arguably School Days' popularity ended up being to its detriment and in the end the series' infamous reputation is undeserved, because while it ended up frustrating and messing with its audience that is the intended effect it was supposed to have on you, I felt like shit once I finished School Days, that is what it wanted me to feel like however and I praise for it for being able to do what it intended to do from the start.