Better than it looks? High School DxD review

Our hero.

Every season there seems to be a show that just goes all out with the fan service, and this time it’s High School DxD. Does it use the butts and boobs to cover up the lack of story or is there more to it than meets the eye?

From the title you should be able to guess that it takes place at a high school which recently switched from being an all-girls school to co-ed. The main character Issei and his friends are desperate for chicks, but they can’t help repulsing them all. Kind of out of nowhere, however, a girl approaches Issei wanting to go out with him and he jumps at the opportunity without a second thought. Unfortunately for him, it’s a trap, as the girl is a fallen angel in disguise who is after the “sacred gear” he holds inside him. Before Issei is murdered, he is saved by a demon girl from school who has had her eyes on him as she saw that there was something about him. Being rescued from death by her, he becomes part demon and her servant, thus he is thrown into the supernatural world where there is conflict between fallen angels and demons on earth.

This is where most of the effort was spent.

The way it started showed a bit of promise, I thought, as Issei was just absolutely worthless in every way and would clearly level up over the course of the show to prove himself. Whoever wrote the show, however, didn’t do a very good job at pacing the story, as it has a big action set piece early on that kind of felt like it should’ve been in the second half of the show, not the first. All the other demons who earlier saw him as a massive loser suddenly treat him as a comrade and without having earned it first, Issei gains new powers and defeats a great opponent. The biggest issue really is that the show skipped the whole part where the main character has to earn his powers somehow. If he had gone through training, or maybe had some buildup beforehand that there was something up with him it would’ve worked better. As it is now, he just became more powerful for no good reason and the story never gave the viewer the bit where you start rooting for him to get better. By not having that part in there it’s hard to sympathize with him. It didn’t have the Rocky training montage. Sure, you don’t have to like every main character I guess, but in this case it really felt like they were setting it up that way at the start and then just kind of forgot to put those bits in there.

The girlfriend is a trap, and not the kind who has a penis.

So obviously there’s a lot of fan service in the show with uncensored exposed breasts appearing in every episode. Even the first couple of seconds of the opening have nipples move across the screen. I guess you kind of expect a show like this to not care too much about the story once it has all those pieces in there but it’s still a waste of potential. Look, I never expected this to be good, I just wanted it to not be absolute crap. As it is now it’s very uneven and parts of it I found almost unwatchable as they were so bad. Is it too much to ask to have breasts wiggling around on screen and get a decent story as well? Well from this show it is at least.

Pictures like this briefly distract you from how bad the show is.

Speaking of the breasts, they don’t look very good. The physics, design and shading add up to something that looks a lot worse than it should. Even the rampant panty shots somehow look a bit crap, so I think for most of the time it even fails as a massive fan service show. When I watch the show I’m wondering just who in the world would want to buy the blu ray versions, as I can’t see any reason why you’d want to subject yourself to this show again. I hope the people who made the show and spent such minimal effort on all the component parts of it, apart from the strip pole ending, realize the trash they’ve produced and won’t blame piracy when nobody buys it.

At first glance this looked like the kind of show you’d have to approach with expectations set low and sadly it lived up to that. Characters are poorly developed (from a story perspective, their breasts are enormous) and it lacks basic stuff that would’ve made the story more engaging. It does just enough to be somewhat coherent and then spends more time on getting the maximum amount of jiggle on screen than making a story you could care about. I have nothing against a show with fan service galore, but I want it to be more than that as well. This isn’t that.

Of course there's a clothes melting tentacle monster in it.