Marriage/Bonds

It’s a good thing The God of High School doesn’t seem to be a very popular anime this season. Because if this was something like Tower of God, I’m sure a bunch of people would furiously comment and tweet at me for saying that this episode is bad. I just wasted 20 minutes watching a filler episode about Mira almost getting married.

I’m not sure how apparent this has been in my past couple of episode reviews for this series, but I don’t exactly like The God of High School. It’s an alright series. It has some good fights, animation, and music sometimes. But there’s not really a plot and the characters are all boring and forgettable.

Basically, there’s no reason for me to care about anything that happens in this series.

We’re four episodes into the series. Just four, and there’s already a pointless “filler” episode. The final two minutes seemed important but other than that nothing of note happened. And I get that this episode is supposed to show Mira’s “tragic” backstory, but does it even matter?

Does anyone care about her character at this point? And did that backstory, which didn’t actually tell us anything, change anyone’s mind about her? She’s still more forgettable than all the background characters who were knocked out in the previous round of the tournament.

Also, the fact that Daewi’s two minutes of character development at the end of the episode completely overshadowed Mira’s 20-minute backstory should tell you all you need to know. This was a waste of an episode that didn’t serve any purpose. It didn’t even build up the antagonist organization despite featuring one of its members.

Boruto is better at storytelling than this is.

Seongjin: The Strongest Martial Artist

You may have noticed that alongside the filler-like nature of this episode’s plot, there was also a distinct lack of action. Daewi pushed over some bodyguards, Seongjin activated his stand for a couple of seconds, and at the end of the episode, Daewi killed Mira (not literally). But there wasn’t an actual fight at any point.

And no actual fight means no high-quality fight animation, which is the only reason most people are watching this.

What makes the lack of a fight so perplexing is that there easily could have been one. After all, Seongjin, a member of the main antagonist group, was featured prominently within the episode. Mira could have fought him to show the strength of her Moon Light Sword technique. But she just slapped him instead.

Also, can we all just appreciate how Seongjin is known as the “strongest martial artist?” He’s so strong that, even with a katana and a samurai stand ability, he lost to a high school girl’s slap. And once he lost, he stole her wooden sword as a consolation prize and ran away. That’s definitely the strongest martial artist.

Do you think Seongjin is going to come back? Was that it for him in the series, or is he going to be a real character later on? And if he does return, will he actually be a formidable opponent? Somehow I don’t see him ever being redeemed.

Is the unnamed antagonist group actually just this series’ version of Team Rocket? Because if they’re all as useless as Seongjin is, I won’t be able to take any of them seriously. Mira isn’t even that strong, apparently. Daewi was able to easily demolish her in the semi-finals seemingly without using any special abilities.

The Daewi Recovery Mission

As I mentioned, the only important part of the episode came in the form of Daewi’s character development in the final two minutes. Here, we see that his friend with cancer dies, Daewi snaps and beats up his bullies, then he continues on to take out all his frustration on Mira in the semi-finals.

I think ever since Naruto, people have been pretty familiar with this character dynamic. There’s the main character who’s always optimistic, the female lead who everyone calls useless (which Mira is), and then the edgy guy who drifts apart from the others temporarily, but comes back thanks to the power of friendship.

I’m not saying that Daewi is going to be a carbon-copy of Sasuke or anything. But what I am saying is that this is his Sasuke arc. It’ll probably only last an episode or two before he’s back with Jin and Mira like nothing ever happened, but it’s going to take Jin beating some friendship into him first.

While I still don’t think Daewi is a good or interesting character, this bit of development does reinforce my thoughts about him being the best of the main three. Unlike Jin and Mira, Daewi at least has the potential to be a good character in the near future.

And moving away from Daewi for a moment, what do you think happened to Mira after her beat down? Obviously she would have been taken to the hospital due to that amount of blood loss. But remember, all the fighters in the tournament have nanobots in their bodies that instantly heal them.

So she couldn’t really be that injured, right? Well, unless she bled out all the nanobots. But considering she took a sword to the stomach the day before and seemed just fine, I’d say her life isn’t in any real danger.

Conclusion

What did you think of The God of High School episode 4? Did you like the episode? Or do you just want to get back to the tournament arc action? I’m definitely in the latter group considering this series has nothing of interest going on for it otherwise.

If you enjoyed this review, remember to click the like button ❤ down below. Also, follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on any future content. And come join our Discord server if you’re interested in discussing anime with other members of the community.

Finally, I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika tier this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the next episode is available here.

Wisdom/Kingdom

The God of High School episode 3 lost me. The series has officially moved beyond the point at which I can accept what’s happening. It’s not that the series is too strange — One Piece is far stranger, yet still works. The problem is that there’s a disconnect between how the series is presenting itself and its reality.

It has an issue I see with a lot of shounen battle series where they try to have a semi-serious plot, but include a bunch of wacky things for no reason. For example, at the start of this episode, we’re shown what I’m going to assume is the main villain group of the series. And within this group is a girl who’s literally wearing a ball gag as part of her outfit.

She’s straight-up wearing a BDSM ball gag and a choker with a bell on it while attending her secret, evil organization meeting.

In the previous episode, I was willing to overlook the fact that Kang is clearly not a high school student despite partaking in this fighting tournament for high schoolers. But I don’t think I can overlook things like that anymore now that Mah Miseon’s background has also been revealed.

Miseon is the WWD Women’s Pro Wrestling Champion. That’s to say, she’s obviously not in high school.

The reason I could overlook Kang is that there are other battle series, particularly Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, in which high school students are depicted as being 6’5″ and 280 pounds of pure muscle. But with Miseon, it’s not just her appearance — even her background clearly indicates she’s not in high school.

And with all of this, I haven’t even touched on all the random abilities that were just introduced as well.

Abilities Awakened

The best battle series have a power system that’s explained early on and remains relatively consistent throughout. Alchemy in Fullmetal Alchemist, esper abilities in A Certain Scientific Railgun, and even devil fruit and stands from the aforementioned One Piece and Jojo’s respectively.

Bad power systems are those which are purely arbitrary. A great example of this is whatever magic system is used in The Seven Deadly Sins. In that series, there’s no real consistency and the characters just make up new attacks every time they go up against an opponent. There’s not even an underlying system that connects these random attacks.

But why is that important? Simply because without a set power system, anything can happen. If there’s no consistent framework, then characters can just pull a way to win a fight out of thin air, which is just bad writing.

The God of High School has previously hinted that it has a power system known as charyeok. However, with the exception of one ability I’ll discuss in the next section, the abilities we see in this episode don’t appear to be connected to charyeok; they’re arbitrary.

In her fight against Miseon, Mira loses her wooden sword and is forced to fight with her bare hands. But it’s revealed that while her sword couldn’t damage Miseon, she can create wind blades using her hands that can.

Because anime, I guess.

The same thing goes for Daewi, who revealed that he can create a tornado just by stepping towards his opponent. Oh, and he can also disintegrate a metal baseball bat with a single punch. And even his opponent had some random ability.

Now, I understand that some of these “abilities” could simply be visual depictions of their attacks, but the fact is that their attacks still have those effects.

The Work of an Enemy Stand

One ability we see in this episode that I do believe is connected to charyeok is the stand-like ability we see come from the green-haired commissioner Mori fights. It’s some sort of giant grim reaper/jester that’s not simply a visual representation of a fighting technique.

We know this because people, including Mori, react to the sight of this being; and Mori even physically interacts with it. Additionally, when this enemy stand appears, it’s accompanied by the dark purple miasma that has previously been associated with charyeok in the second episode.

At first, I was thinking that if the series goes down this path of stand-like abilities, it wouldn’t be so bad. After all, the grim reaper/jester we saw in this episode was pretty cool. But as I thought about it more, I decided that I’d actually prefer that there was just no power system in this series.

I know a lot of viewers of this anime enjoy the high-quality animation of the fights. And I enjoy the mix of good animation and actual fight choreography that comes from hand-to-hand combat. But once you add abilities like the one we see here, we lose out on both of those aspects.

The fight choreography is the obvious loser here, as the characters are no longer moving around and fighting with their fists or weapons. And from what I saw, even the animation during the fight against the enemy stand wasn’t at the level of the previous fights — probably because there was less choreography.

Including these abilities might be cool, but I think it’s going to take away from the main draw of this anime for most people. Just like how in Naruto, flashy jutsu are cool, but the best fights include complex, hand-to-hand fight choreography.

Conclusion

How did you feel about The God of High School episode 3? Does it suffer from the same issues many shounen battle series do regarding their “wacky” nature? Or do you not view that as a problem? And do you think the inclusion of a power system is good or bad for the series? Let me know in the comments.

If you enjoyed this review, remember to click the like button ❤ down below. Also, follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on any future content. And come join our Discord server if you’re interested in discussing anime with other members of the community.

Finally, I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika tier this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the next episode is available here.

Renewal/Soul

Right before watching this episode, I was saying over on Discord that Sword Art Online is actually the best-animated series of the season. And while I’d still say that the first episode of the new SAO season had more sakuga, the animation in this second episode of The God of High School was definitely higher-quality.

However, while I understand that the appeal of this series for the vast majority of viewers is the action, I can’t help but look at the other aspects of this anime and be disappointed. The characters are so bad so far. And after watching that second episode of Fire Force season 2, the characters of this series look even worse.

To illustrate this point, why don’t we examine what we know about the three main characters, Mori, Mira, and Daewi, so far.

Mori is basically the most basic protagonist character you can have at this point. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about his motivations later on, but in this episode, he claims that his goal is simply to fight strong opponents. And this is backed up by the fact that his primary motivation for entering the competition seems to be having a rematch with the blonde guy.

Mira isn’t all that much better than Mori. Her goal is to grow her family’s dojo which has been on the decline ever since her father died — or potentially even before that. That’s not a terrible backstory for her, but it’s extremely cliché and I think this was a bit too early to introduce her background.

And lastly, we have Daewi, who we literally know nothing about. He’s just the cool guy in the background and I don’t really see any indication that his character is going to develop all that much. There’s nothing to develop.

Go Gamdo vs. Kang Manseok

Go Gamdo is my favorite character of the series so far, and he was in the first episode as well. He’s not all that interesting either at this point, but I really like his fighting style and that’s basically all there is to this series. I’m hoping that he’ll be a recurring supporting character going forward — and since he has a name and a unique design, so he should be.

Kang Manseok is Go’s opponent in the first round and is also the “villain” from episode 1. Although Kang has a name and a unique design, I don’t feel like he’ll be as important going forward as Go. Of course, I could be wrong, but he really seems like a prologue-type antagonist who’s just here to set up the story and main cast.

But who knows? Maybe he’ll become one of Mori’s allies now that he’s been beaten into submission.

The Go vs. Kang fight set up a lot of the basic information about the series. First, their fight allows us to learn about Mori’s ideals. Go is set up as a good guy and Kang as a bad guy. So when Mori steps in to rescue Go, it tells us that he has a particular set of ideals and he’s not afraid to break the rules of the tournament to uphold them.

Next, it gives us a rough power scale. We see that Go is stronger than most people predicted, but then it’s revealed that Kang is much stronger than Go is. So when we see Mori easily defeat Kang in turn, it signifies just how strong Mori is.

And then by showing the ease with which Park Mujin (the main antagonist) takes down Mori, we see how much stronger Mori will need to become before the end.

Charyeok

The third and final thing we learn from Kang specifically is the apparent “magic” of the series. Naruto has chakra, Hunter x Hunter has nen, Tower of God has shinsu, etc. In The God of High School, this power system seems to be called charyeok.

At this point, we don’t really know much about charyeok. We know it’s what Park Mujin used to destroy the island in the first episode, and we can infer that it’s what Kang uses at the end of this episode. It also looks like a dark purple haze and can apparently be used to perform long-range attacks.

That’s everything we know.

So in search of more answers, without spoiling the source material, I used Google Translate to figure out what charyeok means in Korean. And after that minimal effort, Google Translate didn’t have an answer for me. I’m sure if I dug deeper and used other translation sites I could figure it out, but I wasn’t willing to waste that much time on this.

There’s also the distinct possibility that charyeok isn’t even the correct spelling of the word. Crunchyroll is known for some having some iffy spellings, so I can’t be sure Google Translate is the one at fault.

The mystery of what exactly charyeok is aside, I’m not sold on its inclusion in the series. Maybe it will end up being cool and interesting, but for now, I don’t see it. I’d much prefer a “realistic” (this already wasn’t realistic) fighting anime than one that has a magic power system like every other shounen battle series.

Conclusion

What do you think of the second episode of The God of High School? Is the series still living up to the hype? Are you able to overlook the boring characters and apparent lack of plot as long as there are good fights? Do you think charyeok is necessary? Let me know in the comments.

If you enjoyed this review, remember to click the like button ❤ down below. Also, follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on any future content. And come join our Discord server if you’re interested in discussing anime with other members of the community.

Finally, I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika tier this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the next episode is available here.

Set Up/Stand Up

Last season, we had Tower of God, an anime based on a manhwa as its source material. Manhwa is just the Korean version of manga. This season, we have another anime based on a manhwa, The God of High School.

I enjoyed Tower of God a decent amount, and since The God of High School is animated by MAPPA and I’ve heard it’s popular, I figured I’d check this one out too. But I have to say, after the first episode, I’m not looking forward to this series as much as I was with Tower of God.

So far, I see two reasons for this series to be popular, and more reasons for why I don’t think it’s that great. However, before all the fans of The God of High School attack me for saying that, just keep in mind that this impression is solely based on the first episode of the anime.

Though to be fair, I’m sure as the series progresses I’ll anger you even more.

As a brief overview, I think the fact that this is an action series focused on hand to hand combat is definitely going to boost its popularity. And because it has good animation on top of that, a lot of people are going to pick it for either anime of the season or anime of the year.

But I don’t think the characters are interesting so far. I don’t think the plot is developed enough to even attempt to comprehend what it is yet. And I think the character designs and art are a bit off-putting.

As for the music, it wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t bad or anything, but I’d say it’s pretty average action series music. If you want a fighting anime with better music, try Megalo Box.

Tournament Arc

From what I understand, the majority of this anime is going to be one, giant tournament arc. The tournament is called The God of High School competition, and as the name implies, its goal is to determine the strongest high school student.

Within the tournament itself, anything goes. It’s a martial arts competition, but the style of fighting doesn’t matter and it’s even stated that weapons of all kind are allowed. So far we’ve only seen a few “non-lethal” weapons, but I’m sure they’ll get deadlier as the series progresses.

I’m also interested to see if anyone will just use a gun later on. But since this is anime, bringing a gun to a fistfight probably wouldn’t end well for the gun user.

Now, when I said there isn’t much plot to understand just yet, this is what I mean. We know there’s a martial arts tournament, but we don’t know why people are entering or even why it’s being held. Is this a normal occurrence in this world? Does our protagonist have any motivation for entering other than simply being the best, like no one ever was?

Also, at the very beginning of the episode, we got a scene of some mob bosses on a private island that was then destroyed by what I can only describe as a half-hurricane-half-kaiju. Obviously that’s foreshadowing something, but so far it seems completely unrelated to the rest of the episode.

Are all the high schoolers going to be fighting with superpowers by the end of the series? It’s clear that the series is eventually going to move in a supernatural direction, but what form is that going to take?

The God of Noses

Let’s talk about some of my petty complaints about this episode and the series in general. These complaints don’t really affect how good or bad I think The God of High School is, but they’re the little things that I can’t help but notice and be bothered by.

First up, we have some dialogue from when we were first introduced to Daewi Han, one of the three main characters. Daewi is finishing up his shift at work when his boss thanks him for working the night shift. He then responds by saying, “Hey, it’s my job.”

Just let that sink in for a moment. He’s thanked for doing his job by his employer and his response is to tell his employer that doing his job is his job. That’s on par with the infamous “people die when they are killed” line from the original Fate/stay night anime.

The other petty complaint I have has to do with the art. I think the character designs are pretty average, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. No, what I’m referring to is the elephant in the room, if you will. That’s right, the noses on the characters. Just look at the nose on that woman in the picture above.

I have two main issues with the noses in this series. First of all, they’re pretty large most of the time (they strangely vary in size from scene to scene even on the same characters). Second, the shading they have makes them stand out even more.

All the characters have extremely large noses that are shaded to draw your attention to them even more. Why? Probably because the creator of this series got their start as an amateur artist on Tumblr. If you’ve ever seen art on Tumblr, you know what I mean. Tumblr artists love noses.

Conclusion

I’m going to keep watching this series because despite my complaints about it, I did enjoy watching it. And because I know it’s going to be a popular series, you can expect reviews of the latest The God of High School episodes every Monday for the rest of the season.

But what did you think of this first episode? I’ve heard mostly good things from fans of the source material, but that’s generally always the case. The only other person I know of who watched it and hasn’t read the source material had the same complaints about the series that I did. Do you agree? Or are we the minority? Let me know in the comments.

If you enjoyed this review, remember to click the like button ❤ down below. Also, follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on any future content. And come join our Discord server if you’re interested in discussing anime with other members of the community.

Finally, I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika tier this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the next episode is available here.