Welcome to our 2017 Summer Anime Reviews. We’ll be tackling a few of the new shows airing this season in fairly brief reviews. The shows were selected by lottery, and these reviews will only cover the first episode of each series.

Synopsis: “It’s the year 2045. The world has been contaminated by the Irousu invaders, and humans find themselves contained. Standing boldly against these invaders are but ordinary girls. The Shinjugammine Girls Academy is a school for these “Hoshimori” (Star Guardians) destined to fight the Irousu.”

If there’s one good thing I can say about this first episode, it’s that it thankfully only felt like 22 minutes. I think I only checked the video duration once the entire time. The premise of Battle Girl High School is…well, to be honest I don’t know. There are girls…some in middle school and some in high school…and they fight robotic-like creatures called Irousu by transforming into combat versions of magical girls. But I have no idea why this is happening at all. Girl has typical weird dream, girls fight the Irousu, some higher-ups at the school discuss how the girls essentially have gotten rusty, two girls are going to lose their school clubs, and then the girls spar together. None of which weaves together to form any kind of coherent narrative beyond “Girls must stop sucking in order to protect the world.”

The cast for Battle Girl High School feels like someone on the production team just marked off archetypes on a checklist in designing the characters’ personalities. There’s zero sense of individuality among the show’s characters, with each pretty much personifying one or two standard traits and nothing more. Assumed main character Miki is just the standard “We can do it if we try!” girl who fails to take time to properly assess situations because of her happy-go-lucky nature. Honestly, besides these characters all being stale after only one episode, a lot of them border on obnoxious as they fall into general high-pitched whining fairly frequently. The cast is an ensemble in the worst sense of the word: bloated to the point where no single character has any time to shine.

I hate to say it, but this show really didn’t offer much of value. The characters are pretty awful, the plot is incoherent, the animation is uninspired and dull, and the music was actually not that bad by comparison. I can only wonder if I’d appreciate this show more if I played the web game it’s based on. Probably not. Because it’s really hard to see anything at all positive about this first episode. If you wanna watch cute girls engage in battles against aliens, there are probably still better options. If the show would just take some time to build up some tension or exposition instead of immediately cramming over a dozen characters and their annoying quirks down our throats, it might have a future. But I highly doubt I’ll continue with this, and I wouldn’t really encourage anyone to give it a shot. And with that, I’m proud to deliver the site’s first review of something completely awful.

Battle Girl High School - Episode 1

2.7

Writing

2.0/10

Visuals

3.5/10

Enjoyability

2.5/10

Pros

• Music was not terrible

Cons

• Messy action choreography
• Bland animation
• Unoriginal characters
• Fails to take time to establish its premise
• Non-battle scenes feel mundane

Watch Episode 1 on HiDive

DaCrowz

Founder of Cards on the Table, DaCrowz continues to profess that his opinions on manga, movies, and shows are somehow in good taste despite the fact that he would likely give an "A" rating to the Prison School anime. When he is not being mistaken for Nicholas Hoult in public, he puts most of his energy into convincing the Yu-Gi-Oh! community that Volcanic Scattershot is staple for any deck.