There are few things that get us weebs on our feet like some good action. 100https://media.giphy.com/media/j52HUkPQXfCfeJLwaN/giphy.gif High energy. Thats what propelled God of High School GoHS off to the races from the getgo. Everything from the early2010s dubstep of a bombastic OP to the cast of manic martialartists were engineered to deliver fistpumping fun. Oh and the action was spectacular too. For some audiences such hype was all that they could ever ask for in a show. But for others the train goes by ohsofast with far too little room to breathe. One has to ask if the ride was worth all that much to begin with. Mild spoilers ahead regarding the premise of GoHS so feel free to skip ahead to my TlDr if youd prefer to go in blind. https://i.ur.com/FRPTi2r.mp4 Welcome to Korea home to the biggest mixed martial arts tournament the world has ever seen. Fighters from all over the country stake their lives in the ring all for the prestigious title of God of High School. Not that its actually affiliated with a school or anything Im not sure what academic institution would sign off on having minors battle in a noholds barred cage fight. And these fights really dont hold back competitors are pushed beyond their human limits thanks to nanobots that act as augmented hitpoints repairing the body midcombat and ensuring that brawls leave fans on the edge of their seats. This was essentially an underground fighting ring getting the widespan attention of a major sports championship. Sounds looney as all hell and I was all for it. 100https://i.ibb.co/SKNS9YQ/HorribleSubsTheGodofHighSchool091080pmkv20200928232816281.jpg The first episode strode with confidence with a pilot putting asskicking adrenaline action on full display. Lesser studios would kill to pull off this level of sakuga just once in a season MAPPA staged those setpieces every odd week. A lot of those scenes werent all style and no substance either creative visual storytelling choices expressive key frames and even motioncapture techniques were incorporated to deliver scenes that got audiences hyped and talking. Sure there were definitely concessions made in giving backgrounds or inbetween frames the same degree of attention and secondary characters were written like those of the fighter video game campaigns GoHS took inspiration from onenote deranged and ready to jump into battle faster than you can say Fatality. But hey I like awesome animation as much as the next weeb. I wont complain if the show asks me to turn my brain off and revel in the chaos. Unfortunately as engaging as the action was thats not exactly what the shows going for. Maybe I started this off wrong let me try again. 100https://media2.giphy.com/media/Kb56efP7IUDbHbSsTg/giphy.gif GoHS follows the story of Jin Mori a scrappy taekwando pro eager to prove his strength and reunite with his longlost grandfather. He meets a couple of friends in the tournament: Mira a martial arts student hoping to breathe new life into her antiquated fighting style and Han a barefist brawler participating to keep his friend alive. Perhaps this Korean WebToon was wellsuited to get the traditional anime treatment after all. Its your classic shounen the show is literally built around a tournament arc for Petes sake. Ive been meaning to find a shounen title I could get invested in and it seems like I could do a lot worse than GoHS. Our main trio were gonna be the underdogs training hard to be the very best and learning the importance of friendship along the way. We see shades of this in what is probably the series highpoint Episode 5. Han and Jins duel was a great blend of character growth and epic action. Its a little more serious than I previously expected sounds good to me. Except thats not what the show is going for either. An entire tournament arc that could have taken place across the entire cour was rushed out in the span of 5 episodes. How? By having littletono meaningful buildup or development take place outside of the fighting. It really is just fight after fight backtoback. The show throws countless punches but none of those blows carry weight behind them. Theres no time to show our cast struggle from the very bottom as they work their way to the top. No training montages or hardearned lessons against tough opponents. 100https://www.slashfilm.com/wp/wpcontent/images/thegodofhighschoole1594037876221.jpg As the ED goes: All we do is just win and its incessantly boring. The show also does the core relationship between Jin Han and Mira no favors. While GoHS preaches the importance of friendship the close bond chosen to represent this ideal boils down to our trio travelling to the stadium and threatening to beat the shit out of each other every 10 minutes. Sure somewhere in those death threats is an endearing interpretation of this competitiveness as they urge each other to overcome their hurdles. And Id be inclined to agree if these characters could demonstrate their connection in any other way. The writers are rarely capable of showing this friendship outside the context of sweaty combat. Every helping hand offered always comes with a caveat that reads: The only one who beats you in a fight will be me Their connection in the anime is twodimensional and repetitive. Itd be too much of a stretch to deem this relationship as negative or toxic that implies some risks taken in portraying our three stooges. 100https://static0.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2020/07/GodofHighSchoolMiraepisode3header.png?q=50fit=cropw=960h=500dpr=1.5 Oh and all three of them are immediately the best fighters of the preliminary rounds diffusing most of the tension for a good half of the season. The author threw in a magic power system into the mix one that only 4 of the martial arts preliminarys competitors tapped into. Guess who three of those fighters are. I actually laughed when Mira having been disarmed won the fight by slicing the air as a ranged attack leaving a flesh wound this happens multiple times in GoHS. Wait this magic system is part of the lore of course So thats the point of the show. Ok I think were finally getting somewhere. Third times the charm? 100https://media1.giphy.com/media/lLFX3HyiNSn50VvDG3/giphy.gif Things really heat up in the second half of GoHS as it pulls back the curtain to reveal a more complex setting than one would have initially imagined. A world defined by a massive power struggle a battle of godly proportions. Two factions are deeply rooted in conflict over a mythical Key that possesses power to rival that of deities themselves. These factions tap into a magic system known as Charyeok for their uncanny abilities. The God of High School tournament is really a front to handpick Charyeok users and hopefully trigger the awakening of the Key. It sounds overwhelming and way more complicated than what I signed up for but weve seen this storytelling work before. Calling GoHS the next Evangelion would be a stretch but there are parallels between the two. A charismatic leader Park Mujin goes up against a shady organization the cult in taking control of a mysterious force through taking advantage of mentally unstable teenagers. Heck its even got some complicated worldbuilding of its own. Surely this has to be what GoHS is going for? 100https://i2.wp.com/wpcorp.qooapp.com/en/wpcontent/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/20042808045998.jpg?resize=7002C393 Nope really missed the mark on that one. Normally alongside this large chaos in the background youd get a more focused character conflict in the foreground. GoHS does attempt to maintain this balance but fails to derive anything meaningful from its convoluted context. This show is so hellbent on oneupping itself in its lunacy because it barely gives the audience any reason to care about the characters experiencing these events. What then occurs is a perpetuating cycle where the crazy plot has to compensate for its shallow character interactions by going allin on its silly ideas further sidelining the cast and making their appearances onscreen comedically asinine. They didnt even make this magic system a new hurdle for our alreadyOP heroes to overcome each of them master their abilities roughly two episodes after these powers were formally introduced. Jin grows so quickly capable that he can perfectly replicate new combat moves after seeing them performed once. None of this makes sense to me nor do I have any incentive to care. In Episode 9 Hans entire arc was to get anxious over the missing Jin getting ready to leave the stadium in search of him getting jumped in the bathroom by a crazy competitor who picks a fight getting kissed by that same lunatic and forgetting why he was about to leave the stadium in the first place. The main casts importance to the story is cutdown to the point where most attempts to give them screen time are plain stupid. I made a comparison with Eva earlier and thats a story that knew how to balance its macro lore with its micro internal conflict. There was a thematic and symbolic interplay between these ideas making them important in the grand scheme of things. May I ask how introducing Charyeok Jojo Stands/Personas ancient relics a stereotypical cult clones la The Matrix the Sharknado villain a Naruto NineTailed Fox CGI Buddha King Kong falling out of the sky and teddybearlaserguns are important or meaningful in any way? 100https://pbs.tw.com/media/EejEQaEVoAIlPK.png If the idiom warns against having your cake and eating it too GoHS buys out the whole damn bakery and goes just about bankrupt in its selfindulgence. It simultaneously wants to be a goofy action anime and a more serious show. It wants to tell you how powerful friendship can be without putting in the legwork to making that relationship look remotely convincing. It tries to be this overstuffed blockbuster while falling comically short of having its disparate elements say anything. This whole review Ive asked what the point of GoHS is and the only answer Im satisfied with is that its a glorified commercial. A soulless adaptation speedrunning through the highlights of its source material. This series feels about as haphazardly paced as the liveaction anime remakes we as a community have come to detest. Both give off the impression that theyre checking off corporate boxes wellaware that none of what youre seeing makes any semblance of sense unless you read the manhwa. This approach to storytelling means that even the few strong moments in the series are tainted by the suspicion that what youre watching is just another item on the list. These are quite heated accusations to lob at the show but all signs point to this mismanagement of story. Why else would this singlecour attempt to adapt more chapters roughly 100 than most 23episode seasons when just the first arc alone could have been enough for viewers to get invested for the longterm? What a mess. 100https://media1.giphy.com/media/ehzBscFVvfNl7GMElT/giphy.gif TlDr: God of High School is an actionpacked extravaganza. If youre willing to invest your time under those grounds alone go for it but dont expect the show to do anything else. GoHS got the liveaction anime remake treatment with its horrible pacing laughable drama and twodimensional characters. As much as GoHS puts in admirable effort into making its fight scenes some of the best youll witness allyear the team behind the project cant quite erase the fact that it has READ THE MANHWA written all over it in bright bold letters. There is reason to believe that this was a corporate cashgrab but with an abysmal second half the show fails at being a commercial too. Because having sat through this painfully stupid experience Im now even less likely to give the WebToon a read. 3/10 STRAY RAMBLINGS SPOILERS: Actually I take that back. Han actually DOES beat the shit out of Mira in Ep 4 leaving her heavily injured and unconscious. While this story choice does lead to the only good arc in the show I find it uncomfortable how quickly the three swept this under the rug and moved on. No one in the group ever acknowledges the fact that one of them almost murdered another. I guess whatever happens in the ring stays in the ring? Yikes. The BIGBANG segment is the Korean knockoff of Big Shot from Cowboy Bebop. 53https://i.ibb.co/mq9j3cy/HorribleSubsTheGodofHighSchool041080pmkv20200928234317992.jpg 40https://noobsubs.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/noobsubscowboybebop021080pbluray8bitac3.jpg Ive heard a lot of people saying that GoHS was pulling a Tower of God and I dont think that comparison is fair. Whilst ToG could be pretty hard to follow it handled its worldbuilding far better than GoHS ever did. Having seen both WebToon adaptations so far fall below expectations is something to worry about though so heres hoping Crunchyroll keeps its act together for Noblesse. How you do drama or how you create tension its very different in anime versus manga so how do we make it so that people wont get confused when they get into it? And how do we not lose certain aspects of the story that really mattered? Joseph Chou producer of GoHS 12 episodes in and I dont think either of us have the answer. BEST GIRL: Maybe Seungah. A lot of the secondary characters felt like clones really but she seemed pretty wholesome. 100https://i.ibb.co/4g03XQr/HorribleSubsTheGodofHighSchool111080pmkv202009282348530072.jpg Thats it from me This review was admittedly more harsh than others Ive shared so far. But I hope that unlike the show the points came across clearly. If you happen to like my verbose rants feel free to check out my other reviewshttps://anilist.co/user/AnimeDweeb/reviews for seasons past and present peace