School Days was a story that I was already familiar with from watching the anime series. I was aware of two things: one that the ending was going to be fairly dark and two the main male protagonist was a significantly more redeemable character. With this in mind, I was still pleasantly (or rather disturbingly) surprised.

I don’t normally like being the type to compare the anime to the manga, but in this case I think an exception is necessary. The most importance difference was how much better I felt about Makoto as a main character. While he still manages some fairly unlikeable actions, he finds a way to basically man up to the situation and try and fix things. It becomes a story of a guy who is less sociopathic, destroying the hearts of women left and right to one of a guy who makes a few bad choices that could be brushed off as him simply thinking with his penis more than his brain like most normal teenage men. However, I will leave the comparison here.

While the male protagonist reminds us that guys can be pricks sometimes, it can be easy to overlook how manipulative and conniving young women are as well. Sekai wastes no time in trying to win the affections of Makoto after working so diligently to bring him and Kotonoha together. This is also where my criticisms of both Sekai and Kotonoha come into play. Kotonoha begins off innocently enough, but her personality changes so rapidly that you don’t really feel like she’s made a genuine evolution as a person (even if it was for the worst). Sekai’s transformation was even more radical. Her personality changes are three-step: playful, tomboyish friend (re: Asa Shigure from Shuffle! If you’d like a solid idea of what I mean)  passionate and jealous lover  completely psychotic. While I was willing to accept her transition from tomboyish friend to jealous lover, her change to utter insanity was so abrupt that I was startled it actually ended that way. The only character who seemed to have a solid emotional growth was Makoto, and as we all like to see in our protagonists it was a redeeming, positive one.

The artwork in School Days was also reasonably well drawn and shaded from what I saw. I had only some minor complaints where they try and accentuate light reflection from sources such as the sun on the hair. It changed the color of the hair so much that you felt as if the character went from having black hair to blonde hair. Panel flow also felt wonky in a few places as well, but it was minor and did not detract from the flow of the story in any discernible way. One particular high point in the series was how emotional half sized and full sized panels felt. They were drawn in such a way that really spoke volumes about the emotional state of the character at that given moment.

In all, I enjoy School Days as a standalone story that sets itself apart from the anime series. I faulted it on the basis on how radically Sekai and Kotonoha change as characters and felt that with perhaps an additional two or three chapters, they both could have been fleshed out a bit better in their development.