ldouglas - 2014-05-04 09:25:14

It seems these days that the anime community can be rife with claims of something being the "worst show ever". Usually, it can be pretty clear that most of these are simply reactionary to a work that might only be mediocre in some regards; things discussed like Naruto, Guilty Crown or the Chaos Head adaption. Barring the melodramatic and those who tend to rate the most awful things they've seen a 5/10, if one were to scrape the bottom of the barrel they would find such masterpieces as MD Geist, Cipher, and of course the infamous Mars of Destruction, which is often regarded as the worst ever made.

Well, those people are wrong. Gakeuntoshi Valanoir is an absolute travesty. it's a bad anime that has ascended bad anime to super saiyan levels; a 1 score among 1's.

Don't let this tantalizing scene fool you; nothing nearly so interesting occurs in this shit heap.

Gakuentoshi Varanoir (School City Valanoir) is based off of a 2002 adventure game of the same name by Idea Factory, who are also the ones who made this anime and many other abominations such as the more infamous Mars of Destruction which would be released a few years later. (and their improvement really shows)

I've never played the game, but considering Idea Factory's primary niche is game development I can only assume it has at least some merit compared to it's adaption, not like that's hard to do.

Story: The story basically begins when our heroine Myu reads an advertisement for the grand school Valanoir...off of a hamburger wrapper. Naturally, this was an appealing manner for her to consider a higher education there without further thought. However, poor Myu doesn't have it easy as her pervy Grandfather has misgivings about the school, and the teachers themselves seem at odds with her, and she doesn't quite fit in with the copypasted two form students who speak in unison. Why, on her first day there she finds a love interest and a rival even!

If it were not for the dreadful animation and time constraints, i believe the story's setting would play out similar to other school slice of life ecchi stuff, and could even achieve to be as high as mediocre. Half the scenes are character introduction (not really only some are really introduced properly) and the rest of this is hot ecchi style "action" scenes. There's really not much to describe or even spoiler with this.

Animation: Some of you probably think i'm overreacting, but this shit has to be seen to believed.

Until I had the displeasure of seeing this, i had truly believed that Musashi Gundoh held the spot for worst art and animation, but in hindsight it might as well be a Studio Ghibli work compared to this. At least they tried to animate some stuff for the action scenes, as badly as they failed. I never got the impression that anybody even tried to animate here. It does not take a trained eye to notice the incredibly cheap, lazy, and pathetic lengths the makers went to avoid animating anything they could from the very first scenes. Shameful examples can be found at any particular moment in this anime but particularly notable was the efforts made to never move characters mouths, including making a character eat a hamburger while talking so they don't even have to show it; he literally just chews his burger the entire conversation, and he never actually takes any bites, the burger just remains there kind of getting slobbered on i guess. Another character is quickly punched in the mouth by main character just so the staff could put a BANDAID over his mouth. The backgrounds, as you can see from my images, look like they were created with some incredibly bad cgi thing, you would think a video game company could at least do cgi background models but that's just too tall an order here. There is a great reuse of designs, literally all the houses looked the same, many students are just copypastes, and i've seen Inferno Cop with more poses than some of the characters are given here. There is one guy who literally has his hands scrunched together like a T-Rex for both OVA's. Of all things, the team decided they wanted to have a battle go on. Well, it was called a battle anyways, but i saw no movement from either side really until 6 minutes in, and it was over with a mere bending over to grab a conveniently placed yen coin. My friend and I could not believe this shit was actually happening. To it's sole credit, the main characters are drawn decently, like one guy on the team could actually draw a still design to a passable degree, but oftentimes even they're drawn incredibly poorly for time management/laziness. Even the wall colors look off; mostly colored in bile green or shit brown with weird glitchy looking cgi artifacts on them. For the amount of still scenes they might have well done a visual novel; it couldn't have possibly been a more wasted effort than this.

Sound: Could be argued as one of the stronger elements. A very apologist person could even call this anime a 2 score if they really focused on the music. There is some stock sound effects but there is also a catchy jpop song that actually sounds up to standards in the first OVA, but i wouldn't call anything from the soundtrack memorable or immersive.

Characters: Main character just wants to be a typical girl having fun at school with friends. I can't think of any character here who was interesting and wasn't 1 dimensional. Heck, half of them weren't even introduced other than a brief on screen flash and one liner. Their relationships and gags are subpar even compared to a typical Hentai.

Enjoyment: I just barely finished this, and that was only because I had a friend to share the laughs and anguish with and he wanted to end it after the first OVA too. Both of us are no stranger to bad anime either; this was actually the feature for our bad anime night. You might get a few laughs from how stunningly awful it is for a few minutes, but it gets old fast. I can't even imagine fans of the game wanting to see the characters they might have had some attachment for depicted in such a nightmarish realm.

Overall: I can't believe Idea Factory made Choujigen Neptune and it actually looked alright. And that nobody killed themselves out of shame for creating this.