High School of the Dead Review

Zombies, high schoolers, and fanservice. what can go wrong?

Story: 8/10

I absolutely love the concept. The legit zombie outbreak concept is always something that I look forward to no matter how many times I've seen it before. The story here is what you'd expect. After a zombie outbreak, several teenagers along with a ditzy school nurse try to survive. A pretty standard zombie outbreak plot. HOWEVER... the overboard fanservice ruins it... It's not that I don't like close up boob shots or random panty shots, but it's that they seriously went overboard. So much to the point that it pretty much gets in the way of the story, sadly. In one episode, there was honestly about a good 10-15 minutes dedicated a whole bathtub scene complete with soap bubbles and naked girls prancing around the house acting like it's not uncommon to be bare-skinned during a biohazard follow up. Loved the concept, extreme ecchi ruined it.

Character: 6/10

There wasn't much character development to be honest. Other than the main character who goes from an angry high schooler to a leader of a small survival group, and the kendo girl's confession of her past, everyone else didn't change much. Two characters I absolutely hated in this anime were the genius chick and the school nurse. The smart chick is as annoying as one can get, one of those tsundere characters most people like to call them. I believe there was one episode where she didn't have much to say... and I believe that was one of the better episodes. The nurse chick, where do I begin. Forgive me, but all throughout the series I was hoping she'd get raped by zombies. Her stupidity astounds me. Her boob size to retard ratio is right on. The gun nerd, on the other hand, was a fun character to watch despite no development.

Sound: 7/10

There's not really any voices that stood out or songs that caught my attention except for the 1st ED. Cool thing was each episode had its own ending song, but only the first one was memorable for me.

Animation: 9/10

As expected of Madhouse, the animation is superb. Unfortunately, most of it is spent towards making bouncing boobs more fluid. Ecchi aside, fight animations, and art detail overall is quite good. Watching it at 1080p will make you appreciate the amount of detail they put into the animation.

FluffyBunnyPwn gives it 7/10 overall.