Hello everyone,
Today we'll have another preview (the third preview after Nisemonogatari and Black Rock Shooter) of a series of this upcoming winter 2011/2012 anime series named Highschool DxD based on a series of successfull light novels.
This series, while having a base story that may be somewhat resembling Infinite Stratos in terms of genre, is known on the net for the massive quantity of fanservice present in the storyline, something that may make Maken-Ki looks like a family show.
I'm terribly interested in how this studio (TNK) is going to adapt this, especially if you consider that they are the same guys behind Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka and they are involved in many other projects as 2nd Key Animation studio.
The story is pretty simple and follows Hyodou Issei (Yuuki Kaji that is the same seiyuu of Shu Ouma from Guilty Crown) as your ordinary and a bit lecherous high school student that is somehow killed by his angel girlfriend Amano Yuuma right on his first date.
Fortunately for him, he is soon after raised back to "life" by a beautiful devil named Rias Gremory (Yoko Hikasa that is the same seiyuu as Mio from K-On) right after as a devil to "serve" her in the battle against the fallen angels...
Yes, everything of this story sounds of "hey, I heard already about this", but I'm reserving the judgement on the story until I actually watch the first couple of episodes.
The trailer shows us the main character (who looks like the famous "Generic Protagonist #0") being killed and resurrected with plenty of blood in both scenes together with various battle scenes involving him and the girls.
At the same time, during these battles, we get a nice showcase of breast physics and panty shots. The most important thing to notice is that they had to heavily censor their own promotional video in many scenes!
This may indicate the quantity of fanservice we'll get in the final production and probably give us a warning on the fact that most of the fanservice will be probably censored by the "Mystic fog" and the "power of the sun".
I'm sure we'll have to re-watch this series in BD/DVD version later next year in order to get the "full meaning and value" out of it.
If we look this series from the technical standpoint, I have to say that I'm not an huge fan of the graphical style they're going to use in the anime project (as shown in the trailer) because it somehow gives me an "old school" effect.
The music on the other side is quite good and combined with the high level Seiyuu working on this project (Shizuka Itou, Ayana Taketatsu, Yoko Hikasa) may actually represent the only redeeming feature of this otherwise generic series.
Concluding, Highschool DxD is a series I'm going to watch in this upcoming winter season, but I'm not going to blog regularly about it. (unless it turns out to be really good and not just an excuse to show fanservice...)
See you soon,
feal87