Daily Lives of High School Boys (2012) User Reviews

Slice of life

[akashpr-67648 · 9/10 · 29 July 2019]

A perfect slice of life anime with both witty and crude/absurd humor. Very close to actual high school stuff and loads of fun to watch it with friends.

Very entertaining

[snowyprecipice · 9/10 · 29 August 2018]

This is not a series. It's more like a collection of sketches. Which is perfectly fine! Just don't come in here expecting the show to go somewhere and enjoy it for what it is - a collection of cute sketches about the daily lives of high school boys. I found the later episodes better, once the characters were more established in my mind. Definitely a good watch!

Funny sketches which reminiscent of our High School days

[CyrilMartin · 9/10 · 24 January 2021]

High School, we all loved high school and never wanted it to end. We all had our time stacked with various activities and what not but we all have some fond memories of mundane things that used to happen in our daily life that still make us laugh. This is the anime we all wanted to reminiscent our school days, if you want to laugh for straight 20 minutes without worrying about any plot, characters, or timeline then this is the anime for you.

There is no story or any recurring plot, there are many characters but we're shown to have 3 protagonists in which one of the characters' life is not so funny. A reminder that they only show funny moments of the high school boys so don't expect the protagonist to show up in all the scenes. The show opens up hilariously with the standard anime and manga situations and makes fun of that. There are also some appearances by high school girls and their daily lives, they tease about how high school girls act all cute and all and how they deserve some screentime. They explore the 4th wall in very funny ways.

All the sketches are goddamn hilarious, the opening song is great, the ending song is one of my all-time favorites it really matches the atmosphere of the show and the music is high schoolish. Highly recommend it.

Right on the money

[blackmamba99971 · 10/10 · 2 February 2012]

The daily lives of high school boys. A series about three friends, Tadakuni, Yoshitake, and Hidenori. All who do not have a single clue on how to date a girl, let alone talk to one without tripping over their tongues in the first place. Seeing as it is a teen angst series, it is much based upon the real world, where teens imagine things that are a hundred times more worse than the situation calls for. Which is the reason this series is a gut buster of laughs. For many reasons, I can recommend this series mainly because 1.) Most teen boys do not get girls. 2.) Girls do not get boys. 3.) When both mix together, you get a Mish mash of misunderstandings because of the misconceptions on both sides, with things that girls think about, such as . . . (Will he like me? Is my face too round or fat? what will he think of my butt and so on.) ON the other hand, boys don't seem too concerned about what a girl thinks, just as long as they have curvy features and a big rack. Needless to say both sides have no clue until such a time when a prom night comes up. It's basically all the same, with the flushing skin, fast heart beats, the jittery nervousness both feels on a date. In point, a possible failure which will be told to the Girls/Guys when it's all over. I think this series touches base on the most fundamental questions teenagers have no matter how ridiculous it may seem. I really enjoy this series, it reminds me of my youth, and how bad it was to date girls in high school. A highly recommended series.

A beautiful masterpiece that delivers

[Ashutosh44KS · 10/10 · 23 July 2019]

From the start of the very first episode, the show delivers. Whether it's funny scenes or the comedic lines played after each segment. The series is based on the misconceptions that both highschool boys & girls have about each other. While the character and story development is kinda negligible, the constant edition of new characters that are equally charming really makes up for it. It's a must watch, might not attract people of a group above 25 IMO.

The very best anime I have ever seen.

[sankalpsss · 10/10 · 19 December 2020]

I don't know why people are saying it is not the best but is good. For me it is the best anime series I have ever watched. I generally don't write reviews but I want to make it so high rated that somehow I get the second season of it. Totally worth your time , try it and it might become one your most favourite anime as well.

very good story and close to reality for some people

[mpoatm · 8/10 · 26 February 2022]

When watching Daily Lives of High School Boys, some people will remember memories from when they were at school with their friends.

And will make you remember the past memories "Oh.. I did it in the past with my school friends".

Pretty Good

[pestacular · 7/10 · 23 May 2022]

It starts off strong, and though it may lose some steam by the end, its classic style of absurd character comedy is hard not to smile at. The characters are somewhat weak - at least for a character-based comedy - but always entertaining. Though, I hate to be that guy (but I'm gonna be that guy anyway): WOW, what a cast of copy/pasted one-note female characters. I could probably count the skits involving female characters that DIDN'T end with the girl getting mad and hitting the guy unreasonably (or within reason for getting her PANTIES STOLEN for god's sake) on one hand. I can't even say I'm getting tired of the consistent anime trope of women and girls being violent emotional caricatures to contrast the reasonable male characters: I have BEEN tired of it. Some many of the gags being at the expense of the girls spoiled some of the show for me - that being said, there are some hilarious and memorable segments that merit rewatching. I loved the running gag with Yassan and Hidenori sitting on the slope exchanging cheesy lines, and the main trio's improv escapades were always fun to watch (though I started to wonder where on earth Tadakuni had gone halfway through the series, never mind how a joke was made calling out his absence). Maybe I'm at fault here for letting its status as a classic raise my expectations too high, but whatever the cause is, it didn't ruin the experience entirely; I'd still recommend this show to anyone looking for an easy laugh.

Disappointing Literature Girl since 2012

[wandereramor · 7/10 · 16 May 2012]

Daily Lives of High School Boys (man is that an unwieldy title) is one of the more surprising anime series to come along recently. What originally looked like a male version of K-ON and its ilk turns out to be a quite funny parody of that kind of series. The show nicely translates the anxieties of teenage life into hyperbolic comic characters, making especially good hay out of the way girls and boys think of each other as alien species that you might one day like to date.

I believe this is from the same creator as School Rumble, and like that show this is a bit hit or miss but a still generally pleasant riff on high school anime. It's not a brilliant must-see series, but it probably won't let you down either.

Daily Lives

[Mysterygeneration · 7/10 · 15 January 2024]

Oh youth and the tremendous voyage called growing up. The adolescent years often characterize most people in one way or another. While some people have happy memories of high school and others have unpleasant ones, I think we can all agree that it was an exceptional time in our lives that cannot be compared.

Daily Lives of High School Boys. That's all there is to it. It's a typical slice-of-life tale, yet it works surprisingly nicely. The episodes are segmented and center on numerous characters-each with unique quirks-as they go about their daily lives. It is quite difficult to depict something so simple in a humorous way, and I believe that most animes that attempt to do so wind up with a lot of uninteresting scenes that detract from the overall atmosphere. DKN manages to avoid it in practically every scene, which is pretty incredible. You'll still laugh aloud a lot, even in its worst episode.

There's hardly much to note here. It was an acceptable level of art. Better wasn't necessary anyhow. The character designs were passable, with several figures having well-worn expressions. That worked well enough with the animation. It didn't really stand out, but I never thought it needed to be much better, so I suppose they did a decent job.

Okay, so there are two main reasons why I had to give this a nine. To begin with, the soundtrack was hilarious and well suited. The Literature Girl Song was hilarious to me every time; it was ideal for those kinds of situations and, as you can tell by simply listening to the song, it's a terrific job. The voice performers then account for the second reason. I wasn't sure where to discuss this because I'm not an experienced anime reviewer, so for obvious reasons, I'm just included it in the sound.

Pretty boring.

[invisibleunicornninja · 5/10 · 18 July 2018]

I watched episode one, waited for a plot, found out there isn't one, then stopped watching.

If there was comedy in this show, I wouldn't have cared as much. I mean there's jokes. I understand the setup/payoff shown here, but the jokes aren't funny. This show is over reliant on grossout humor and just randomness. Both of these can work in other contexts, but on its own just throwing random thing onscreen doesn't stand on its own. You need well developed characters and some kind of narrative. Maybe the characters develop over time, but I don't think it's worth it to sit through hours of painfully unfunny sketches.

Daily Lives of High School Boys, and why structure is one of the most important parts of making an enjoyable show

[Protogeist · 4/10 · 11 March 2019]

Have you ever seen a show that started out as a really forgettable show and then became something great. Or maybe the opposite, a show that starts out great and then just plummets down. Surprisingly, I've found that most shows I've watched are pretty consistent with it's quality. You know, we have shows like Darling in the Franxx or Death Note who both have a very large quality drop near the middle of the show (IMO). But I don't think I ever thought about dropping any of those shows. But that's where DLHSB unfortunately. From the first episode I really disliked it. It had some good parts like the skirt scene, which is one of the best scenes in the show IMO. But the rest just felt so boring. I don't really know what it was, but something about the writing made me not enjoy it. It really felt like a 2010 anime. The show uses a lot of meta jokes throughout the show, and for the most part I think they were really funny. Commenting on the fact that one of the characters weren't in many of the scenes, or that all of the scenes were never their daily life (as the titles suggests), but the most interesting. It comments on how Slice of Life anime were written, and how few shows actually felt like real life. But the first meta jokes in the show really grinded my gears. It felt like they just made fun of something they themself did. It's like when deadpool says that the writing is bad at one point in the second movie, but doesn't do anything with it. Breaking the fourth wall to make fun of yourself isn't funny unless you do anything with that. At one point I was glad that the opening and ending were long so that the actual episodes wouldn't take time to watch. I know just watching a show to have watched it is bad, but I always have this thought that a show could redeem itself if I just took time to watch everything.

And of course, it definitely did. When I watched the fourth episode, something weird happened. I started to enjoy the show. The conversations that the main characters had became very realistic to how friends actually talk (Like in the scenes where they play volley and the visuals were oddly artistic, especially for this show. I'll get to that later), while still being funny. Something happened at after the third episode. I don't know if it was that I got used to the bad writing or if it actually got better. But either way, I accepted it gladly and my decision to drop it was finally scrapped.

But I'm definitely not saying that it became a perfect show or anything. The problems I had with the first three episodes were still there, but it didn't feel like every scene was annoying, but that the annoying scenes were scattered across the whole show. I'll explain.

I had many problems with the show. It had many predictable jokes and ones that go on for way too long, or should've gotten a longer time to develop more. Many jokes are beaten to the ground like the "stealing the sisters underwear" joke that really embraced the over-the-top nature of the show at first but then just becomes annoying, Some of the exposition is handled pretty horribly. And lastly, many of the characters don't feel very unique, I mixed up many of them. Mainly Hidenori and Yoshitake. Their sense of humor felt really similar, their characters felt very similar and both of their voice acting was very undistinguishable (I could tell them apart while watching the show. But if you let me hear lines of dialogue from both of them, I would not tell them apart anymore)

But there were two problems that were the most memorable ones. The first one is the structure of the show. The show is structured in a way where nothing is chronological. But that every scene is a new funny scene. I did not like this structure at all. There are shows that do this well, like this seasons Kaguya-sama. Like in DLHSB, the shows structured where none of the scene are chronological. That the scenes are there to present us with jokes. The difference is the connection between the scenes and how many there are. In kaguya-sama, none of the scenes very often isn't in a chronological order, but is just scenes that the creator came up with. The difference here is that most scenes are about the same thing. Kaguya and Miyuki battle for dominance. They try to make the other person confess their love for the other, to make sure they don't have to do it themself. Not every scene works like this, but it's how the show works in general. In DLHSB, none of the scenes share anything. The first scene could be about the main characters stealing one of the sisters underwear, and then transition into a scene where the joke is that all the characters fall into pools of water outside (An example of a joke that goes for WAY too long). Though, this isn't the main problem. But the real problem is the amount of scenes in every episode. I'll continue to compare with Kaguya-sama. Cause in that show, there are 3 scenes in every episode more or less. The jokes get to develop this way, and are therefore funny. The difference here is that DLHSB has around 7 scenes per episode (I only counted once, so it could be more or less. I'm guessing it was normally more). It's the opposite, where none of the jokes are developed and are usually just one jokes that is thrown at us multiple times. This is what really made the show boring at times, and is what I hate about the first three episodes. You could've cut out scenes and developed some of the better ones. An example would be this. In one of the episodes, one of the characters (Really vague huh?) receives a love letter. He shows it to his friends and they all assume that it is a joke and want revenge for this. Then we cut to the place where the love letter told the character to come. A way to develop the joke could've been to show us them planning and training for the revenge, to really show us how absurd the scene is. It is a simple mistake that can change a lot. At least that could've raised MY enjoyment of the show.

Now as I said, there was one other thing that was as bad. And that would be the visuals. I'm not a massive fan of the normal anime art. There are great visual in anime for sure, but I like more stylistic art styles more than animes almost realistic general artstyle. And this a good example of this. Most of the visuals looked pretty ugly in my opinion. Other than the artstyle not being for me, the the coloring looked really bland, the character designs weren't that memorable and the animation was really boring, where much of it is edited by just using the same small animation over and over again (Like when something impactful happens, the animation would just be two characters jumping in front of a red background and the camera would go up and down a bunch of times. Yeah, that was a pretty bad explanation.)

But the big problems with the visuals for me were the background characters. Or what I call, hentai designs. A way to fit the budget with an animation is to make background characters faceless. Or at least eye-less. This a good way to save money, but not to make a visually appealing show. But if that was just the case for the background characters it would've been fine. The problem is when "main side-characters" gets this treatment. An example of this Tadakuni's sister Mei. Her character is in the show A LOT. She is a pretty big character even thought I wouldn't say that she was a main character. But we never see her eyes. Her and her friends are all eye-less. It makes them look very inhuman. Eyes are a big part of how humans identify people. Is is a big part of our face and identity in a way. So removing them looks really weird, especially when they're big enough to make me notice it every time. And what annoys me more is when tiny characters don't get this treatment. Yassan is a joke character used in a few scenes. She has a face. Her brother is used in ONE scene. He has a face. They were willing to spend money on drawing two joke character, where one isn't even a character, and not a character who is in a majority of the show.

That was probably the most annoying part of the show, even the structure could've been ignored at times. But every time i saw a faceless sister, all I could think of is that hentai use the same method to make the viewer immerse themself into the male character so that they can cum faster. (Not to disrespect BTW. We're all into different things)

But all that aside, I thought the show was okay. I enjoyed it, but I saw a lot of problems in it. I'll give it a 5/10 for now

Yawn...

[Irishchatter · 2/10 · 4 September 2018]

Without a plot in this anime, it makes it less interesting and becomes rather boring. All it is about is 3 horny teenage boys wanting to desperately experience love and thinking they are big shots. Seriously waste of time...