Battle Girl High School Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

Battle Girl High School Blu-ray Movie Review

Battling Boredom.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman July 26, 2018

Battle Girl High School looks a lot like, and takes more than a few cues from, Sailor Moon, but the show never captures that same magic. It aspires to be too much, too soon. Rather than slow down and build a coherent story and construct an intimate character roster the show instead sprawls from the outset and struggles to find an identity through the remaining episodes. There's little character depth and even less story detailing. The series jumps from one action scene to the next and one school event to the next with little care or concern for pace, narrative structure, or slowing down to really get to know the gaggle of girls. The series banks on Anime cliché and genre familiarity as its strong points, assuming audience interest by its very existence rather than working hard to earn it. The result is a slow-paced and dull show with enough potential to whet the appetite but too little meat to satisfy any cravings.

Official synopsis: Mysterious invaders have attacked the Earth! As the Irousu roam the conquered lands, mankind has been driven back, but there’s one last weapon that may still turn the tide: super-powered schoolgirls! At schools like the Shinjugamine Girls Academy, elite classes of Star Guardians alternate between regular schoolwork and learning to kick Irousu behind. It’s a duty that the members of the Shinjugamine Hoshimori force, like freshman Miki Hoshitsuki, take seriously, but as they’re basically normal girls who just happen to get their powers from a magic tree, there are normal life issues they have to contend with as well. With the arrival of their latest mysterious recruit, however, things are about to get deadly serious. Their final exam is about to begin and if they fail, the whole world is doomed in 'Battle Girl High School!'

The series is based on a Japanese social game designed by COLOPL, which hopefully featured more depth than this. Everything about Battle Girl High School whittles down to a single word: "serviceable." From the character roster to the action, from the setting to the alien invaders, there's nothing here that's a standout, and not because there's just no potential for great exploration. The fault lies with the lazy, lackadaisical approach to series construction. It's too crowded, develops too fast, and falls into a routine that's predictable on each path, whether that's characterization, happenings at the school, or the battles with the mysterious Irous, which are little more than fill-in creatures for the girls to battle from time to time. Nothing the show has to offer is ever developed with any sort of insight or sense of purpose. It's all a simple framework to sell an anime to fans who the creators seem to believe are predisposed to like anything with schoolgirls, action, and aliens because other shows have found success with a similar formula.

The show does make an attempt at variety. Though the alien attack has apparently left much of the world in devastation, there's a surprising diversity in location and opportunities for the girls to escape the centralized areas of their school. But even as the action shifts to here and there, simple changes of scenery are not accompanied by simple changes of tone. The show never escapes its monotone framework, never allows the characters to stretch or bend in friendship or in battle. Additionally, the artwork feels lifted from countless other shows. The characters and environments alike lack any sort of visual distinction. Add that the battle scenes too are absent any unique visual dazzle and the show struggles to find any real saving graces.

Battle Girl High School Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Battle Girl High School's 1080p presentation never struggles in the delivery of the show's rather straightforward Anime stylings. Lines are clean, textural efficiency is high, and color reproduction appears accurate. Character details are fine, particularly moving beyond essential facial features, which beyond eyes are rather simple, and considering more the clothes, weapons, and environments which are more interestingly complex and varied. Static environments in particular enjoy a more satisfying level of textural detailing, more complexly rendered elements that the Blu-ray brings to life with appreciable ease. Colors are more of a pastel, light and airy, often lacking any serious intensity, but there are various standout elements, such as a bright blue sky at the beach in episode three, that reveal very impressive color density and saturation. Action scenes sparkle with more pronounced highlights and bright light sources, too. Source or encode flaws are nearly nonexistent. This is a very satisfying presentation from Sentai.

Battle Girl High School Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Like many Sentai tracks, the two-channel limitation is not much of an obstacle. Though lacking surround, centers, and subwoofer channels, Battle Girl High School's DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless presentation plays large, with plenty of front-stretching width and solid musical, lyrical, effect, ambient, and dialogue clarity. There's surprisingly good and rich reverberation at a concert in the first minutes of the first episode, for instance, but throughout the track the stretch, the natural location details and recreations, large scale action music, sweeping effects, and the like all deliver a robust track that betrays the two-channel limits and opens up about as far as a track of this configuration can. Dialogue images to the center and is so well pronounced and positioned there that one would think a dedicated center channel was in play. This is near a best-case scenario presentation for a two-channel lossless track.

Battle Girl High School Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Battle Girl High School contains the Sentai-standard clean opens/closes and previews for other Anime titles.

• Clean Opening Animations (1080p, 3:04): Textless intro videos.
• Clean Closing Animations (1080p, 7:38): Textless outro videos.
• Also from Sentai Filmworks (1080p): Previews for Welcome to Pia Carrot! 2 DX, Love and Lies, Long Riders!, and Armed Girls Machiavellism.

Battle Girl High School Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Battle Girl High School sounds great on paper but the positives largely end with the concept's fundamentals. Put into motion, there's little to like with any of it. The characters are stock, the roster is too large, and the show struggles to develop them with any memorable identity. Action is repetitive, the aliens are largely inconsequential beyond the purpose of merely "being there," and the environments are uncreative. The show seems to believe its audience preexists and will not care that the show is jumbled but merely care that it's there. But that's not good enough. There's no catch, no draw, no reason to watch beyond the frenzied first episode that springs too much on the screen and too little context. Sentai's Blu-ray is very good, as usual. While extras are typically skimpy, video and audio presentations are just fine. That said, skip it.