Review: GAKUEN HEAVEN

 It's back-to-school time here at the Manga Test Drive, which in the manga world means attending anything but your ordinary Japanese high school.  That's certainly the case with our first review, a visual novel adaptation about a very special (and very gay) school.

GAKUEN HEAVEN, based on the visual novel by SPRAY with art by You Higuri.  First published in 2004 and first published in North America in 2006.

PLOT:

Keita Itou is a lucky boy.  While he seemingly has no outstanding qualities, he has been accepted to the prestigious boys' school Bell Liberty Academy where every boy has a special talent or quality.  Once he gets there, he is welcomed by the very tall, handsome student body (and in particular by the student council president Niwa).  Soon enough Keita is swept up in a school scavenger hunt where the winner is granted whatever they want.  The competition is fierce, especially once a group of boys use this opportunity to get to Niwa by attacking Keita.

STORY:

First of all: ha ha, I see what you did there, it's literally BL Academy, very clever I'm sure.

Aside from that and this story's origins in a game, Gakuen Heaven is a perfectly ordinary BL manga of its era.  It follows a lot of the common plot beats of turn-of-the-millennium BL and utilizes a lot of the clichés one would expect in BL of the time.  It wasn't bad enough to make me angry, but its lack of originality holds it back at nearly every turn.

Keita is your prototypical uke: sweet, innocent, gullible, sensitive, basically a shojo heroine in everything but gender.  His golly-gee-whiz routine gets old fast, as does his frequent complaints about how useless he is compared to his boyfriend best friend.  I guess there's a whiff of a larger plot where Keita tries to figure out why he was admitted to this school in the first place, but that plot thread is swiftly forgotten.

Thankfully, Niwa is much more well-adjusted in comparison, being a rather friendly and well-rounded young man.  Too bad that can't be said for the rest of his classmates, who are all basically walking seme stereotypes: aloof, pissy, manipulative, and rapey.  They are there entirely for the sake of threatening Keita so that Niwa can save him in true white knight fashion.  This of course is followed by a big, dramatic love confession, which is immediately followed by them having sex on a rocky beach.  Aside from the suddenness of it all, I couldn't help but think about how this would only lead to getting rocks and sand in some very sensitive areas in some very un-sexy ways.  That alone should tell you how unconvincing this whole romance was to me.

ART:

I've noted before that You Higuri is a pretty good artist in general, and she was the original character designer for the game so the character designs survived the transition from game to page perfectly intact.  That said, these designs are very much in line with BL manga art at the turn of the millennium and it's a look that hasn't aged gracefully.  The characters in this book only come in two flavors: tall, broad, narrow-eyed semes with giant catcher-mitt hands (distinguishable only by hairstyle and the odd accessory) and Keita the tiny, boyishly cute uke.  That means the majority of the cast always looks like they're leering lasciviously at Keita regardless of their thoughts or actions, including Niwa.  It's honestly a step down from her original, contemporaneous works.

RATING:

I can't speak to how it rates as an adaptation, but as a manga onto itself Gakuen Heaven operates entirely on tropes and never manages to rise above mere mediocrity.

This series was published by Tokyopop under their Blu imprint.  This series is complete in Japan with 5 volumes available.  3 volumes were released and are currently out of print.