Review: HIGH SCHOOL DXD

There was a time when you couldn't swing a stick without hitting a manga adaptation of a light novel series where some horny doofus and his harem of marketable waifus go to Magic School and have fanservice-laden adventures.

This is...certainly one example of those.

HIGH SCHOOL DXD (Haisukuru Di Di), based on the light novels by Ichiei Ishibumi and character designs by Zero Miyama with art by Hiroji Mishima.  First published in 2011 and first published in North America in 2014.

PLOT:

Issei was your typical horny high school student, hoping to score some girls and touch some boobs instead of hanging out with his even hornier, stupider friends.  It figures that the first girl to give him the time of day turned out to be a fallen angel who killed him.  Now he's been resurrected as a demon, the latest minion of the bombshell popular girl/demon queen Rias.  Issei is now a soldier in a never-ending war between demons and angels, but he's got a secret weapon up his sleeve.

STORY:

This era of light novel-to-manga adaptations tended to be pretty horny in general, but few of them could aspire to be as single-minded about it as High School DxD.  There's nary a page that goes by without a glimpse or a mention of boobs, panties, butts, and porn.  Like Issei himself, this series is completely led around by its dick, hoping that you'll be so distracted by the fanservice that you won't notice that the characters who aren't ripoffs are hollow clichés and that the plot isn't the same old holy war nonsense that a thousand other stories have riffed on, from Angel Sanctuary to Bayonetta.

I'll say this much for Issei: he isn't the usual anonymous, nebbish-y harem lead.  Sure, his personality could be accurately summed up as "walking boner," but it's at least something.  In true light novel hero fashion, he turns out to have a secret, horrendously overpowered ability.  In this case it's a magic gun in his hand that's conveniently fueled by his libido.  Thus, Issei actually has an excuse as to why he doesn't respond to the regular come-ons he receives from Rias and her inner circle (despite them freely making themselves available to him) and the writer has all the excuse he needs for all the fanservice he wants.

For all the fuss that Issei (and by extension, the author) make over Rias, she's basically a sexy lamp.  We are told that she is many things: elegant, commanding, cunning, sexy, etc, but mostly she serves as a giver of exposition and an endless spring of fanservice.  It's telling that more time is spent watching her slowly take her panties off and on than giving us any sense of her as a personality.  The rest of her followers are a bunch of gimmicky -dere girls, along with another token dude (but not a horny one, and thus is not treated as competition for Issei).  The closest thing to an exception is Asia, a nun who is sympathetic to Issei.  On the surface, she's both the resident ingenue and klutz, thus providing lots of unintentional fanservice for Issei and the reader.  Those who know a thing or two about light novels from this era will recognize that she's clearly a ripoff riff on the title character from A Certain Magical Index, which was to 2000s light novels what Sword Art Online was to today's isekai ones.  Meanwhile, horror fans will just be confused because she is literally named Asia Argento.

But what about the plot?  Surely there's more of a plot to this than just horny antics?  You'd be correct, although it takes a while (and a nasty little homophobic "gag" about Issei's first attempt at a demonic deal) to get there.  The introduction of Asia is where the holy war angle really gets going, but it's a total non-starter.  The only idea that Ishibumi had was "what if the angels, priests, and exorcists were bad and the demons were actually good?"  The problem is that even at the time this series was new that twist had been done to death in other forms of media (Japanese and otherwise) and this series has nothing to add to it but gratuitous fanservice.  After all, that's all that anyone would be reading this for.

ART:

The good news is that there's not much of a difference in quality between the original light novel art and the manga art.  The bad news is that's mostly because the original designs weren't very good from the start.  Like a lot of fanservice-driven properties, the designs of the characters themselves are dull and the designer compensated by putting them all in needlessly fussy, overdesigned school uniforms that mostly just serve to better facilitate the fanservice.

If this manga has any advantage over the light novel it's that it can show all the horny shit that the books merely had to describe and Mishima certainly takes advantage of it.  There are loads of barely-concealed nipples, bizarrely bulging vulvas, ridiculously detailed panties, and skirts short enough to readily flip upwards or are easy to gaze up from below.  He makes sure that you notice these moments, as he tends to give them nice big spreads (or at least generously-sized panels to show them off).  Otherwise his art is perfectly, unremarkably functional, just another vehicle for the fanservice.

RATING:

The only thing High School DxD has going for it is that it's a little more openly, consensually horny than most of its contemporaries.  There's nothing here that you couldn't get from other ecchi magic school harem titles before or since, and certainly nothing of quality to be found here at any level.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is complete in Japan with 11 volumes available.  All 11 have been released and are currently in print.