Anime: Seikoku no Dragonar

I know AniDB generally discourages reviewers to give straight across scores in all categories but it's hard to do anything but that with Dragonar Academy as it's a show that lacks any redeeming values.

Over the last couple of years we've seen a steady stream of light novels being adapted to anime series and now we get yet another with this series, produced by C-Station a former offshoot of Bee Train Production Inc. and the overall result is a marginal failure.

Anime is full of time honored clichés that never seem to die and Dragonar Academy is so packed full of them it shows just how void this show is of any creativity or imagination. Giant bouncing breasts on all women, naked magic girls showing up from nowhere and mood swinging tsundere characters are ripe and abound in this series it feels less like this is less of it's own series and more of a copy paste job from a few dozen other series of it's kind.

Taking from probably equally lazy source material, the scripts written by Noboru Kimura are shoddy and thrown together with no thought or effort behind them. The large cast of cookie cutter characters will bore you with just how uninspired they are as they all fit neatly into their archetypes, with wide eyed boy hero (Ash), tsundere-not-love-interest, (Echo) bitchy princess (Silvia), one dimensional sex symbol of an absurdly powerful student council (Jessica).

This is barely forgivable from a group of first time creators but the fact this comes from several long time animators who had once made excellent shows in the past with their old studio, before breaking away to form this new company, adds more insult to injury. The choice of making a light novel as your first effort out of the gate can be blamed on the trend of light novel adaptions that saturate the market right now but the cliche storm cannot.

Topping off the cliche storm is a number of soft-core moments between a nude dragon lady giving oral to a pseudo tentacle rape scene, you would think they'd rather be making a hentai series.

Animation and art is just as lazy with ugly looking dragons to top off the grossly exaggerated character designs. One would think with a show centered all around dragons it would be the one thing you could get right but the dragons look like a mix of generic fantasy dragons painted in pastels that makes them look like they're covered in hard water spots or they're wearing the projection clothes from the Count of Monte Cristo anime.

Interestingly, half the time you won't see any dragons and it will be mostly focused on whatever lame slice-of-life scenarios ripped from every other show of it's kind. Echo while being presented as a dragon is little more than a magical loli with some horns glued onto her head.

The music was somewhat interesting and entertaining and might be the one redeemable factor but it's tie to this awful show doesn't make me enthusiastic to want to listen to it.

Dragonar Academy is uninspired, lazy and contrived. Beating down dead clichés that have saturated the market of the last couple years alone this would barely make the grade for a crappy one episode OVA, forget a 12 episode season. I get the feeling even if you are looking for a silly fanservice show there are likely far more entertaining options out there that are less copy-and-paste than this show.