LogFAQs > #971304508

(I decided I would do a write-up for this by treating it as if I recommended it to myself. If anyone was feeling bad about me not really loving their recommendation, you might feel better after seeing how low I rank something I picked for myself!)

BONUS. Classroom Crisis
https://myanimelist.net/anime/30383/Classroom%E2%98%86Crisis
Summer 2015 (13 episodes)
My Score: TBA, MAL Score: 6.98/10
Best Character: Sera Mizuki
Recommended by: @Robazoid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SgrQvxS5uQ
(EDIT: I got this video link at work and I can't really listen to it here, but I'm worried from the title that this is the OP with Crysis music or something. It was either this or no OP link at all, though, so oh well. The OP isn't very good in any case)

Premise: At a corporate school on a Mars colony, the advanced A-TEC class is dedicated to aerospace development. Then a new student transfers in, and it turns out that Kiryuu Nagisa is actually a high-ranking executive who's been sent to shut A-TEC down!

The Good: Classroom Crisis is a sci-fi anime set in a future where humanity has numerous space colonies. This is thanks to the powerful Kirishina Corporation, which also sponsors a school where the advanced A-TEC class is at the cutting edge of aerospace research. Both the students and their teacher have eccentric personalities and a reputation for wasteful spending, which finally drives Kirishina to dispatch a young executive to shut A-TEC down. I liked a few of the characters, especially Mizuki. She was a nice upbeat girl, and her interactions with the executive transfer student Nagisa were the best part of the show. I also didn't mind some of the corporate scheming, though it was held back a bit by stuff I'll cover in the bad section. Other than that, the nicest thing I can say about this is that one of the characters was basically a corporate ninja, which is always fun.

The Bad: Classroom Crisis did so many things wrong that I'm honestly struggling to decide where to begin. Part of that might be that I went in with the wrong expectations. I wanted a sci-fi slice-of-life about kids designing a spaceship, but this wasn't what the show was at all. The only part of development process that wasn't skipped over was budgeting. Otherwise they pulled new breakthroughs out of their asses entirely offecreen. There was also very little that I would call slice-of-life. No, this was an anime about the cutthroat world of corporate politics... but, even on that level, I don't think it did a good job. Nagisa mostly maneuvered against his older brother Yuji, who was an awful mixture of abusive and stupid. He was such a crappy person that you wanted to see Yuji fail, but he was also such an idiot that victories against him felt hollow rather than satisfying. It didn't help that Nagisa himself was a terrible person most of the time too, though at least he got some development along the way to help justify it.

Other than that, Classroom Crisis had a lot of big plots that came out of nowhere and were handled shockingly poorly. They introduced a major character having amnesia halfway through the series as an offhand comment, I mean, come on. They spent a lot of time developing a relationship and then turned it into a love triangle with no build-up at all. And, like I said before, the whole aerospace research aspect of the show was basically skipped over. It was just an excuse to have corporate scheming. This meant that most of the A-TEC students got no development at all.

Overall: Classroom Crisis really seemed like an anime that I would like, which just goes to show that it's impossible to tell if I'll enjoy something without trying it first. The characters, with Mizuki as a notable exception, were either annoying, jerks, or they barely got any development at all. The corporate scheming was unsatisfying, the research was nonexistent, and a lot of big plot moments came out of nowhere (and, arguably, went nowhere). I felt bad for giving low ranking to a lot of recommendations, but I hope this helps people see that it isn't their fault! This is the kind of junk I often wind up choosing for myself, after all.