High school Of The Dead or H.O.T. Dead

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I was looking through the free on demand selections and came across High school Of The Dead ep.1. I know, I capatilized some of the wrong words, that is because it is abreviated H.O.T. Dead. The synopsis said it was zombies so I was there.

Ummmmm..... can you say fan service. It was borderline ridiculous. If that is the demographic you are going for you should just go all the way. With the amount of language and violence that is in this, there won't be many kids watching, so upping the ante to adult only wouldn't change much in terms of sales. I didn't have much a problem with it until it started getting in the way of story.

Sure it is episode 1 of a half hour show, but all you get is how the zombies infected the school. There are some really cool gory scenes but overall it didn't really set the series up well. That might have been because they needed about 15 minutes of the half hour they had to show fan service. The writing could have been a bit stronger and less cliched but some of that could be translation.

Animation wise it was pretty. Clean lines, the zombies are done well. The attacks are gory. The character design is what you would expect. Nothing earth shattering. The voice acting was par for Anime. Not great but passable.

Overall, it was okay. Not enough to get me to buy the DVD, but enough that I might watch other episodes if I saw them available. The fact that I can't watch this with my wife or kids kind of limits its viewing potential.

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This was a great little read. It follows Keiji as he goes “ground hog day” on the day of his first battle against a near unstoppable alien force.


It was actually a pretty refreshing read. A background in mecha anime might help as would some knowledge of Japanese culture, but I don’t think it is necessary to enjoy this book.

You get to know Keiji really well in this book. Besides him really only one other character is fleshed out, but they are all background characters as this is really Keiji’s story.

The book is really short and really quick. It doesn’t take long to rip through. The downside of this is that you find yourself wanting more. I find this preferable to the alternative of wishing that the author would have cut out some of the exposition, but I did want to know a couple of the characters a little bit better.

Ultimately this book was about relationships during war if it was about anything other than expressing a pretty cool idea that mixed ground hog day with mecha anime. And what a great title. I would recommend this to Military Scifi fans, as well as fans of mecha anime. The book is fairly appropriate for about the 14 and up age group as there were some non graphic mentions of sex and lots of violence.