Daily Lives of High School Boys is a comedy slice of life based on the manga. It is twelve episodes long. The anime starts off with a hilarious section that pokes fun at tropes and the companies that is sponsoring it. There isn’t much of a plot, but at first, it follows three high school boys, Tadakuni, Yoshitake and Hidenori. They’re good friends and they pretty much just hang out together. Each episode is broken down into shorter segments and involves normal day to day events of the three boys and it’s nothing too unrealistic.
Even though it’s just covering mundane everyday moments, it manages to make those moments funny and interesting either through exaggeration or the embarrassing actions of the characters that normal people do, like pretending the stick you’re holding is a weapon. Granted, sometimes these moments are a bit weird like how the trio suddenly decides they wanted to try out female clothing. The anime is great in that it speaks true of the phrase that “boys will be boys”. This leads to moments where one of them will start to embellish and exaggerate their stories in an effort to one up one another. These results in a hilarious conclusion as the others take it seriously.
The trio’s antics soon involving several other recurring characters like Tadakuni’s sister (who unfortunately falls victim to the trio’s sudden interest in female clothing as mentioned above) and their classmates. While they hang in separate groups, they do from time to time interact with the main trio. These include the student council, who ironically has the appearances of delinquents. There’s also an opposing group of “high school girls”, where the premise is similar to the boys but of course, much to their chagrin, don’t get their own anime. However, scenes often de-emphasize the female characters by not having their faces fully in view.
The anime embraces typical tropes in this genre, which is not a bad thing because it does them quite well. Being male teenagers, they often have convoluted (and yet focused) thought processes that they try and analyse the situation. This leads to over-complication of what should be simple matters. Several segments capture this really well such as not considering the consequences of what they are doing or talking about, or when they’re chatting about pointless things.
As with all comedy anime that are structured with short segments, there are hits and misses. The differences between the highs and the lows aren’t as pronounced; so on the whole, the content is fairly consistent. It does repeat similar concepts frequently though. Even if it was hilarious the first time, like the parts where the boys role play as if they were playing a RPG game, when it gets to the third or fourth time, the novelty wears off.
The story doesn’t have any objectives since it pretty much just shows random bits of everyday life. This matches well with what the characters are experiencing at well. They just take each day and event as it comes. Even though sometimes may be a bit weird, they never get too out there to be completely impossible. The ending to the season is kind of like an ending and not an ending. It leaves it open without the characters fully moving on.
Overall, Daily Lives of High School boys is a funny collection of segments, which makes it an enjoyable anime. The animation appears simple at first but there can be a lot of detail packed into the background. It breaks the fourth wall in certain segments as the characters know that they are in an anime and will complain how they’re not getting screen-time. The good thing is that this anime has a consistent level of quality and peaks fairly high with its randomness in everyday situations.
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