Stop me if you’ve heard this before: delinquent high school kid, gaggle of weird girls, club room, etc etc etc. Yes, you have heard this story before, very likely a lot of times, so how does one make a show like this stick out? Do it well. D-Frag is certainly a little cliche, but it does what it does very well, mostly avoiding the depths of inanity that a lot of it’s competitors sink into.
The ostensible main character is Kenji Kazama, a self-styled delinquent who’s plan for the first day of school is to punch his way to the top. Unfortunately for Kenji he may also be one of the saner people in the school, and he quickly gets himself roped into being a member of the Game Creation Club (Provisional) by the club’s insane members, all of whom seem to think they are living Pokemon characters. The club members spend most of their time getting into fights with other school clubs, mostly the original Game Creation Club.
Despite thinking the entire club is full of loonies, Kenji decides to stick around out of a strange sense of pity, since the club would be shut down without him. The head of the loonies is Roka Shibasaki, a borderline dwarf with a habit of trying to win fights by putting a black bag on her opponent’s heads. No, there’s no reason that should really work, but it does because pretty much everyone else in school is also insane. I say “pretty much” because there is at least one person who isn’t a total lunatic: Takao (aka Boobs), the president of the original Game Creation Club.
If it seems like fairly thin plotting, it is. D-Frag is less about telling a grand story and more about hanging out with some funny people. Well, some of them are funny anyway. Most of the club members are actually kind of annoying, but thankfully the amount of time spent with them is fairly limited, though there is a fair amount of Roka in the show. Really, the best parts of the show are Tako and Kenji just hanging out. They actually make for a fairly cute and almost believable couple, even if Kenji is too dense to figure out why Takao wants to hang out with him so much. Relative to other similar anime, D-Frag doesn’t spend a whole lot of time treating Takao as a pair of breasts that occasionally talk. Yes, there is some “boobie humor,” especially involving Takao’s uncanny ability to shoot the zipper tab off her outfits off like a slingshot, but D-Frag manages to keep it fairly restrained. It’s actually rather refreshing, since most show like this wallow in boob humor like a 13-year-old that just found out what boobs are. It also helps that almost all of the characters actually have more than one emotion and even act like real people sometimes. The only exceptions are the barely sketched club members who only seem to be there so there were enough VA’s to make for a full singing group, but they don’t do enough for their thin characterization to matter. Again, refreshing.
Are there some dumb parts? Certainly, but it is a comedy after all. Obviously much of one’s appreciation for the humor will come from one’s tolerance for weird/dumb stuff, but the show does manage to keep from sinking to the absolutely lowest common denominator. Most of the time. There’s even a little bit of character growth occasionally. But mostly it is quite silly. I don’t think anyone in the show ever actually goes to any classes, so apparently this school doesn’t really offer much of an education as much as a location for club events and opportunities for student’s to fight each other. At various points, Kenji has to fight off the Band of 14 Devils (who seem mostly lifted from other shows like Fist of the North Star or Cromarite High School), win a contest for one of Roka’s bags, and fend off a challenge from the original Game Creation Club. When any actual learning gets done is a mystery.
D-Frag also looks pretty good. Generally most shows like this look pretty awful. D-Frag actually seems to have gotten a budget that was higher than the cost of a meal at KFC, so the animation is actually really good overall. The show doesn’t rely on long still scenes reminiscent of a dating sim and the action scenes actually move pretty well without obvious CG shortcuts. Extras include a couple of US cast commentaries and some of the promo materials from before the show aired in Japan.
Does D-Frag reinvent the wheel? Hardly, but it’s likable enough and manages to avoid a lot of pitfalls that high school comedies tend to fall into. Recommended.
