It’s not like Doki Doki School Hours had much of a plot to begin with. It was much more an animation of 4-panel comics than anything else. You know…characters with one, maybe two dimensions to their personality, set up situation, rimshot for the punchline.

And what little plot the series had was thrown to the wind in Volume 4, when the writers ceased to write anything remotely having to do with what plot there was.

So you can hardly call it jumping the shark, when Volume 5 starts of with a parody of every shounen anime ever, inexplicably called “Beast Buster Katarina Nagare.” It’s especially inexplicable because it’s not like we’ve ever seen Iinchou interested in this kind of adventure anime/manga/game at all, and because, once again, the character gags remain the same (except for Iinchou inexplicably becoming a rogue warrior schoolgirl thingy.)

But what’s REALLY weird about Volume 5 is how, after apparently getting all the fanfic they could think of out of their system, the writers suddenly, for no apparent reason, return the the original school-year plot. It’s quite boggling. Unfortunately Doki Doki School Hours comes with no liner notes (or any extras…in fact, its *so* sparse I kind of think we’re lucky to get a case with the DVD,) so there’s no way to learn whether their madness had any method at all. Since there is no proof to the contrary, I’ll project…. No. ;-)

It also makes me a little sad to think that there are so many series I enjoyed more than this and would have loved to have a 26-episode run, and instead, this ridiculous piece of fluff got to go on waaaaaayyyyyy past the time the joke was dead, buried and forgotten.

That having been said, there’s nothing to make this particular volume any less amusing than any of the others. Nothing has changed, in fact. Rio and Kudo are still gay for Mika and Suetake, respectively, and everyone else is pretty much the same as they were when they first showed up in the series. Tominaga seems to have taken a hit on screen time (did she offend the producer?) which I feel bad about, because I think she’s my favorite character. Hang on, let me check:

Minako Tominaga

A brutally honest student who belongs to the cooking club. She is often shown moaning about being surrounded by the “idiots (etc…)” in her class, or telling people off. She loves slasher films.

Yup. She’s my favorite. :-D

Stuff happens in Volume 5. Some of it is school-type stuff, like the school festival, and some of it isn’t. The final episode is my second least favorite tedious plot complication (after the physical exam). Mika-sensei is having an Omiai (arranged formal matchmaking meeting) so of *course* she’s positively 1) getting married and 2) leaving school. The students stress, they get over it, and surprise! when the next semester comes, nothing’s any different.

While I hated the SPCD in this episode, I did love Kitagawa’s quite real issues at the thought of losing Mika-sensei – and how the other students pretty much acknowledged that. One more for the animated lesbians are better looking, smarter and more talented list; now they are more gracious and emotionally stable, too. ^_^

Ratings –

Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 4
Service – 3

Overall – 6

I keep waiting to get utterly sick of this series. So far it hasn’t happened. If I marathoned it you can be sure I’d be very very done with it, but as an occasional piece of brain candy, it’s plenty fine.