I'm not much of a shonen person, and I'm not entirely sure what drove me to check out Assassination Classroom. That being said, I'm glad I did, because its first season was an absolute blast.
Assassination Classroom has an incredibly weird and inventive premise. It starts with a weird-looking octopus eventually named Koro shows up and blows up the moon. He makes a deal with the government to teach Class 3-E, the lowest ranked class in a prestigious junior high school, with the ultimatum that the students have to kill him in a year or else he'll destroy the Earth too. Yeah, it's wild, and there's a lot to it, but it really is a great concept in a lot of ways. For starters, the sheer concept of an "assassination classroom" is absolutely hilarious. Seeing the students randomly pull out guns and knives in class will never not be hilarious, and all the other 3-E teachers being other assassins and government employees leads to some very fun scenarios. Karasuma and Irina are very unconventional teachers, and seeing them grow into their new positions is a blast. Of course, Koro-sensei himself is a highlight of the series. Despite being a terrifying world-ending threat, he's also super charismatic and a genuinely stellar teacher who goes neurotic over helping them learn, which just leads to a super complex and fascinating character. There's this looming feeling of confliction throughout the season, where you want the students to kill Koro-sensei to save the world and win the money prize they deserve, but you also want Koro-sensei to stay alive and keep teaching them, which in turn leads to the even more interesting element of AssClass's story.
On top of being an incredibly fun story about assassination one's teacher, Assassination Classroom is also a commentary on the Japanese education system, and a really well-executed one at that. Class 3-E isn't just the lowest ranked class in the school, it's a tool the principal uses to stoke fear into its students. He posits that if the worst performing students get shunned from the rest of the school and open to discrimination, everyone else would perform well out of fear of being like them. The saddest part is that a large chunk of 3-E's students aren't actually bad learners, as we eventually learn it's more common that they're only specialized in a single subject, or that their grades fell off for personal real-life reasons. Seeing Koro-sensei desperately try to help 3-E flourish in a school designed to help them fail is just as engaging as the assassination stuff, if not even moreso. It helps that AssClass does an incredibly job at giving the whole class equal amounts of screentime. There is technically a main protagonist in Nagisa Shiota, and a great one at that, but he never overshadows the rest of the cast. Pretty much every episode shines a spotlight on another student, and the show as a whole rarely ever isolates one character from everyone else. This is an ensemble cast through and through, and the way AssClass efficiently develops its massive 22-student class in such a short span of time is probably one of its most impressive feats.
Another impressive thing about this first season of AssClass is how well it's structured. For a show based on a manga, it's hard to even tell with how tightly-knit Season 1 is, everything gets paid off in a super satisfying manner. Nagisa spends the season taking notes on Koro-sensei's weaknesses, and they're used in the big final assassination attempt. Irina spends the season coming off as incompetent only to show the students how good of an assassin she really is in a final arc. Many episodes focus on the conflict between Class 3-E and Class 3-A, culminating in 3-E's victory in the finals. The list goes on, it's great. That being said, I do have one pretty major criticism with Assassination Classroom, an issue that I've noticed many shonen anime suffer from: Narration. You will not go an episode without Nagisa telling you that they're assassins, they gotta kill their teacher, they have a year to do it, the weapons aren't designed to kill humans, Koro-Sensei is actually a really good teacher, he moves at Mach 20, you get the point. It's exhausting. I get that shonen anime are meant for kids, but they're not that stupid. The vast majority of the narration in this series post the first episode are either things we already know or can easily imply by just... watching the show.
Highlights:
School's Out, 1st Term: Ending the Class 3-E storyline on a high note, this episode has the students finally manage to beat 3-A on the finals (as well as getting full marks for their assassination lessons). It's a super heartwarming finale to all the school stuff and sets up the final arc in a great way when the students learn they won a summer vacation over 3-A. Also, Karma getting a reality check when he didn't do as well thanks to his cocky attitude was a great twist.
Go Time: If I had any another criticisms about AssClass's first season, it's that it is a bit on the slow side for its first half. I praised how well laid-out it is, but that does mean that a lot of the season's best moments are all in the final arc. That being said, what a final arc. Go Time has the students pull off their biggest assassination attempt yet, and it's an absolute spectacle to watch, which also makes it absolutely crushing to watch them lose when Koro pulls yet another superpower out of his ass. The second half of Go Time tosses in yet another twist when half the students all gets poisoned, with the antidote being ransomed for a frozen Koro-sensei.
Karma Time, 2nd Period: The last four episodes of the arc has the non-poisoned half of the class slowly work their way up a hotel fighting off enemies and all getting time to shine. As you can tell by the title, Karma gets a great moment here as he shows how much he's grown since his failure during the finals. But despite that, Nagisa was just as notable. I think it's really cool that the main character of an anime has a super androgynous design, and it's finally utilized here as Nagisa has to disguise as a girl to sneak through a club. It's a great sequence that shows how much of a pure cinnamon roll Nagisa is, as despite being pulled over by a drunk rich guy, he manages to talk him out of smoking and into bettering himself.
Nagisa Time: This was a good finale. Nagisa's final battle with Takaoka wasn't super crazy choreography-wise, but it got the vibes perfect. Between the compelling drama of Nagisa having to be talked out of not killing Takaoka, and the shadow-heavy visuals, the stakes feel higher than ever. There aren't really any surprises here, but the plot is resolved in super satisfying fashion.
Overall, Season 1 of Assassination Classroom really feels like a complete package. It's funny, action-packed, filled with a very lovable cast of characters, tackles the education system in a super compelling way, and ends on a fantastic final batch of episodes. It may have a bit of a slow start, and suffers from some very ham-fisted narration, but overall, this show is an incredibly good time.
4/5 Stars
