Ah, school anime: a topic so prolific that even though I typically run September as Back to School Month, I’ve got to look into it during the rest of the year as well if I’m to have any hope of addressing the sheer quantity of its offerings.
Classroom Crisis (I will be omitting the star at my discretion) at least tries to keep its academic scenario somewhat fresh by placing it on a future Mars colony. It’s also an anime original property, rather than one that initially came from its manga or light novel outings. But with bigger ambitions come bigger expectations, and a show needs to take care to not let its pitch write checks that its content can’t cash. How does Classroom Crisis hold up?
It opens with the odd juxtaposition of corporate suits talking about a hostage situation over imagery of a couple of girls heading to school. These two threads start to relate to one another when it seems that they’re classmates at a special school run by the corporation, and that they were meant to get a transfer student in the form of our kidnapping victim. Finally, the stories collide as the kidnapping situation reaches the students and one of the two girls (the laconic Rei-esque ace pilot, Iris) races off in the prototype aerospace craft the class built to go do some rescuing.
However, this turns into an unwanted rescue as the rescuee complains regarding the massive cost of the stunt (far more than the ransom), and introduces himself as their new boss, who is looking to downsize and disband the special class/R&D group that he’s joined.
We do get an answer as to why that class, called A-TEC, even exists (it’s due to one of the company founders having had a thing for student innovation, making his mark as such), but in general our new classmate and boss, Nagisa Kiryuu, actually starts out seeming to slide into an antagonist role. Worse is his higher-ranked elder brother, the one who has set the agenda to down A-TEC and who Nagisa works for even as it’s implied said brother has been trying to rub him out one way or another.
This continues as A-TEC’s budget is slashed and an accountant brought in by Nagisa has them transferred to a run-down hangar used by the founder, utterly demoralizing the lot. There’s some indication that the budget cut is being embezzled by the brother, but that doesn’t matter all that much to the characters we actually spend time with.
Just when you think the show is all about kicking a group of gifted kids while they’re down (with a ploy to gain support via the company union foiled through promoting the teacher to manager), A-TEC manages to bend the rules and get a win in the form of converting the old hangar into a functional facility.
This calls for the obligatory fanservice episode!
Beach or Onsen? Why choose one when you can have both!
It does at least serve to start getting Nagisa bonding with the other students as despite his best efforts to just work the trip away he’s dragged into mischief… and because of those efforts he gets a chance to experience Iris making a two-hour drive in under an hour.
This leads into another episode where both the A-TEC teacher and his class rep little sister, Mizuki, learn (one from the old admin, the other from the horse’s mouth) that Nagisa is the abused bastard descendant of both founding lines of the corporation, hence why his (half) brother hates him so much and why he’s seen as so important, due to inheritance and all. Meanwhile, A-TEC gets back into gear to make innovations on a budget.
Then, since we haven’t done space stuff in a while, we get an episode where Iris and the accountant lady (also a ninja of sorts) end up on a hijacked space-plane, which serves as a gateway to unlocking a subplot where Iris has memories suppressed via trauma that may link her to Nagisa. This thread follows us into the obligatory school festival, as does integrating Nagisa more into the class.. Salt with some nonsense about politics and corporate corruption that we’re not really invested in, and you have the show’s path through here.
The politics comes to ahead in a win for Nagisa over his brother. However, the current CEO is another brother of his who is more suave, powerful, and presumably evil than the one who gets reassigned to Space Antarctica for failing to rig an election. He pulls the rug out from under Nagisa and seems to sign A-TEC’s death warrant for good, at about the same time as Iris has some PTSD flashbacks that cause her test piloting to go awry. She realizes that she’s the real Nagisa and the boy we know seemingly her double, and then smacks right into the face of Mars. Normally you’d expect her to be stone dead from this, but future safety tech and plot armor do wonders.
After that, we really start getting all the story at once. CEO brother gives a rather reasonable pitch to recruit Nagisa into his new plan: making war machines of death. I mean, I had kind of assumed that a multi-planetary heavy industrial company would probably have that kind of business but apparently its new, and the whole reason A-TEC is being shut down is to poach the teacher for it. Seems excessively complicated, but whatever.
Nagisa does some soul-searching, and ultimately manages to have a scene with Mizuki that goes fully romantic, starting the recovery from rock bottom (though it doesn’t seem to sit well with Iris)
Me, I’m just kind of happy that the sweet, earnest girl managed over the mysterious laconic unemotive waif. I don’t dislike Iris, but her archetype is usually a shoe-in in the worst way. This development doesn’t make her brother very happy either, but all the same he agrees to work with Nagisa to find a way to break the CEO’s ambitions, because building military vehicles when you’ve predicted oncoming disaster based on mining operations running dry is bad.
Then Nagisa gets literally backstabbed and kidnapped by the brother he beat earlier. Said brother has a cool and improbable death lined up for Nagisa (shot into the astroid that he was rescued from in episode 1, via a spare version of the episode 1 A-TEC engine) but between the ninja accountant and A-TEC being on the case, the launch only just gets off… and of course Iris is determined to get back in the saddle with the next-gen version for a demo anyway.
The daring rescue is presented during a board meeting, but even with its success (and Iris throwing her hat in the love triangle ring despite Mizuki having already made first base), CEO brother refuses to stop the disbanding of A-TEC. This is fine, though, as they also streamed the presentation to investors all over, and prepared letters of resignation so that A-TEC (Nagisa included) could bail and develop super-engines of their own apart from said jerk CEO. Thus, with the whole class of gifted kids and their teachers forking off to found the next big aerospace start-up, the show ends. Despite the To Be Continued vibe that probably never will be, I think having the class strike out on their own is a fine enough finish.
Classroom Crisis is… fun, for the most part. The early stages where Nagisa is just a huge jerk are the worst bits, but they do kind of need to set him up as this corporate scumbag for his later parts to play well, since that’s his skill set even if it isn’t his ambition. And once A-TEC is willing to turn around and see their predicament as a puzzle (as much as telling them to do so is delivered harshly) their zeal makes a pretty good watch.
That said, the show as a whole is pretty light on its “science fiction” ambition, and in fact doesn’t do much to get you to understand anything. What is the special engine? I kind of know because it was mentioned one time that it uses the solar wind, so I guess it’s some kind of electromagnetic ramjet, but there’s no effort spared to indulge the viewer with technical details like that. It’s just a fancy engine for spacecraft that lets you go to space really fast, and faster is better.
And, sure, there’s a degree where you don’t want to be sent to school for every piece of fiction you engage with. But Classroom Crisis’s theme is a school of genius engineers! I want to have some concept of the genius of the engineering. The kids make an engine that’s something like twice as fast on thirty percent of the budget despite having to rebuild it after Iris runs into Mars like a cartoon coyote, but I haven’t the foggiest how they did that. Does it use new technology? What was the Eureka in that case? Is it a material science thing? Was there a standard practice that they decided to challenge? Nothing about that is illuminated. They’re just a super-smart group so of course they pull it off.
The business stuff is treated similarly. I think I know a little more about the corporate inner workings of the Kirishina Corporation than I do about the X-3 Engine, but it’s still not much. Why was the election so important? I get that one party is backed by management and the other by the union so presumably they’d set different policies but I’m not let in on what that might be or why it’s so critical to do cloak and dagger bull over. Similarly, if you have a mega-genius in a role you think wastes him… why not just transfer the guy? A-TEC is older than its current teacher and we see that the CEO can just kind of reassign people, so couldn’t you take the one genius you want and put him on the war machines of death project without using an overly long and underhanded scheme to destroy an asset that’s at the very least good PR as is repeatedly seen? Slash their budget, sure – but disbanding A-TEC to get one person out of it feels a lot like smashing a window to get a little fresh air. I think there’s an easier way. If there’s not, I don’t understand enough to know why.
Because of this, Classroom Crisis is a show you ironically have to turn your brain off for. If you think about its setups, rather than just letting the emotions of each scene guide you, you’re going to be lost and confused. But the emotions are… well enough done. It sucked when the gifted kids were getting kicked. It had the right roller coaster as Nagisa completed one revenge only to hit a brick wall when going for #2. That works, and even works well. Nagisa, Mizuki, Mizuki’s brother, and to a lesser extent Iris are good characters. Nagisa’s brothers are well-executed antagonists of very different stripes. I especially like how petulant and temperamental the lower-ranked brother is, it really makes him feel like he sucks compared to Nagisa remaining calm and collected. The rest of A-TEC are about a quirk each, but that’s fine, it makes them read as the class of weirdos they’re supposed to be.
At the end of the day, Classroom Crisis delivers what it wants to deliver… but doesn’t match the hopes it would set you up with. Mars! Genius engineering! Space stuff! All in the show, and all extremely technically. We never get a solid Martian environment, we never understand the tech, and we very rarely get thrilling space action.
All the same, I’m going to err on the high side for Classroom Crisis and give it a B-. Once you know what the show really is, it’s very watchable, even endearing, and while there are places where it drags it’s better than real junk food. If you’re up for some light drama with a thin sci-fi patina, go ahead and check Classroom☆Crisis out.