‘Teens developing high-level science tech’ is a decently-trodden path in anime, mostly in respect to mecha. Classroom Crisis offered a potentially more plausible, harder sci-fi take on it by having the teens working for a mega-corporation developing experimental engines. It’s just mundane and low-key enough that you could get some very serious detail in it that would actually make you feel like you learned a bit about astronautic engineering, even if it’s mostly bullshit.
But that promising setup loops back around to being concerning: if the scope is going to be (comparatively) low like that, why stick with the school setting? Why not go even further with the realism and have them be adults? I think that was a fairly common concern going in, but the first episode at least alleviated the worst of it by being pretty good fun and revealing a plot with a fair bit more going on and the promise of a much larger scope.
There are three major sides to Classroom Crisis: the corporate politics of Kirishina Corporation, the engineering struggles of A-TEC, and the school life of the A-TEC employees. All three elements are intertwined (the latter two most of all), but they all accomplish different things to varying levels of success, so it’s worth discussing them separately.
By far and away the best part about Classroom Crisis are all the business dealings and backroom politics. They essentially boil down to a Machiavellian game of revenge by Nagisa Kiryu taken against his older brothers – seniors in the company – with A-TEC playing the role of a pawn. The company intends to dissolve A-TEC, ostensibly due to exorbitant R&D costs with little in the way of profitable results, and Nagisa was put in charge of them, presumably to sink him along with A-TEC after numerous attempts to be rid of him failed profitably. Of course he’s well aware of this, so he spends his time digging into his brothers and finding ways to ruin them, hopefully using A-TEC to humiliate them.
And it is some fascinating stuff. Closets are opened and the skeletons dug up, tactical promotions are handed out, politicians are bought off left right and centre, but everything that’s being done is above board, if not exactly ethical. The rise and fall of scheming, amoral businessmen who are simply trying to maximise their profits – on both sides of the fight – is hugely entertaining, both when intricate plans come together beautifully and when they fall apart to an even more devious, even more secretive one.
Best of all, this is all done with a distinctly left-wing bent. The CEO of Kirishina Corporation is not shown to be some big business villain, or evil, or anything of the sort. He’s simply creating value for the shareholders, as is his duty, and he’d never be in that position in the first place if he was concerned about whether his company was particularly humanitarian. But this attitude is shown to be harmful, not only to everyone in A-TEC but to humanity. This is how publicly owned businesses operate! They have to! It’s capitalism! And this is an anti-capitalist message! The show sides with the workers – with the A-TEC employees – showing them to be simple victims in all this, harshly criticising the actions of the company by proxy. They’re dehumanized to assets, nothing more or less, and treated accordingly. Even Nagisa, ostensibly a protagonist, has to earn our sympathy because he’s wilfully part of the machine and is simply trying to use it to his ends.
Classroom Crisis really speaks to the bleeding-heart lefty in me, and I like that. And what’s more, it does so without being preachy and still making the damaging corporate politics entertaining to watch!
While it would still be interesting, the corporate politics wouldn’t be as engaging without us having some investment in the fate of A-TEC and the people employed there. That’s what the engineering and school elements of Classroom Crisis help to achieve, by focusing on said employees and their work. Or at least, that was the intent. In practice it wasn’t quite so successful.
The aim of A-TEC throughout the series is to develop a next-generation engine on a shoestring budget to prevent being entirely shut down. It’s a shame that there wasn’t actually much focus on the engineering challenges they would have faced, or much insight into the development process and the drama that entails. That gets handled through small time skips and montages, with the occasional failure creating some tension. The engineering side is mostly a means to explore the characters, not contribute something fundamental to the show’s identity in the same way as the corporate side. Which is unfortunate because astronautic engineering would be such a fascinating thing to show off in detail. Classroom Crisis had an opportunity to do some great hard sci-fi, but merely settled to be in space.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the characters were good enough to focus on instead. I mean, they’re not bad – certainly enjoyable enough to get invested in their plight and root for them – but they’re forgettable. The secondary characters are just a collection of mostly muted archetypes, Kaito Sera is the put-upon irresponsible genius young teacher, Iris Shirasaki is the ~mysterious~ quiet expert pilot with amnesia, and Mizuki Sera… well, ok, Mizuki’s great. Her delightfully round smile, her good-natured teasing, the very conscious friendliness, her slight doofiness, she’s the best. She’s not a complex character by any means, but she avoids a lot of archetypes and is hugely likeable. Definitely makes up for some of the weaknesses in the cast.
I really don’t understand why it was sort-of set in a school. A-TEC isn’t just an experimental R&D division of the company: its purpose is to foster the development of promising young engineering students within the company’s schools. The best of the best work there, geniuses and prodigies every last one. But why did it need to be a school? Surely having A-TEC be a university graduate department would make more sense? They’d be older then, which would make their genius and results a lot more believable. It gets sidelined pretty hard by the end anyway, and you could be forgiven for forgetting it was even a thing. So why? Why waste time early on with it, why bother with superfluous school festival bit, why shoehorn in the class outing (and the resulting, utterly dire hot springs scenes)? Sure, it adds some novel dynamics when Kiryu, their boss, is also the most junior (and useless) in the class. But was that really necessary?
This points to one of Classroom Crisis’ major failings – it lacks a cohesive sense of identity. Between the corporate politics, the engineering challenges, the school shenanigans, and a whole cavalcade of other very distinct genres and tones, Classroom Crisis wears far too many hats and can’t seem to settle on any one. Sure, ninja Hattori was a fun scene, but a bit out of place in the broader context. The romantic subplot was handled well but tacked on. And the mystery of Iris – and why Nagisa seems to know something about her – resulted in some astonishingly dumb and laughable scenes. It felt like wearing all those hats was sometimes just a justification – or even an excuse – to have all the characters it did and get some use out of them, but the overriding corporate element left the majority of them irrelevant.
There are entire narrative threads in Classroom Crisis that I can say were great, and really succeeded at what they were trying to accomplish, but when I ask what Classroom Crisis as a whole was trying to accomplish I come up empty.
I’d be lying if I said Classroom Crisis was unenjoyable, because there’s some great fun to be had here. I’ve kept repeating it, but the handling of corporate politics and the plot built around them is fantastic. But for every excellent moment there’s a dire one, and in the end it’s just too uneven. That coupled with the lack of identity results in a package that’s entertaining overall, but also just unremarkable. Oh, and let’s not forget the utterly shameless sequel hook that left a MAJOR plot thread utterly hanging in the worst, most unsatisfying way possible.
I can’t whole-heartedly recommend Classroom Crisis, but there’s enough good stuff going on here that you could do worse.
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