High School DxD Hero Fanservice Review Episode 02

The story isn’t slowing down at all, and we even get two new characters.  Thankfully, this episode still finds time to take a much needed booby break.  A very nice episode indeed.

Issei meditates and injects his consciousness into his sacred gear so as to remove the negative feelings that are blocking him from a greater power.  Here he meets the spirits of his Red Dragon Emperor predecessors.  Most of them are in a stasis type state and unresponsive to him.

Then suddenly and without warning Issei is approached by a lovely tall green-eyed blonde named Elsha who turns out to be the strongest ever female Red Dragon Emperor.

 

 

Elsha is pretty hot, but her being a spirit buried inside Issei’s subconscious makes her prospects for nude scenes seem unlikely.  Maybe down the road Issei will train with her in some kind of Inception type world and we’ll get a dress break?  Maybe she’s star in a future BD special that can operate outside the constraints of the story?  Here’s hoping.

 

Elsha provides Issei with a small treasure chest, telling him that the contents contain great power.  However, she warns Issei that he can’t half ass things and that if he’s not careful, the contents of the chest could “destroy who [he is].”  She also mentions that many previous Red Dragon Emperors did not have happy ends, including herself.

Issei uses the key he got from Beelzebub to open the chest, then suddenly wakes up.  To his dismay, his new treasure is missing, but Ddraig assures him that it is destined to return to him some day.

 

Suddenly men around Issei start acting violently perverted, either groping people nearby or chasing them down in an attempt to do so.  Is this strange behavior and the disappearance of Issei’s treasure related?  I guess we’ll find out later.

 

Issei’s buddies make an appearance.  They are as stupid and perverted as ever.

Oh what’s this, another new character?!

 

Here we meet the fox spirit girl Kunou.  Her mother was recently kidnapped by bad guys. She and her servants attack Issei and his entourage thinking they are the bad guys for some reason.  We get a decent fight scene in the forests of Kyoto with a good amount of attention given to the backdrops/environment.

 

Eyecatch.

 

Not much fanservice wise during the fight, but the overall art quality was pretty impressive, even if it isn’t obvious from these two screens.

 

Issei rolls out of bed early in the evening.  Somehow knowing the girls are in the bath, Issei decides in an uncharacteristically rapey kind of way that he’s just going to barge right in on them.  This seems out of character for Issei, who always either had girls throwing themselves at him or otherwise stumbled into naked girls by accident, but never with malicious intent.  Is he being impacted by the same mysterious force that made male characters violently perverted earlier in the show?  Or is this just a left turn for Issei’s character?

I personally didn’t anticipate this personality turn, but somehow Rossweisse did, as she is waiting outside the bath to stop Issei from violating the girls privacy.  Rather than realizing the jig is up, Issei double’s down and actually engages Rossweisse in battle.  As you might expect, Rossweisse doesn’t stand much of a chance.

 

Now a bit of twist, the episode cuts away to a bathing scene, but it’s NOT the girls bathing in Kyoto!  It’s Akeno, Rias, and Koneko, the three girls who stayed behind.

 

(The picture above is a composite i made of the two images that preceded it. Notice the size of the heads (about the same) compared to the bodies (Akeno’s shoulders and breasts are way bigger)).

Akeno and Rias talk about their boobs, and mention how Akeno’s boobs are larger.  It’s true that they’ve always been larger in the previous seasons (albeit by a meager 1cm) but (at least based on how Passione is drawing these characters) it seems Akeno has grown a full cup size since BorN.

Akeno is frustrated.  She can’t understand why Issei would prefer Rias’ boobs even though Akeno’s are larger and better shaped.  Anyway, the two get into a bit of a tussle and Akeno plays with Rias’s boobs.  Let the fapping begin!

 

Dat Lady J pose…

 

Rossweisse loses her battle as well as her dignity, but she ultimately distracts Issei long enough to prevent him from peeping in the bath before both are called away to meet yet another new character…

 

Actually, this isn’t a new character at all.  Apparently she’s SerafallThe Magical Girl from the previous seasons.  Crazy.

End of episode.

 

Webms

 

 
 
Webm Album

 

Overall Thoughts:

 

I thought this was an excellent episode.  There were no wasted scenes, the two new characters look great, and the story seems focused and brisk.

The fanservice certainly didn’t disappoint either.  A bit more of Koneko would have been nice no doubt, but Rias, Akeno and Rossweisse helped pick up the slack.

Uno Makoto does a really good job drawing bodies.  Makoto had previously done Seikon no Qwaser, and while Hero’s boob design isn’t quite on that level, it’s actually not that far off either.  You can look side by side and actually notice stylistic similarities.  If nothing else, the fact that Rias and Akeno now have differently shaped boobs is pretty nice… and long overdue.  These are the best boobs and nipples for DxD so far, in my opinion.

The art quality was consistently strong throughout.  Sure, there’s a few derpy faces on inbetweener shots, but that’s par for the course.  The parts of the episode that you expect to look gorgeous did.  The overall production values are really impressive, and the fluid animation for all the character movements is such a nice change of pace since most ecchi anime tend to be lower budget and stiffly drawn.

It didn’t come across in the screencaps, but I really enjoyed the effort that was put into the Kyoto scenery.  They must have used 50+ different backgrounds for the journey through the Thousand Gates and the surrounding woodland.  The constant change of backgrounds made it feel like the characters were exploring a real place, and not just a generic set.

And while we technically did miss out on the bathing girls (presumably Asia, Xenovia, and Irina among them), they may have well decided that they wanted to save that scene for the next episode.  That would be awesome.