How to Do a Compressed Anime Adaptation Right - aka What “The God of High School” Didn’t Do

MAPPA’s highly anticipated adaptation of the smash-hit Korean webcomic The God of High School certainly made its mark on the anime world with its face-melting sakuga moments and non-stop action, but it also had one very noticeable flaw – it tried to compress over 100 webcomic chapters into just 13 anime episodes.

As a result, important plot elements came up far too suddenly, characters were introduced just to be thrown away an episode or two later, and big climactic fights felt hollow because they lacked the proper build-up to get the viewers invested in what was going on. It’s still a great show for animation nerds and anyone who loves hot-blooded shounen action, but the lightning-fast pacing left audience members completely unable to understand what was going on for large portions of the finale. So how could they have fixed this? Let’s take a look at several short adaptations of much longer source material to see how they handled this problem.

This article was written for Honey’s Anime, so please read it on their site.