High School DxD BorN

ハイスクールD×D BorN

9.0(1)

OtakuDen

7.4(538,105)

MAL Score

Ranked #2572

Popularity #259

Action
Comedy
Ecchi
Romance
Supernatural
Harem
Mythology
School

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Apr 4, 2015 to Jun 20, 2015
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Summer break arrives at Kuoh Academy, but Issei Hyoudou—the Red Dragon Emperor—and the Occult Research Club don’t get much time to relax. In the wake of their clash with Vali and the Chaos Brigade, it becomes obvious how far Rias Gremory’s peerage still has to go. To close that gap, Rias and Azazel push the group into a demanding training program in the Underworld, aiming to toughen them up for what’s coming next.

As the team gradually sharpens its abilities, Issei’s days remain filled with the club’s trademark flirtatious chaos and romantic complications. At the same time, new threats begin to gather strength, and the unexpected arrival of Loki—an evil god from Norse mythology—signals that even bigger supernatural battles are on the horizon.

Otaku Consensus

High School DxD BorN is the loudest and most divisive TNK-era DxD season: fans respond to Tetsuya Yanagisawa’s brisk mix of ecchi comedy, power-scaling, and mythology, while the Underworld training and Norse escalation give the season a bigger franchise-crossover feel than its predecessors. Its major liability is adaptation trust; the compressed, rearranged late stretch is the criticism that follows BorN most often, especially among light-novel readers who prefer the cleaner source progression.

Why You Should Watch

Watch BorN if you want a battle-harem season that treats fanservice, shonen power-ups, and occult worldbuilding as one inseparable engine rather than separate modes. It scratches the same itch as To Love-Ru’s shameless harem chaos, but with more faction politics, dragons, demons, angels, and gods colliding in a single urban-fantasy rulebook. The appeal is not subtlety; it is seeing TNK push the franchise’s identity to maximum volume across a tight 12-episode cour, with ChouCho on the opening theme and Yuuki Kaji’s Issei energy extending into ED2 performance credit. If you want ecchi that keeps escalating its supernatural stakes instead of resetting after every gag, BorN is the season built for that appetite.

Key Characters

I
Issei Hyoudou(VA: Yuuki Kaji)
Issei remains the rare ecchi lead whose shamelessness is also his battle identity, making his fanservice comedy and heroic power fantasy feel deliberately fused.
R
Rias Gremory
Rias is compelling because her harem-center charisma is matched by actual command responsibility, turning the club’s affection dynamics into a peerage power structure.
A
Azazel
Azazel functions as DxD’s most entertaining mentor archetype: intellectually dangerous, morally flexible, and far more useful than a standard school-supervisor figure.
L
Loki
Loki gives BorN its sharpest mythological pivot, expanding the series beyond its demon-angel-devil foundation into a broader divine conflict space.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
BorN is a TNK production with Junji Gotou credited as both character designer and chief animation director, giving the season strong visual continuity with the earlier TNK-era DxD look.
2
Takao Yoshioka’s series composition fits a dense mix of demons, angels, dragons, religion, magic, and Norse mythology into only 12 episodes, which explains both the season’s momentum and its reputation for compression.
3
The season’s identity is unusually quantifiable in its AniList tags: Female Harem at 92%, Nudity at 85%, Religion at 79%, Dragons at 73%, and School at 71%, a combination that captures why DxD occupies such a specific niche.
4
BorN’s late-season adaptation choices are its most debated feature; light-novel readers commonly single out the rearranged and anime-original-feeling stretch as the point where the season loses source-material precision.
5
The music credits underline the franchise’s split appeal: ChouCho handles the opening theme performance, while Yuuki Kaji, Issei’s Japanese voice actor, is credited for ED2 theme performance.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: High School DxD BorN aired from April 4 to June 20, 2015, as a 12-episode TV season during the Spring 2015 anime cour.
Fun fact 2: Its MAL profile shows a major popularity-versus-rank gap: a 7.41 score and rank around #2572, but popularity at #259 with more than 538,000 votes, marking it as far more widely watched than its critical placement suggests.
Fun fact 3: The anime retains the source-credit pairing of original creator Ichiei Ishibumi and original character designer Miyama-Zero, while Junji Gotou translates that design language for animation.
Fun fact 4: AniList lists BorN with 3,230 favourites and a 71/100 score, closely mirroring MAL’s reception pattern: broadly liked, heavily watched, and not treated as the franchise’s most universally polished entry.
Fun fact 5: The staff lineup includes Jin Aketagawa as sound director and Ryousuke Nakanishi on music, giving BorN dedicated credits for both the performance side of voice/audio direction and the score.