“A Town Where You Live” is a romantic drama that differs from the norm when it comes to adapting manga into anime. Most anime start right from the beginning of the manga and proceed from there. I have not read the manga so I don’t know exactly where it starts relative to the rest of the story, but this anime starts from a later arc and instead uses many flashbacks to fill in the important details that happened prior to present events. This makes for some confusing switches in time periods and also results in a lack of connection to characters, especially the ones that mostly only appear in flashbacks.
The story of the anime begins with Kirishima Haruto, a country boy who is moving to Tokyo as he chases after the girl he loves, Eba Yuzuki. He leaves behind his friends and one of his other former crushes as he ventures alone into the big city to start his new life and his search for Eba. With him, he has brought a necklace which he hopes to give to her. Eba is a girl who is originally from Tokyo but due to family problems, bonded with Haruto on the few occasions she visited his hometown (one time was fairly short when they were young and another time she actually lived at his house for an extended period of time). Haruto starts living with his older sister, Aoi, and soon meets several other friends who go to his new high school, like his new female neighbor Mishima Asuka and the upbeat motorcycle-riding Kazama Kyousuke. Haruto begins his new everyday high school life while continuing to be an amazing cook and, most importantly, searching for Eba.
Aside from the inconsistent rhythm of the plot due to the many flashbacks which sometimes encompass entire episodes, I felt the plot also suffered from the characters' personalities. Haruto (as I mentioned at the beginning) is your typical indecisive male protagonist. Because of his indecisiveness, he ends up hurting not only the girls he is involved with, but himself and a few other people connected to the girls. Eba isn’t much better. She is also very indecisive and constantly tries to push Haruto away despite it still being blatantly obvious that she still has at least some feelings. These problems accumulate throughout the course of the show and end (in my opinion) with a rather unsatisfying and unrealistic ending.
As for the art, it’s unimpressive to say the least. The character designs are maybe the worst part of it as every single character’s face is just copied and pasted with a different hair style and color as well as different eye colors. Because all of their facial structures are exactly the same, every character has the same stupid looking smile (I think this is the first time I’ve genuinely disliked any anime characters’ smiles). As for the backgrounds, they are very colorful and add a lot of effect to the scenes which sometimes helps them but sometimes is overused and ends up making some scenes laughably overdramatic. By that I mean that there are only so many times when gusts of wind, lightning bugs, and sakura blossoms can show up at the perfect time before it seems to be more than a coincidence. The scenery around Tokyo and Haruto’s hometown however are much better and during the regular scenes, the scenery is much nicer and more realistic (as far as anime goes anyway).
The soundtrack consists of mostly instrumental pieces that sound generic in a romantic drama. None of the tracks stand out and the OP and ED are just average as well. The voice acting is impressive though as there are several different accents which (I assume since I don’t understand Japanese) the voice actors do well. It’s definitely clear even to a westerner like me that these accents are about as different as American and British ones.
Kimi no Iru Machi tries a little too hard to be a dramatic romance story. Whether it comes to the indecisive characters or the strange art style, the show just falls flat in almost every possible way and is nothing more than forgettable. I recommend skipping this or maybe trying the manga instead (I know I’m recommending something I have not read, but I would recommend starting at the beginning of the story instead of dealing with flashbacks as that seems to me like it would work a little better). Still as I said in the beginning, do not watch this if the thing you hate most in the world is indecisive characters in romance stories, because this will annoy you to no end if that is the case.
