Arata naru Sekai: World's/Start/Load/End

Did I miss the point, or was there just not one in the first place?

Multimedia projects always have the failing that in order to get the whole story, you have to go through each different part of it, as only then will everything fit together and make sense. And as nice as it is once you have finished, to be able to explain everything and appreciate how tightly woven every detail is, you will always be confused by whichever part you start with, and get spoiled about some aspects of the next.

Quite often, that part can be not just confusing, but ends up really unsatisfactory, ... so much so that it discourages going through the rest of the project. This would be Arata naru Sekai, which left many questions but no real reason for me to go and find the answers.

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Arata naru Sekai is very light on story. Aside from a few flashbacks, the protagonists mostly just wander around an abandoned cityscape, exploring a few locations they knew in the present. However, rather infuriatingly, the characters seem in a rush to move on. They notice and experience several unusual things, but leave them all be, even though I would expect them to play on their minds like they did mine as the viewer. This continues all through to the ending, which is incredibly perplexing. Again, I would expect it to maybe have some meaning in relation to the other parts of the project, but I'm not enticed to them after its poor execution. It's almost as if they had run out of time and decided to hurry to a close.

Like the plot, there is not a lot at play with the characters. The protagonist, Arisa, who prompts most of the flashbacks, has the setup for an arc, but it never gets resolved. Rather, it is completely absent from the ending, not even instantly reverted. As for the other girls, I can't seem to recall them actually having stories of their own, they struck me as just other speakers for Arisa to bounce off of. The flashbacks themselves are probably the best part of the OVA, as they are where most of Arisa's character work is done, as well as featuring what I'm led to believe is the whole project's overall deuteragonist, Kirishima. of course, being absent from the majority of the OVA doesn't really give a lot of opportunities for him to be explored. Just like Arisa, he has the seeds of a character arc, and also just like Arisa, he doesn't get an ending to it.

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Story aside, the technical details are just average. Stylistically there is nothing of note, the artstyle is generic and the lighting and colouring are neither garish nor muted. I can't say much for the music as I don't recall any, and last of all the animation is passable but often times sidestepped. The OVA used a lot of diagetic sound, which i think worked towards its favour when trying to create the desired tone, and almost worked if not for the plot issues. I don't recall an OP, and the ED was forgettable.

The world design was decent, but it grossly underestimated how much a city would change after 6000 years of abandonment. I guess I could excuse this if it's supposed to be 6000 years of the same day, but I'm not certain if that was actually what occurred. What was interesting was how the protagonist started already in the future, and I assumed it would never directly show the present, though this was not the case. The various locations felt like set pieces, but nothing was really done with them. Overall the setting is a missed opportunity, which more or less sums up the whole OVA.

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There isn't a lot that could be improved about Arata naru Sekai without changing it entirely. If I had to point to something, perhaps isolating to the future world could be interesting, as I mentioned it initially began with. Since it does not show a time machine or the process of arrival, perhaps adding even more ambiguity to the present day might help.

Overall, it was disappointing and directionless. There's nothing to close the curtain on and I'm still at a loss as to what really happened. If adaptations of the manga and LN parts of the project were announced, I probably wouldn't bother.

I really have to say, this movie had a lot of potential, It could have been a very sweet, calm, artsy philosophical anime. And if it was a 2hr or at least an one hour anime that really grasped the audience's attention it would have gotten a 10. however the fact of the matter is it starated out very nicely but then I could feel that director of this anime just rushed the ending making a lot of loose ends and just really ruining this anime.