Nov 7, 2021
When I first heard the premise of Shinsekai Yori I was quite interested. I really liked The Promised Neverland (Season 1) and seeing a similar concept with good reviews made me think it would be good. Instead, after finishing all 25 episodes, I feel really disappointed with how it went.
Shinsekai Yori had a pretty solid foundation for its story. Having kids figure out the world the darker parts of the world they live in is a pretty tried and true concept for a coming of age story yet it completely misses the mark. The beginning paints this world of mystery about the origins of
...
the society of psychics and this system of killing off children, but as the anime continues the cracks in the story begin to show.
Past the good concept and setting everything else about Shinsekai Yori just makes watching the rest of it a pain. Given that one of the main parts of the story was Saki's friends slowly being killed off you would think that more effort would be put into the characters. Instead each character has about as much depth as a piece of paper. If I was asked to name a single character trait of the main cast I genuinely wouldn't be able to answer because every character has no personality (besides maybe Squealer). They didn't even get any better as they grew up, with their relationships feeling really unnatural (especially the part where they include gay relationships and call it merely a result of conditioning from the Ethics Committee). It makes sitting through these scenes which are supposed to evoke emotion super boring to sit through because I just don't care about any of them. Having a flashback or long expository before a character dies isn't good character development, it shows you didn't put any effort into character writing.
Even the one saving grace, the setting, is presented in a very dull way. Past the beginning every single bit of worldbuilding is conveyed through long, boring expository dialogue, bringing the actual story to a grinding halt. It's extremely predictable when every time some new concept is mentioned it leads to a character's death to the point where Once they tell you everything about the Ethics Committee that plotline is just left unresolved and ignored for the sake of the queerat plotline, which should've been emphasized more in the first place if it was going to lead into the climax of the story. The idea of the queerats fighting back was a cool idea with a pretty clear-cut message about how the flaws of humanity will come back to haunt us. Instead of exploring this the final arc of the anime consists of Saki and Satoru going from place to place with uninteresting action scenes trying to find a macguffin to kill Akki. Events just happen, followed by long bouts of exposition, followed by more events that overshadow the previous focuses of the story. It's boring and shows an inability to present a story in a way that doesn't involve sitting the viewer down for a super long monologue. Shinsekai Yori is literally the opposite of "show, don't tell" and it ends up taking an imaginative world and presenting it so badly it ends up being boring just to sit through.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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