Started out okay, went on to be great, only to crash and burn at the end.
I'm not sure what it was that originally made me like Erased. Perhaps the premise and the characters, maybe even the voice acting. At any rate, although it was a little slow in the first episode, it started picking up steam after that, giving me what I sure was going to be one of my top five favorite anime series.
Sadly, it wasn't to last. Although they did a pretty good job setting up the narrative, there were several problems that kept this from being as good as it could have,
...
and *should* have been.
***POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW***
1: The villain is way too predictable. Maybe I've been watching anime for too long, but I was able to spot who the killer was based on various anime tropes I've gotten used to. I could forgive this, since the series is arguably more of a thriller than a mystery, but it is worth mentioning.
2: The final confrontation between Satoru and the villain was kind of lackluster. Now, I hear this is partially because they compressed several volumes of manga into 12 episodes. So obviously, the conclusion was a little rushed. Perhaps if they had more episodes to devote to the story, it could have been done a little bit better. This by itself wouldn't normally be a dealbreaker, but coupled with my next point, it created one of the few storylines that was very good and promising in the beginning, but was ruined so badly by the ending, I can never watch the show again, despite how much I enjoyed the first ten episodes.
***MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW***
3: This was the big one for me. I think it's best that I preface this with a quote from The Princess Bride...
THE KID
-- hold it. Hold it, Grandpa.
You read that wrong. She doesn't
marry Humperdinck, she marries
Westley. I'm just sure of it.
After all that Westley did for
her, if she does not marry him,
it wouldn't be fair.
GRANDFATHER
Well, who says life is fair?
Where is that written? Life isn't
always fair.
THE KID
I'm telling you, you're messing up
the story, now get it right!
While the Grandfather was right that life isn't always fair, in fiction, I tend to be a little more demanding. Part of what drew me to the story was the rapport being built up between Satoru and Kayo. When Kayo was sent away to live with her grandmother, I was okay with that because it would allow the two kids to grow up, thus forever silencing the complaints saying "He's mentally 29 years old, and she's only 11." Look, I'm not going to get into the whole "is Satoru a pedophile?" debate, because there's never been a case in history where a 29 year old man has had his 29 year old mind placed inside his 11 year old body. We don't know whether his body would or wouldn't affect his mind, so it's pointless to argue about it. I will say there were clearly some unresolved feelings the 11 year old Satoru originally had towards Kayo before she died, given 29-as-11 year old Satoru's behavior towards her. So I was okay with them being separated until they grew up, just to make things easier for the critics to swallow.
Then, by a horrible twist of fate, Satoru ends up in a coma for 15 years. I could accept this, as it provided a way to legitimately tie the past to the present. What I couldn't accept was that in the fifteen years Satoru was in the coma, Kayo, for some reason known only to the mangaka, winds up marrying Hiromi. Why? Maybe this was better explained in the manga, but the two had virtually no interaction in the anime. Why would you put all that time and effort into building Satoru and Kayo's relationship only to pull the rug out from under them like that? If the writer never intended to pair the two of them together, then why was there so much ship tease between the two of them? All the writer had to do was either leave their relationship at the end completely ambiguous, or not include the ship tease in the first place. The twist came out of nowhere, and it felt like it was only included for the sole purpose of pissing off the fans. Again, maybe the whole thing was foreshadowed better in the manga, but this left such a bad taste in my mouth, I have no desire to read it and find out, since I know the result is still the same. Seriously, I've seen plenty of amazing stories that had otherwise bad endings, but still managed to be worth revisiting. This one had one of the few endings bad enough to effectively ruin the entire story for me.
**END SPOILERS**
With that out of the way, if you find yourself watching the series despite my review, I advise you to watch no more than the first nine episodes, then make up your own ending. The tenth episode is still good, but it ends in such a way that you almost have to watch the eleventh episode, after which point, there's no turning back.
Mar 30, 2016
Boku dake ga Inai Machi
(Anime)
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Started out okay, went on to be great, only to crash and burn at the end.
I'm not sure what it was that originally made me like Erased. Perhaps the premise and the characters, maybe even the voice acting. At any rate, although it was a little slow in the first episode, it started picking up steam after that, giving me what I sure was going to be one of my top five favorite anime series. Sadly, it wasn't to last. Although they did a pretty good job setting up the narrative, there were several problems that kept this from being as good as it could have, ... |
