It's hard to bring up Mirai Nikki without mentioning how great its premise sounds on paper. A survival game between twelve diary users, all with different motivations and reasons, to overwrite the future and survive a thrilling game of wits, courage and luck. It's an excellent premise, but also tried and done to death (especially in recent years, thanks to the Hunger Games movies/novels).
What often tends to be a deciding factor in them is how to make characters feel human, their panic and sense of calm in between feel real, and well...just not feel too extreme, really. A basic understanding of human psychology is required to capture that, and it requires a lot of solid character writing to accomplish that.
Oh, and there is also the (arguably) equally important plot armor aspect. A lot of what makes survival games so intense and thrilling to sit through is the unpredictability of what happens next. However, that can be sacrificed if the actual show has a script solid enough to carry through and excuse all the questionable incidents that occur over the course of the show.
Mirai Nikki fails in every single way, and it is easily among the most anti-climactic series I've ever seen. The script mocks me constantly for taking it seriously, yet takes itself more seriously than it can ever dream of being self-aware of.
The storyline goes nowhere past the basic premise, and there is no theme whatsoever to think about. The show pretends that there is the whole theme about "being able to dream of future and fight for it" and all that, but honestly, the show never foreshadows that theme til very late onto the show, as well as the ending, well, pretty much contradicting that.
Did I mention how much plot armor this show has? No seriously, any situation Yuki and Yuno are put into they manage to walk out of with little to no harm, and there is no real suspense once you realize that there is a particular formula which is pretty much that Yuno and Yuki come across one of the other twelve, that person either pretends to be an ally or becomes an enemy (don't expect any reasonable explanation either) and then they defeat that person only for a period of calm to come and then the cycle repeats itself again.
Seriously, this show is in some ways the worst thing a survival game should be. It's predictable, formulaic, the script is a walking joke and the characters are equipped with enough plot armor that can make Ichigo from Bleach blush. The worst thing is that this show has absolutely no idea how to balance its quiet moments with its hectic ones, with the quiet moments coming off as forced or too quiet, and its hectic ones coming off as extremely over-the-top and silly.
I also need to mention just how bad the script feels. It's bloody ridiculous, and some of what is permissible in this show can break any sane person's sense of disbelief. A terrorist blows up the school bit by bit and the show tells you that she is a terrorist with no real care for a human's life. Why? Just because. Why didn't she just blow up the whole school? A little kid tries to kill Yuno and Yuki with poison gas. Where did he get the poison gas? Who sold him the poison gas? Don't know? I don't think the show does either. I can go on and on, but I really don't want to spoil the entire show. Honestly props to anyone who somehow managed to suspend their disbelief for all this, it takes a lot to be able to manage that with a show like this.
There is also the characters. Where do I even start? They behave irrationally, act like a pack of immature brats who can't fight their way out of a paper bag one moment and suddenly can do complete and utter miracles the next. There is so much inconsistency in their behavior that I'm not even sure they even can be considered "characters".
The main characters are especially guilty of this. Yuki changes personalities to be whatever the plot demands him to be. He is normally a coward and a wimp, but you'd never guess that if you watched clips of his clashes with the various diary users over the course of the show. He is a wimp in the quiet moments of the show but becomes a complete badass when the plot demands it, and can throw darts with a surprising level of accuracy (which admittedly is foreshadowed early on). No matter how good you are at throwing darts, they can't be the Deus Ex Machina solution when all else fails.
Yuno is no better, with her character being foreshadowed to simply having a crush on Yuki then later turning to be a complete and utter maniac who kills people for fun and games, simply because it makes the show more marketable and easy for people to not get bored. To be fair, she is entertaining (and the main reason I finished the show) but I'm not entirely sure that it's for the reasons the writer planned her to be. She changes personalities off the drop of a coin and her monologues boil down to "this person looked at Yuki, I must kill them" and "this person is dangerous to Yuki, I must kill him". She is completely defined by her relationship with Yuki, and as such never once feels like an actual character. The show does attempt to explain this and fails miserably, coming off as incredibly edgy and laughable at best.
The side characters vary wildly, with most of them being every bit as stupid as our main duo, and others being pretty decent. I kind of like the detective in particular, his motivation was really easy to sympathize with and he is also the only person who was talking sense in the show. I could go on about other examples but I really don't want to spoil the whole show.
A special mention needs to be addressed about how women are treated in this show, however. Every single woman in this show is sexually abused or raped, sometimes both, and there is literally no special thought put into making this work or its psychological consequences.
Seriously, it's like the writer and the publishing company were thinking to themselves about how to give the female characters the harshest and most edgy back story possible, and they kept seeing rape and sexual abuse as the answer. It's absolutely disgusting.
The soundtrack is unremarkable at best, with some very strange tracks being put in the wrong time, sound effects being poorly implemented and the voice acting sounding poor and inconsistent, with a lot of strange noises that actually made me laugh whenever a character is dying or put into any danger.
The artwork is alright but nothing particularly remarkable to look at, with backgrounds looking really bland and the entire show looking as though everything is in a darker color simply because they wanted to make the show look dark, but coming off as incredibly edgy and (maybe I have bad eyes or something, I don't know) but I could swear that the character designs have this dark shade that is pretty nasty to look at. Seriously, why do that?
A lot of people like Mirai Nikki. I kind of admire them for that, since there is so much that the show does wrong in my eyes that I found myself struggling to watch episode to episode. The story is stupid, the characters inconsistent and the themes non-existent.
I honestly don't recommend this show, just watch the Fate series, read/watch the Hunger Games and read Battle Royale. I can assure you it's a better use of your time than this show if you're looking for some survival games. I'm not saying any of them are perfect, but they're way more satisfying to watch than this show.
