Boku Dake Ga Inai Machi feels like a show quite deliberately crafted for a mainstream audience. It has a relatively reserved young adult male protagonist and a mostly relatable extended cast of characters with good voice performances backing them up. While it emulates elements of the manga's harsh, angsty artstyle, it chooses subdued colours and realistic motion to create a down-to-earth atmosphere, making it an easy show to simply relax and take in. Another interesting aspect is its use of a much wider aspect ratio in the scenes taking place in 1988, giving the scenes a cinematic feel that distinguishes them from the rest of the series.
Sometimes this series tells us, in reference to our personal lives, to dig a bit deeper. When you dig a bit deeper into Boku Dake ga Inai Machi you find there's not as much lying beneath its surface as it makes out. The main character of this series is, for some reason unbeknownst to all but God, bestowed with a power called 'revival'. When something happens or is about to happen, he may get a chance to go back in time and fix it. The key word is 'may', since he has no control over the power, and it doesn't activate many times in the story when bad things are very clearly happening. The premise of the plot is him using this power to, extraordinarily, travel 18 years back in time to solve a serial kidnapping and murder case.
Since there are no defined rules for the revival power, its use as a convenient plot device for the author is too transparent and visible to the viewer, which partly undermines the feeling of realism the show is going for. Once Satoru is back in 1988, the plot begins losing focus. More than half of the series is dedicated to the protagonist rescuing Hinazuki Kayo, just one of the murderer's three victims. We soon find she's a victim of severe abuse, and much of the series focuses on Satoru trying desperately to find ways of keeping her safe and out of her mother's reach. These are the most engaging scenes of the series; the parts where the core elements of the mystery are least present. Many aspects of this arc are heavily idealized, which would perhaps work better if the presentation of the show were truer to its level of maturity. The premise of Satoru's childhood friends all helping him to rescue Kayo, and in the process him realizing the importance of reaching out to other people, is cute, but the perceptiveness of the elementary schoolers, in particular Kenya, is a hard sell for anyone who remembers most of their childhood.
Bringing things back into perspective, these are relatively minor criticisms for an enjoyable part of the show. It's the other third where Boku Dake Ga Inai Machi starts to fall apart. With two other potential victims to save and only several episodes to go, the mystery is resolved at blinding speed, and describing these episodes as 'rushed' is charitable. There's little time to understand the circumstances of the remaining victims, and the reveal of the murderer is rather anticlimactic, since it's the most obvious culprit and the few red herrings aren't followed up enough to throw the audience off-course. As a result, the wider narrative, which should frame Satoru's struggles and put them into perspective, fails to do that. There's no compelling interplay between the 1988 and present eras. All Satoru gains from the future is knowing who may die and who may be the culprit; no specific clues he may be able to use to make his own deductions. It feels like Boku Dake ga Inai Machi is just a skeletal time-travel mystery with the story about Kayo at its heart, which makes the ultimate resolution of that 'sub'-plot feel lazy and unintentionally hilarious.
To put it more bluntly, I feel like this series relies on emotional pandering to conceal its severely flawed narrative. No aspects of its premise or execution are particularly unique. Its message, as far as I can make out, is for introverted people to be a bit more outgoing; a bit of a tame theme from a show that features concepts like time travel, child abuse and serial killings. And critically, because of the contrived use of the time travel power, there's little tension since there are ultimately no consequences to the protagonist's failures. So a 6/10 is a fair score. Don't get me wrong, this show is definitely above average, it's just not good.
