Mirai Nikki is the worst anime I have ever watched.
No, I'm not kidding, nor am I being hyperbolic. This unholy abomination of a series left such a negative impact on me when I originally watched it back in 2012, that I actually started to hate anime in general and lost interest in the medium for a couple of years because of the fact that Mirai Nikki was the most popular anime back then. It baffled me how anyone could like such an atrociously-written crap without an ounce of irony, and if this is what people were accepting as "good" anime, then this medium is fucking doomed.
Thankfully, as the years went by, people started to notice Mirai Nikki's bullshit and this show's reputation nowadays is considerably worse than it used to be, which is exactly the kind of thing that happens with terrible shows that were once loved merely out of hype while not having substance to back it up. The hype dies away, people will watch it again, some new viewers will also give it a shot, and the awfulness of the content will come and hit you so hard you'll wish you were Chris Brown's wife. Maybe if Mirai Nikki was your first anime, or at least your first """""""""""serious""""""""""" (there's still not enough quotation marks there, believe me) anime, you'll probably feel nostalgic about it, and thus, unable to judge it as the shitshow it actually is.
For the sake of being specific about why I hate Mirai Nikki so much, be warned that >>>I'M GOING TO SPOIL THE HELL OUT OF THIS SHOW FOR THIS REVIEW<<< because I don't think I can express how bad it is without spoiling it. If you're somehow masochistic and want to waste your time with Mirai Nikki without being spoiled, then I advise you to not read any further, I also advise you to go watch something else that's more worthy of your time, or maybe go see a psychiatrist. For everyone else... You may also want to do something else that's more worthy of your time than reading some autistic weeb rambling about how much he despises a shitty japanese cartoon that's 7 years old at this point, but if you really want to keep reading, then be my guest.
Some people usually talk about how good Mirai Nikki's premise is, even others who also think this show is horse shit, tend to admit that it had a good premise. Well, I don't think it had a good premise at all, honestly Mirai Nikki seemed stupid to me ever since the very first episode, and I'm going to explain why. The premise is that there's this guy called Amano Yukiteru, he's your average socially awkward loner teen and has the habit of writing down everything that happens around him in his cellphone, while talking to his imaginary friends, Deus Ex Machina, and his partner, Murmur. Turns out Deus Ex Machina and Murmur are not really Yukiteru's imaginary friends, instead Deus is actually the God of Time and Space, he turned Yukiteru's cellphone into a Future Diary, a device capable of predicting the future up to ninety days, and dragged Yukiteru into a deadly survival game. In this game, Yukiteru and eleven other participants posessing their own Future Diaries with their own specific effects must kill each other until one remains, and the sole survivor takes Deus' place as God of Time and Space. Why? Because Deus is actually dying and must get a successor before that happens.
Yeah, if this premise being stupid wasn't self-explanatory enough for you, then I'll tell you why it's stupid. First of all: Why the hell is Deus dying? The show never ever explains what exactly is killing him, hell, I thought gods were supposed to be immortal, but I guess Deus just got some kind of God AIDS and now he's about to pass away. And second: If Deus is the God of Time and Space, then why doesn't he just use his powers over time and space to look into the future and just make whoever won the game there into his successor already? Isn't he in a hurry to get this damn successor before he dies? Does he just want to see a bunch of people killing each other before dying? Either way, it's fucking dumb as hell, there's no reason to even come up with this game when you know exactly who is going to win in the end. Even if you make the argument that he's giving the participants the chance to change this future that he already knows is coming ahead, this is pointless because the winner of the game by the end of the series is exactly who Deus knew was going to be all along. Really, what is the point of everything that happens in this series?
And no, that's not even the worst part, the story somehow actually manages to get dumber after that masterpiece of a premise.
Among the other eleven participants of the game is Yukiteru's classmate, a girl called Gasai Yuno, who has been obsessively stalking the guy and vows to protect him at all costs, her Future Diary is even made specifically to help her protect Yukiteru. Together, they vow to defeat the other Future Diary owners and bring this game to an end, and as you may have guessed it: Most of the diary owners are generic anime bad guys, ranging from a terrorist, to a girl who commands a creepy religious cult, to a serial killer, to a psychopathic loli who somehow has access to dangerous weaponry and so on. Why would Deus choose a bunch of deranged people to this game? I dunno, it's almost like this is an anime and Yukiteru is supposed to be the protagonist who fights against a bunch of villains or something. There's a cop in the game, though, apparenly Deus' motivation to choose him would be to balance things out because the other Future Diary owners were horrible people, because surely one cop can stand up to almost a dozen dangerous criminals.
Predictably, most of the other participants target Yukiteru because he's Deus' personal favorite pick for winner of the game (in other words, he's the protagonist of the show) and they all end up being defeated. Good thing they all conveniently attack him one at a time despite having a common goal in mind, otherwise I would start believing the characters in this show are actually smart or something. But even if they did attack Yukiteru and Yuno together, I'm sure the writers would find a way to make them fail, because Yukiteru has a plot armor that's somehow thicker than Sakae Esuno's skull. The bad guys have to be really dumb in such unbelievably contrived ways in order to lose their battles against Yukiteru and Yuno that it's really hard to take this shit seriously. Take Minene, the terrorist who's the ninth diary user, for example, she sneaks into Yukiteru and Yuno's school and somehow manages to set up bombs all over the place without being seen or suspected by anyone, which is fucking ridiculous, but I'll buy it. What I won't buy, though, is that she conveniently blows up one part of the school at a time, and it's always giving Yukiteru and Yuno just enough time to get away before they get blown up. She then blabbers about how this was all a plan to lure Yukiteru out, and she actually threatens to blow the whole school up. Well... Why doesn't she blow the whole school up? Isn't her objective to kill Yukiteru? By just blowing everything up from the get-go, she would have killed both Yukiteru and Yuno, two birds with one stone. But we all know why she didn't just do that, because then this garbage would have lasted for a mere two episodes.
The other battles against diary users aren't much better than this, it always comes to them having Yukiteru and Yuno backed into a corner, with all the opportunities in the world to kill them, but failing because they're plagued by the powers of bad writing. The Future Diaries themselves are barely even worth talking about here, seriously, they're almost completely forgotten by the characters during these fights, and only do actualy predict the future when it's convenient to the plot, which makes them more of a cheap gimmick than anything else. Action scenes in spite of that aren't even that good, so just turning my brain off and enjoying the action was an impossibility, they're serviceable enough, save for some really stupid moments such as the fight against the twelfth diary user who acts like a tokustatsu hero, he hypnotizes some followers of the sixth diary user and they also wear wacky tokusatsu costumes to fight alongside him. His strategy is to confuse Yukiteru and Yuno because the costumes look similar, so they have trouble telling this guy apart from the others... Except they shouldn't have so much trouble because the costumes have different colors in their helmets, so even if he did blend in together with the others, he still has a specific color in his costume's helmet, but Yukiteru and Yuno are fucking idiots and take forever to get this guy for some reason. God, this is so dumb...
Even worse than the fights is Mirai Nikki's pathetic attempt at character development. The diary users for the most part are generic anime archetypes with some edgy backstory thrown in there so the unfortunate viewer can maybe sympathize with them, and I mean, they do try really hard to get you to sympathize with these characters, if their stupid backstories didn't get you feeling sorry for them, the fact that most of them die right after those backstories are revealed definitely will! Or maybe you're an actual thinking person, and you realize these backstories don't matter in the end. Look at Tsubaki, the sixth diary user and leader of the previously mentioned generic evil cult that does whatever, she's a backstabbing bitch who wants to win the game because she hates the world and wants to destroy it. But hey, look at her background, she was randomly gang-raped by all the other males in her cult right after losing her parents, how ~sad~ and ~tragic~ a character this one is! The rape really drives the point home, it was completely necessary and had everything to do with the plot, man! What about Minene? The terrorist who blew a school up and possibly killed thousands of students in the process? Minene lost her parents and spent her childhood alone in some eastern country where religious extremists caused violent conflicts to happen, which eventually led to her hating religion... And eventually becoming a terrorist who fights against religion because God is evil and yadda yadda, yet doesn't think twice before blowing up schools and murdering thousands of students to achieve her goals. But wait, you're gonna love what comes next, trust me! Minene ends up being romantically engaged with a cop called Nishijima... A damn cop is in love with a terrorist who recently killed a lot of innocent people! Minene then "softens up" starts acting like a cookie-cutter tsundere in their "cute" romantic moments together, and it's like she never did anything wrong to begin with! She never shows any regret for killing all those people she killed back then, and may I remind you that Nishijima works for the Police! What the hell IS this shit? Am I supposed to just accept this as some kind of cute anime romance? What, does Nishijima see the real human bean behind this poor terrorist who's responsible for the grief of many families who sent their kids to school? Fuck you, Mirai Nikki. Fuck! You! It's already bad enough that you're implying rape victims become psychopaths, but now you're trying to pass murderous terrorists off as misunderstood humans who deserve love? What the fuck, man?
Not even our main characters are exactly well-written either, Yukiteru is wildly inconsistent through the story and can go from a helpless loser to a badass whenever the plot needs him to do so, his relationship with Yuno is as deep and engaging as the romance in the Twilight saga is. He slowly starts to realize that Yuno may have a few screws loose and keeps oscilating between trusting her and not trusting her, yet this motherfucker keeps trusting Yuno even after she tries to kill his friends and even turns against him later! He has no real reason to trust Yuno aside from the fact that she protects him, but at this point it's pretty obvious that she has obscure reasons for doing so. Yuno is a yandere who loves Yukiteru, and that's basically all the characterization she gets, all of her dialogue and actions are about Yukiteru, and she also has a dark past, of course she does. Yuno was abused by her parents and became depressed, she was a loner in the classroom until one day she talked to Yukiteru and sorta made him promise he'll marry her in the future, he thought it was a joke and just accepted the proposal in an obviously half-hearted way. Do you think that's dumb? Yeah, me too. Oh, and also Yuno has what seems to be some dead bodies inside her house, which makes Nishijima get on her tail and start to question her about these rumors, Yuno reacts in the most "obviously I did something wrong" way possible, but Nishijima for some reason doesn't follow her or anything. I swear this dude is the worst cop of all time.
But enough of this, time to crank up this diarrhea dile, because we're going to dive into the final act of Mirai Nikki, where things get even more hopelessly stupid than they already are! Yukiteru's father, who previously abandoned his son in a collapsing tower to save his own ass, by the way, was deceived into killing Yukiteru's mother by John Bacchus, the mayor of the city and the eleventh diary user. This makes Yukiteru go after him, the two to share an "emotional" reconciliation moment, only for them to get ambushed by Bacchus' goons who kill Yukiteru's father. Turns out this whole game was actually Bacchus' plan and he is the one who designed the Future Diaries, Bacchus somehow convinced Deus to go with this game and his motives for wanting to become the new God of Time and Space is that he's basically a Hitler wannabe. Why would Deus go with this plan to begin with? Is it even worth giving a fuck about the plot at this point?
Now Yukiteru wants to win the game because he believes that will give him the power to revive his family... Yes, he thinks the God of Time and Space has life-restoring powers... This is our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen! This is hilariously retarded enough as it is, but Yukiteru could have literally just asked Deus if he could revive his family if he became the new god, there was nothing stopping him from doing so in the scene where Murmur implied the revival thing to him! "Why doesn't Yuno tell Yukiteru that he's going full retard?" you may ask, it's actually because she's also deceiving Yukiteru into believing that! Woah, what a shocking turn of events! Yukiteru just believes her, of fucking course he does, even though she lied to him multiple times at this point, caused the death of his friends and almost even killed him. But yeah, there's a really nonsensical plot twist regarding Yuno, and I'll spill it out right now.
Walmart Kaworu eventually finds out that the Yuno that's been around the whole time is actually another Yuno from a different timeline where she indirectly killed Yukiteru and won the survival game. Seeing that she can't bring Yukiteru back to life, she then traveled back in time, killed her own parents in this timeline, as well as killed herself from this timeline and took her identity as Yuno. She's basically doing an infinite time loop where she spends time with Yukiteru, kills him at the end of the game and returns to the beginning to start it all over again.
First of all, how is Yuno even still around? She went back in time and killed her version of this time, which means she was killed before entering the game and shouldn't be participating on it as a result. Alright, let's assume she's immune to time travel bullshit because she's technically God of Time and Space, then... How the hell can two Gods of Time and Space exist in the same universe? How is Yuno's meddling with time affecting Deus? Couldn't Deus see that Yuno comes from another timeline or that she's actually another god? If Deus died in the previous timeline, how can Yuno just travel back in time and have him be alive? Why doesn't Deus just do that to himself so he can just exist forever instead of bothering with all this stupid shit? What does Deus dying even mean? He dies but can be brought back to life later? His existence gets erased out? Who the hell knows? It's not like the writers are going to explain shit!
Anyway, Yuno and Yukiteru are the only survivors left in the game, turns out Murmur has been secretly manipulating the game all along in order to have Yuno win, which is something Deus apparently never suspected, even though he's the fucking God of Time and Space and can see into the future! Murmur and Yuno travel back in time and end up creating a third timeline, but this time Yukiteru interferes with Minene's help. Yeah, Minene was kept alive by Deus. They end up saving the Yuno from that timeline and her parents before Yuno and Murmur could get to them, which ends up making this the happy timeline where not only Yuno, but everyone else apparently have peaceful lives now. How exactly does Yuno being saved affects everyone else's lives? What does Yuno's life have to do with Yukiteru's parents not divorcing? I don't know, I don't care either.
The Yuno we've seen this whole time kills herself and Yukiteru then becomes the new God of Time and Space. What does he do? Nothing, he becomes depressed over Yuno's death and doesn't do anything... Even though he's the fucking God of Time and Space and he can just travel back in time, meet Yuno in a new timeline, maybe save her and her parents like he did in the third timeline, I don't know. I guess that would mean Deus would also come back and there would be another death game, because this show's use of time travel is just great. Ten thousand years later, Yukiteru decides to create a new timeline while Murmur plans to create another survival game. Yeah, it's basically a failed attempt at a Gainax Ending.
What else can I even say about Mirai Nikki? The visuals and animation aren't anything to write home about, in fact it looks weird sometimes and the CGI is terrible, but at least it looks okay for the most part. Music is also just there, I don't remember anything when it comes to the soundtrack, but the openings are pretty good, so at least there's that. The direction is also pretty sloppy sometimes, although it may be the fault of the source material, but aside from the characters dying pretty much in the same episode that reveals their background, this show has the tendency to immediately brush their deaths off by showing the main characters doing some random comical stuff right afterwards, which diminishes the impact of those deaths even more, and those awkward transitions are present in most of the story. Even if it was the source material's fault for having those same transitions, the anime should have improved on that instead of being such a literal adaptation.
Regardless, Mirai Nikki is a trainwreck in every sense of the word. A poorly-written and poorly-directed mess that pretends it's smarter than it actually is, tries to mask its terrible plot and characters with shock value caused by gore, edgy characters and other themes it handles terribly, and can only be enjoyed people who literally turn their brains off, as many suggest. I would like to say there's some positives to talk about in the story, but I can't see them, the premise is stupid, the story has enough plot holes to cover the moon, the characters are not only unlikeable, but also poorly-written, and the ending is a forced attempt at tragedy. Some people still like Mirai Nikki, even though they admit it's not a good anime, because apparently it's "so bad it's good" so they watch it for laughs, but I seriously can't even give Mirai Nikki this much credit because I was outright pissed off when I watched it, I just couldn't believe how retarded all of this was getting, and the final act was the point where I just gave up and wanted to finish this anime just for the sake of finishing it. I would watch other bad popular anime like Sword Art Online, Guilty Crown, Akame ga Kill or even School Days over Mirai Nikki any day of the week, at least most of those shows had something going for them, they actually made me create expectations before going to shit. Mirai Nikki, on the other hand, is a show I went in with extremely low expectations, and it didn't even meet those low expectations to begin with.
