Unfortunately, a decently good premise was never enjoyable for me due to a lack of focus and good pacing.
The problem begins with the plot, starting off the first five episodes as a slice of life in a school setting where a group of kids goes around finding others with special powers. It’s fairly vanilla, but even as someone who enjoys this type of genre I found myself getting a little bored with it. It felt more like filler episodes than anything, as most of the time there’s hardly any development or meaningful characterization other than emphasizing the stereotype that each of the characters fit into.
And then it takes a dramatic shift for the next seven episodes with two major events: Ayu’s death and the whole ordeal with Shunsuke’s group and the overseas terrorists. Although by itself it may be tense and exciting, there a few problems with it. One of them is that the amount of plot and eventfulness is unevenly spaced, with episodes 7 and 12 in particularly lacking much substance. Episode 7 could have been fine by itself to showcase the effects of Ayumi’s death on Yu, but it doesn’t work well when it seems that Yu has mostly forgotten about his depression by the next episode. Meanwhile episode 12 takes away from the climax of the previous episode with a series of hospital visits to Yu that really don’t add anything other than for Tomori’s.
The other problem is that there isn’t enough buildup to the major episodes such as 6 and 11 and therefore the major deaths don’t have that much impact, at least for me personally. Like I get Ayumi is cute and all, but up until then she was a character in the background, not someone that the viewer spends time with such as Yu or Tomori. Instead, she becomes a mere device to progress the plot, as it is revealed later that you can just “time leap”. Later, a whole new cast of characters with Shunsuke’s group is introduced in a single episode flashback, and because they are so poorly developed it’s hard to sympathize with the death of their friend.
The whole concept of travelling back in time is overused in media, but it can sometimes be used to great effect. Here it mostly muddles up the plot. Besides the flashbacks, its only real use is to revive Ayumi, as it is later shown that Shunsuke is blind and Yu lost his right eye. There are also a few plot holes, such as if the overseas terrorists took action after Yu saved Ayumi, then why didn’t they do anything the first time when Ayumi died, as well as why Yu is able to use his mind control ability with one eye, but not his time leap ability.
Most of the characters are rather flat and insignificant, and in the end only Yu and Tomori have any real development. The other two students in the student council only do anything in the slice of life segment and are only distant memories after episode 6 except for the one time they bring food to Yu in the hospital.
And now I’ll talk about the last episode. After covering the space of a few hours in the hospital bed during the previous episode, the last one takes Yu on a global expedition where he fights off corrupt organizations, braves through the sweltering desert, and deflects an RPG before he meets his ultimate demise through a random guy in China with a dinky crossbow. Looking past the fact that he managed to fend off literally thousands of bullets but not a measly arrow, Yu definitely got a new side to him shown in this episode. Throughout the series, Yu is interesting, but is also prone to extreme mood swings. In the beginning he is shown as defiant and egotistical, but following Ayumi’s death and Tomori’s help he is shown to be more agreeable and sympathetic to other people’s worries. Now in the end he is mentally exhausted and unstable. It’s not necessarily bad that a character has this many facets to him, but at times it is hard to follow such an inconsistent character. However, Tomori goes from being a blunt, independent girl who I liked in the beginning, to a damsel in distress and eventually completely falls for Yu by the end of his trip. In this case I think it would be better off to not have any romance, or at least put in more of a buildup, as the disparity between Tomori’s attitude before and after Yu’s trip is a bit jarring.
I quit in the middle of the first episode because of my overall negative impression, and although this wasn’t what I expected I wouldn’t say it’s far from the truth either.
