The interaction between the characters is somewhat interesting at times, but not enough to please.
Shinkai, as always, wrote a cliché script for the film, and in the novel it is the same thing, during history it is possible to notice a significant amount of errors in the plot, but it is useful in general.
The film is clearly the best way to consume this work, the excellent visuals and animation distract you from the decadent script.

I recommend it if you really loved the movie and want to have something to remember it even more, but if you are going to read it just to have a pleasant moment I don't recommend it.

Note: it has exactly the same thing as the movie, you will not be losing or adding anything to your experience.

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”To be honest, I didn’t intend to write this novel. It may be rude to the readers for me to say something like that, but I though Your Name worked best as an animated film.”
- the afterword of Your Name novelization

If you ever wanted read a speeded up version of a movie script with the best aspect of the movie removed entirely, this is your chance. Truly – Kimi no na Wa works best as the movie, as by far the best parts of the movie are the animation and visuals. So much that it can distract the viewer from the weaker storyline.

But this is a novel – not even a light novel, just a novel. There is no animation here. There aren’t even any visuals as the novel is void of any illustrations. It’s just the story alone. There is no extra story content here. On the contrary, the story proceeds faster, giving the already underdeveloped characters even less time to develop – the relationship between the two leads suffers the most and feels even less believe thanks to this.

I’s say that’s pretty much all you need to know about this novel – it doesn’t offer anything more than the movie does, just less. The story itself of course suffers from the same plot holes like the original, but pointing out that it’s absurd the characters didn’t notice anything denoting the current date in the world or that the boy wouldn’t remember what’s pretty much the biggest catastrophe of modern Japanese history just few years after it happened and didn’t notice the connection and so on, that’s already been done many times in greater detail by other reviewers. Either you’re a fan of the movie and you don’t mind these inconsistencies, or you’re not and in that case I wouldn’t recommend picking this up at all in the first place.

The only reason this is getting a positive reception is because of its association with the hit movie. If it would be judged on its own, it’s really just weak.

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