The finale does bring some good emotional closure but as it is but felt rather rushed and anti-climactic as a culmination of 11 episodes worth of suspense and buildup. The who-done-it aspect of the mystery might not hold you for long thanks to some fairly obvious clues and hints but then again plenty of red herrings can keep you guessing all the same. With a 12 episode count a good chunk of the story is focused on Satoru's efforts to save his classmate, Kayo Hinazuki from a grim fate and terrible home life while the other victims of the story largely come in and are quickly resolved. If the show has a few shortcomings it does unfortunately suffer slightly by it's short length. If not for the clever visual reminders and the ongoing mystery of the future which propels Satoru back in time, it would be easy to forget this is supposed to be a time traveling mystery. As the episodes progress the series really is less about the time travel and more about a kid trying to do the right thing, even if that kid is really an adult. Slowly but surely he has to make a connection with Kayo, a seemingly cold and distant person but finding out she's a girl hiding incredible amount of pain in her life. Through the course of several episodes we see him craftily work out tactics as a grown man occupying the body of his 10-year-old-self. In the case of Erased we have an overlap as our main character Satoru goes back to his past to rewrite the wrongs of history to solve a kidnapping he feels partly responsible for, for not doing enough to possibly prevent it in the first place and help a friend who was set up to take the fall for such a crime. Time travel usually falls along one of two plot lines, set-right-what-once-went-wrong or change the future sometimes with overlap of both. From episode one I was already hooked and as the series continued on I was immensely pulled in by the strong atmosphere and strongly woven mystery. The only thing this had going for me was hopefully a passable Yuki Kajiura score. Going into this series I was largely skeptical, between Aniplex as a business souring me on shows produced by them, the show's director being the same who did Sword Art Online adding to that a time travel plot I was set up for this to be a failure. ERASED also known as Boku dake gai Inai Machi is the breakout winter hit for 2016 based on the manga by the same name.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |