If, by chance, you find yourself in Anime High School and don’t want to go on an adventure, apparently in addition to not sitting in the window-side seat second from the back, avoiding mysterious transfer students, and keeping out of any sort of Paranormal or Occult interest group, you should also stay well away from the Astronomy Club, if this show and Brynhildr in the Darkness have anything to say about it.
And that might be the biggest takeaway
from the whole show. So, this show… It’s a show. It has episodes
and everything. But it’s not exactly memorable or engaging, and in
some ways it’s actually strange that it’s not. We’ve got an
imperfect time loop, a Sword of Damocles hanging over a lovable
character, riddles and mysteries, slow-burn development of the rest
of the cast… so why doesn’t this work?
The story begins with a quick overview
of the events around the Astronomy Club as Kaori Sasaki tries to
confess to her childhood friend, main character Sou Akiyama. She
doesn’t get a straight answer, though, and walking home is creamed by
a bus.
At once, the story begins again. It
starts the same way, but is interrupted by the arrival of a new
character, a strange girl named Yui who seems to be literally dropped
in to the story for the Astronomy Club to find. It quickly becomes
clear to the audience, but not the characters, that Yui has arrived
to keep Kaori from her date with the bus, but the getting there seems
to be difficult.
We go through, over the next eight
episodes or so, the same time that we did in episode one, but in
greater detail and with the new character. And in that, we come
across what I feel is problem one: this is the meat of the show, just
slice of life centered around Sou and the girls of the Astronomy Club
including Kaori, Yui, and two others – rich genius girl Nagisa and
smart-with-a-drop-of-Tomboy Airi, the latter of which clearly carries
a torch for Sou, albeit with a willingness, for one reason or
another, to let Kaori have her shot first.
As slice of life goes, it’s actually
pretty good. We see the characters having fun, kind of teaching Yui
how to be human while building good chemistry between Sou and the
other girls (particularly Kaori, though the Airi material may
actually be stronger). They go play at the river, go stargazing, and
otherwise indulge in events that will prove important divergence
points, all leading to the fateful afternoon where Kaori will confess
her feelings and get obliterated if everything goes the same.
The problems with this are numerous, but I think the biggest one that I want to address here is that it’s just slice of life. Remember – we are in a time loop with the life of one of these characters hanging in the balance, and if that wasn’t bad enough there are some other mysterious happenings like “ghosts” and people falling into comas that seem to be related to the fact that time has been reset. But that doesn’t get the focus, and in fact it is perilously easy to forget that you’re in a show with actual stakes. Other time loop scenarios, ones from better shows, don’t do this: they keep you invested in either the loop itself and the fight to break free, or else powerful and engaging events within the loop that match the drama of what’s coming in the end. In The Kagerou Project we get terrorist attacks, an investigation into the origins of a weird otherworld and the mystic powers bound to these kids, and the Snake of Clearing Eyes leading everyone towards death more or less directly. Even when we spend some time with “down time” scenarios like Yuukei Yesterday, the darkness still comes in by the end of the ‘episode’. In Madoka Magica we’re mostly invested in the life-and-death battles of the magical girls of this particular loop, not even being aware of the looping or its mechanism until late in the game.
I would even argue that the Endless Eight handles the scenario better. Like In Search of the Lost Future, the Endless Eight arc of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a time loop founded in a setting that’s mostly a slice of life with magical elements, and the repeated events are largely just mundane things: pool visits, bug catching, fireworks, and a part time job as mascots rather than stream visits and stargazing. Unlike In Search of the Lost Future, one episode of the Endless Eight is one loop, with several important scenes reinforcing the loop and the threat it poses, conversations in the dark and a dramatic worry as the reset becomes inevitable. And don’t get me wrong, the Endless Eight will drive you absolutely insane. But I think those eight episodes had, at least internal to each episode and in terms of the relationship between events and loops, a better pacing than the middle episodes of In Search of the Lost Future. As horrible as the Endless Eight can be to experience, it at least had a vision and executed that vision.
In any case, this loop, the one that
takes up the vast majority of the show, is also a fail. Sou can’t
respond to Kaori’s feelings and despite Yui’s best attempts to do
something about it, Kaori gets run over again.
We then get the show’s one really
commendable move: the timeline keeps going. Kaori, it seems, is not
rendered stone dead (nor sent to be a chosen one in a magical
dimension – you need a truck for that) but rather comatose, with
little to no hope of ‘natural’ recovery. Sou, pining for her,
becomes a kind of obsessive mad scientist, researching everything to
do with the brain and any corner case theory that could possibly
bring Kaori back to him and unravel the mystery of those strange days
that were her last. Airi is there with him, still busy being stuck
in the all too frequent seat of the girl who gets some of the best
character scenes but whose love is unrequited and unspoken, and
eventually they, together, come up with something. Studying what Yui
left behind, they eventually manage to (re)create her and send her
back to time. They know that time travel can’t actually change their
past, but they hope that some sort of quantum resonance from creating
a universe where Kaori is alive will allow her to wake up in their
universe.
Thus, a new loop begins. Evidently,
this isn’t the first time that this has happened, not by far, and
Yui’s retreading of the events is starting to take a toll: More
ghosts (the afterimages of other versions of the timeline) and more
mysterious comas (also related to time machinations). This leaves
Yui wondering just how much more she’ll be able to come back for. We
go through the events again, more compressed than the main loop but
more detailed than the first loop without Yui. Except, this time
something is different: Sou goes off script, developing deep feelings
for Yui. This initially horrifies her, and she tries to push him
away. After all, her mission is to save Kaori, given to her by the
version of Sou that’s kind of her father and clearly did love Kaori
after all. This Sou, though, just keeps botching event after event
by pursuing Yui. I guess he gets through to her and past her
attempts to deflect, but this brings us to the second big problem:
the emotional relationships are all screwed up.
We spend the vast majority of the show
getting development of and providing weight towards Kaori’s feelings
for Sou and the possibility of Sou’s feelings for Kaori, with an odd
and effective pathos for Airi. But, in Loop 3, after we’ve seen the
depths Sou will go through for Kaori, we’re expected to take this
sharp turn and start rooting for Sou and Yui, who didn’t develop good
chemistry in the stretch that was nothing but building chemistry and
certainly don’t do it here, to be the “official couple”.
I kind of get it – In Search of the Lost Future is based on a visual novel, and research suggests than in the VN you, playing as Sou, can pick any of the girls: Kaori or Yui, of course, but even Nagisa or poor unloved Airi can become the official relationship depending on what the player wants. But what works in a VN doesn’t necessarily work in an anime. I’m going to go out on a limb, having not played the game, and guess that one loop is one route. If that’s the case, I’d say we spent the vast majority of the show on the Kaori route, only to suddenly swap in this last loop to the Yui route for no apparent reason. Player got dissociative fugue and instead of doing what they were trying to do right decided to do something else entirely. I can understand wanting to show off more of the game in abstract, but that doesn’t play well. Other anime based on Visual Novels know that they either need to pick just one route and show it off alone even if it would normally require a New Game + (Steins;Gate and Demonbane do this), show off multiple routes essentially disconnected from each other (Fate/Stay Night’s call, having separate adaptions for Fate, Unlimited Bladeworks, and Heaven’s Feel), or take the general concept and create a “synthesis” route that is consistent on its own but exists solely for the Anime. In Search of the Lost Future instead gracelessly welds Kaori’s Route and Yui’s Route. In the game, the player would probably start a new game (plus?) intending to pursue one of the girls and follow to that route’s ending, and then they might play again. Either way, the route the Player is on gets total investment. In the show, Kaori gets most of the investment and then Yui steals the ending.
Or, if this (a bad end Kaori followed
by a short-loop for Yui) is just what Yui’s Route looks like, I don’t
think I care for how the emotions are handled getting to her.
At any rate, the Yui Loop reaches it’s
conclusion: Sou is actually able to answer Kaori’s feelings,
breaking her heart into a million little pieces which causes her to
miss her date with the Bus. Yui, despite receiving Sou’s confession,
still can’t stay in this timeline, and once again the love of Sou’s
young life is lost to him. In the Kaori Route future, the whole
quantum brain thing works and she wakes up, presumably erasing the
words “Bad End” and finishing off what little hope for a romantic
future that Airi may have had, while in the Yui Route the characters
muse that, with what they know, Sou is probably fated to see Yui
again, suggesting that he’ll still become an obsessive mad scientist
and one day recreate his homunculus waifu, just with no need to send
her back in time seeing how the ghost sightings stop and the coma
victims wake up.
And, in the end, the ways in which In
Search of the Lost Future is botched see it leaving staggeringly
little impact. There are a bunch of theoretically good character
scenes establishing the feelings and situations of Nagisa and Airi on
the Kaori route, but it’s the Kaori route and Yui route that we’re
doing, those two are more or less worthless little false leads so
even if Nagisa has this complicated situation, the show’s not going
to keep addressing it so you can just sort of forget it. Kaori gets
a decent amount of buildup. Maybe I’m just biased in favor of the
childhood friend but by the end of her arc I really wanted to see her
escape her doom with Sou saying “yes” back to her, and it looked
like it was possible. But then that’s largely just shoved aside in
favor of a Yui route that’s rushed and hollow. The show spends too
much time being spice of life to support the timey wimey drama and
leans its ending too much on the timey wimey drama to make the meat
of the show feel like it paid off. It’s not terrible at any point;
it’s decently acted, and while the higher level composition of the
show is terrible, individual scenes are decently written (except for
the “romance” scenes with Yui that come out of nowhere with an
intensity that makes no sense) and do manage to land. The characters
aren’t entirely bland, but because of how underused or undeserved
they all are I have trouble actually remembering them. Nagisa never
gets enough time in the limelight to leave an impact even if the
teaser for her story is solid, Kaori is cast aside, Yui comes out of
nowhere with the worst interpersonal scenes, and Airi… well I’ve
talked plenty about Airi. The end result is that none of them have
good, fulfilling arcs that leave an impact.
The most interesting thing in the show is us seeing the future, what Sou and Airi become and how they work to manipulate the past with the hope of saving their version of Kaori. The evolution of the characters into their adult form is much more engaging than the abortive child forms, but… I hate to do this two weeks in a row, but I’ve got to reach into my folder of good Anime and pull out Noein to absolutely destroy what strength this show thought it had. I was actually preparing to do a write-up of how it might have been interesting and different if we got a show where the future versions of the characters had big roles, like we introduced them earlier and then spent more time with their manipulation of the situation and explored Yui’s relationship with Sou as both a peer and a father-creator… but Noein already does everything I’d want with that, being predicated almost entirely in versions of the same characters that exist across different timelines and different points in their lives, and the interactions between them, like Haruka’s relationship with Karasu, her badass protector, versus her relationship with his younger form, brooding sourpuss Yuu.
With that said, I personally rate In
Search of the Lost Future at a C-. It is entirely watchable, and I
don’t remember it really frustrating me or making me mad, or any
parts that were notably bad except for the Yui romance. The slice of
life is good enough, even if it shouldn’t be the highlight… I can’t
actually say it’s a terrible, failed anime. But it doesn’t stick in
the consciousness or memory. It’s not worth remembering, and I
certainly would recommend spending your time with something else
instead. At least the Endless Eight is an unforgettable experience,
even if it is a torturous one. This is one future that can go ahead
and stay lost, you don’t need to search it out.