Welcome to Visual Novel land, where everything’s made up and only the cute girls matter! There’s certainly a style to the more typical or classical VN adaptations, the ones that follow relatively mundane Gal Game sorts of affairs rather than the merciless mecha nightmare of Muv Luv Alternative or the Lovecraftian WTF soup that was Demonbane… and that is 100% on display here in H2O.
After an arbitrary opening where the title is I guess justified by paraphrasing the well-known if oft-mocked Christian poem “Footprints” with imagery of a beach (The H2O part is actually said to be the initials of the heroines) , we get to our main plot. A blind boy, Takuma Hirose, is transferring into a new school out in the countryside, for reasons that are initially unexplained but probably related to that blindness. He has a boob-grab introduction to a standoffish girl, Hayami Kohinata, and at school meets the kind of improbably female cast of support that you’d expect from a mid-2000s visual novel. Which is, of course, exactly what this show is based on.
The show even manages to get a different girl’s nethers on our blind kid’s face through shoving from a shrill girl and no fault of his, so you know the kind of dated ecchi we’re in for. Honestly, it’s the kind of thing that can now and again cross the line twice to go from dated and embarrassing to oddly charming when the production, except for these seemingly obligatory moments, doesn’t really have a horny camera or overstated designs.
Overall, the main issue that we’re set up with seems to be Kohinata. Despite her very sharp manner of speaking, she does reliably seem to look out for Takuma… and he tries to return the favor when it seems she’s the target of some pretty awful bullying. This might be related to why she’s so sharp-tongued and tries to insist that Takuma shouldn’t get involved in her business. This includes nastiness being left on her desk, her being arbitrarily blamed for a shortfall of lunch servings by the school’s self-proclaimed queen bee (and held down by goons, face into her desk, while being accused), and ultimately getting beat up after she agrees to take things outside in order to spare Takuma any further involvement, giving us a lovely shot of the poor girl limping home for… no reason yet given, but I think that’s the point.
I’ll be honest, I started to get pretty worried when I realized this came out the same year as the film version of Garden of Sinners: Remaining Sense of Pain. But it’s not all reminders of traumatic incidents, there’s also a line where Takuma has encounters with Otoha, a girl who seems to appear from nowhere only when nobody is looking and proclaims herself to be the Spirit of the Sounds of Time and has some sort of supernatural power to back that claim up. She also says Takuma is a (or the) “promised person”, which sounds important.
So what about Hamaji, initially introduced as a major character? At least at first, Hamaji Yakumo makes a weaker impression. Even Hinata seems to do more, addressing Takuma as “Hirose-sama”, which seems to be tied in with her family regarding him as somehow very important. She was the one who ended up sitting on Takuma’s face in an improbable fall, too. And there’s our minor and largely comedic antagonist, Yui Tabata, that shrill twin-tailed bully who did the shoving and had her henchmen do the drubbing of Kohinata. That settled, let’s move on.
Otoha uses her magic powers to give Takuma some time. What time? Time with actual vision it seems, which he uses to see some beautiful scenery for the first time, and also Kohinata. This seems to last at least a while, and he hangs out with some of the other girls (not the bully so much. She gets to be the butt of a few jokes) when Kohinata turns down his invitation to join along. They show him around town, including pointing out the bridge that leads to the lair of an evil oni and no one must ever cross, which seems to put Hinata really out of sorts.
Naturally, Takuma immediately decides to explore across the oni bridge. Even more naturally, this leads to where Kohinata actually lives. And since this is mid-2000s with a hint of ecchi, of course he comes across her bathing in the stream.
At least he seemed to have guessed that, and brought her some ramen as thanks for sharing hers after the lunch incident, so all is well there. He’s even calling her Hayami by this point. To his credit, he also rather boldly tries to stand up for her, going so far as to blow off Hinata (who is desperate to steer him away from her, and possibly in her direction if able) or insist the two be treated as equals. Hayami doesn’t quite stand up for herself, thoug, forcing Takuma to intervene heavily, even when it seems like it will throw in his reputation and fate with hers. Hinata prevents Yui and her thugs from rounding on Takuma and lets him and Hayami escape to have a sweet bonding montage.
After this, Hinata decides to go heavy on making her moves. She forces all the romantic tropes on Takuma. Determined to get to the bottom of this nonsense, Takuma ends up learning that Hinata and Hayami may have been friends in the past. This is well enough confirmed for the viewers via flashbacks, where it seems like that friendship resulted in an angry mob burning down Hayami’s house and, given her current living arrangements alone and in a converted rusted vehicle across the oni bridge, probably killed her parents. Hinata has huge hangups about this entire mess and a complex about being a “good girl”, while Takuma wants the girls to actually talk out their issues.
This doesn’t go so well, as in a panic at being dragged towards the bridge, Hinata forces a kiss on Takuma right in front of a Hayami who dared think she might not be betrayed again.
Seems like a perfect time for a random out of context comedy/fanservice beach episode! We do get a couple moments of Hayami trying to process her feelings, but most of it is dedicated to Hamaji’s little sister trying to assassinate our lead. Also, Hamaji is apparently a guy who crossdresses. There is no reason for this.
Every time Takuma tries to make up with Hayami, Hinata throws herself ever more boldly in the way, to the point where it becomes obvious she’s doing it out of fear. This might be well-grounded, as Takuma extracts a version of those flashbacks from Hamaji, revealing that Hinata’s grandfather probably raised the lynch mob that very definitely lynched Hayami’s parents and burned down her house because she dared befriend someone as important as Hinata.
Eventually, Takuma gets 100% fed up with this and rather than being forcibly dragged away by Hinata, forcibly drags her across the bridge to face Hayami. Hinata has a breakdown, ending with her actually apologizing and Hayami – who presumably kind of gets that it wasn’t so much her old friend’s fault – seeming to accept her.
And that would be a kind of sweet ending if it weren’t episode five, so you know things are going to get a lot messier.
It starts out only mundane bad, as we focus on unlikable bully Yui and learn from her backstory why the Kohinata family was so hated. Apparently they were once as rich and powerful as they were despised, and the head of house used that to be a jerk, such that Yui’s grandfather died of treatable illness because the Kohinata doctor wouldn’t provide medicine or treatment without pay up front, when they already pretty much beggared that family and anyone else they could. Hence, the eventual lynch mob… and Hinata’s family basically profiting from all the spoils of making the Kohinatas eat dirt.
This doesn’t make me like Yui any better. Taking just a moment aside, H2O is not a visual novel I’ve personally played, but like Tsukihime I do have some awareness of differences, thanks to knowing how the fans regard the anime outing. Apparently (among other differences), Yui is even more of an irredeemable little stain in the game and that kind of boggles my mind, because she is a trashy and arrogant bully enough in the show.
I guess they do give her a catharsis moment with Hayami here at the halfway point, but she’s still the exactly wrong kind of shrill for someone with power and in a realistic setting.
That digression done with, we have to get back to Hinata and her crazy controlling grandpa. It’s revealed that, as had been slightly hinted before, Hinata isn’t exactly Hinata. She’s actually the younger of her family’s two daughters, Hotaru, who was said to have died years ago. Crazy grandpa insisted on the switcheroo where the survivor would live a lie and become the elder Hinata for… I’m not sure really why. It’s supposed to be for the sake of the family and even the whole village, and it seems like the same village that loves Hinata was actually glad for Hotaru to die, but there’s no reason for this. I guess Hotaru was a little shy back when? Or she wasn’t as good at schoolwork as big sis? I mean, fair, but that doesn’t seem serious enough to kill her off and force her to live an assumed identity. Between this and everything to do with the Kohinata family, this town is looking ever more like Japan’s answer to Derry, Maine.
Also, Otoha appears to be the ghost of the original Hinata, taking the Otoha identity from a picture book that Hotaru drew. I guess it was established that Otoha is actually magic when she cured Takuma’s blindness, but you could be forgiven for forgetting that fact when her normal feats of the arcane are just mysteriously appearing in and disappearing from scenes without preamble or trace. To be honest, the supernatural elements in H2O aren’t really germane or well-used. Otoha cures the blindness, which Takuma didn’t need to have given how quickly it goes away, and then sort of appears for random talks and moral support, acting as Takuma’s extra conscience when his normal one is fairly functional if a hair less bold. It’s unnecessary; this could have been a perfectly mundane drama and still had its full impact. There is one moment, but I’ll get to it.
Eventually, Hinata is stoked into full rebellion against gramps – she leaves her at-home confinement and, at school, stops answering to Hinata and reintroduces herself to everyone as Hotaru. Shockingly, her friends who liked and accepted her… still like and accept her with a slightly different name and willingness to admit what she herself likes. Go figure.
So, this is a pretty wild and impactful sequence of events. What do we do with it?
The same thing we did last time, have a completely random and out of place fanservice episode. Since they already used the beach, this one is a dream world created by Otoha to be her metafictional self-insert fanfiction.
After that, we get an episode that starts low-key with some love confession misunderstandings, but then jerks from the village decide that they don’t like that Hayami is vaguely happy and, insisting she must be plotting an evil revenge, burn her house down. Again. Takuma’s uncle is seemingly unaffected by the “be a jerk” aura of the village, and Hayami is invited to stay over with Takuma for as long as she needs. The uncle being a crazy uncle, he clearly ships them. Meanwhile, while the villagers want to persecute a little girl even more because they’re somehow terrified of her, crazy grandpa for once acts as the voice of reason. An anemic voice of reason, only slightly expressing disapproval of arson, but still.
We also get a plot point where it seems that Takuma’s mother committed suicide, leaving him with deep scars that are why he doesn’t seem to talk about himself. Hayami breaks through to him, leading to a confession and kiss as their ship sails during the town’s festival. Hotaru, for her part, was quite supportive and a good friend to both of them through this. Of course, if you think this show is going to let Hayami be happy rather than stomping on her at every turn, you clearly haven’t gotten the point that the only footsteps she’s going to see looking back at all this are her own and those of the angry mob hounding her to the ends of the earth.
Sure enough, there’s still a crazy grandpa – who was trying to force his granddaughter to seduce Takuma for political reasons, recall – who spies on the lovebirds even as they get their moment. We are allowed at least a few scenes of them being adorable before Grandpa steps in and accuses Hayami’s family of having been the culprits who drove Takuma’s mother to suicide. It’s not just bluster. Uncle confirms the story, telling of how Takuma’s mom was going to be forced to marry a Kohinata, but eloped and had him instead, which the slighted family never forgave and tirelessly went after her for. This hurts both their spirits pretty hard. At the same time, Takuma’s vision seems to be beginning to fade.
Eventually, Takuma hits a breaking point and yells at Hayami in a way that comes off as a violent rejection, driving her to run out into typhoon rains, have a mental breakdown, and get beaten down by the goon squad. She moves on after one drubbing and Takuma finds her to try to accept her and apologize, but because this show has suddenly gone for weird twisted psychological stuff, she goads him into hitting her, and seemingly beating her to death. It turns out pretty quickly that she’s just injured, while whatever insanity juju is going on drove Takuma into a coma.
In Takuma’s coma nightmare he’s caught in a loop of seeing his mom obliterated by the train she stepped in front of, with Otoha telling him he needs to accept everything to heal his eyes and his heart. He wakes up without seeming to have come to any sort of catharsis, but can’t see any more. Except in a bizarre as hell twist it’s revealed that he apparently could never actually see. Never mind all the things he did that he couldn’t have done if he really were disabled, we have evidence to the contrary, like the photo of the beach episode showing his eyes closed, or his notes from class being arbitrary scribbles.
While he’s busy losing all sanity, Grandpa makes a play to run Hayami out of town. And when she does leave, he’s not satisfied, and has the thug adults waylay her on the way out with murderous intent. When the goons can’t pull the trigger, he decides to just shoot her dead personally, only to be stopped at the last second by Takuma. However, this isn’t quite the save it seems as Takuma appears to have regressed fully to a mentality from before his mother died, having mentally filed Hayami as her. Because Oedipus Complex I guess.
Hotaru calls the cops and gramps is arrested for a few little crimes like attempted murder, but the rest of this is more dedicated to our deeply troubled little couple. With Takuma in his regressed state, it’s decided the best thing for him would be to be gentle, so he’ll be moving back to the apartment his mother once lived in. Hayami goes with him as mom-substitute and full-time caretaker, since that at least gives her something in life.
Just as Hayami seems to be making a breakthrough, though, they happen to be near a train crossing. And, wouldn’t you know it, some idiot kid chases his ball onto the tracks, prompting Hayami to lay down her life to save another in an exact recreation of Takuma’s mother’s death.
Otoha appears to Takuma, he snaps back to himself including apparent vision, and Hayami is presumably reduced to a fine red mist. We get a narration from Hayami’s diary about how much she loved Takuma, return to the “footprints in the sand” motif from the episode 1 opening. We get an extended credits with scenes of everyone grown up (more or less, they still seem rather young, just adult now), including Takuma with vision helping his uncle build a windmill, still carrying a torch for poor dead Hayami
Except Otoha appears, declares that it took a lot of effort to have the fairy world let her do this, and produces a resurrected adult Hayami after making Takuma promise to watch over her properly this time. The end!
Excuse me?
Yeah, this was sappy nonsense when Beyond the Boundary did it and it’s no more sensible here. Don’t get me wrong, the part of me that likes happy endings, and the part of me that really liked this show, is happy to see Hayami in a state where presumably she can finally not get dunked on by all the forces in the cosmos. But as weak as the supernatural elements were up to this point, practically nothing, it seems like an extreme cop-out.
Everything else in this show could be explained In a naturalistic fashion. Hirose was blind, presumably as a severe case of hysterical blindness tied to trauma over his feelings of abandonment from his mother. Since he was never magically cured and all that material was a case of unreliably narrator, Otoha was presumably a figment of his imagination. Why did she look like Hotaru’s dead sister and take a name and identity from a story Hotaru wrote as a kid that Takuma presumably never saw? That’s a little weird, but we’re already dealing with some narrative unreliability so we can kind of take that when very little is made of the connection. This comes very much to a head when the last few episodes hit and Takuma mentally degenerates.
And there were ways you could have gotten the happy ending in a world that was still not flagrant magic. The last we see of Hayami the train basically passes in front of her, Takuma screams, the works. But she had time to turn around and look his way before getting hit. Presumably she could have gone with some momentum to the other side with the little rando she meant to save. That would be a twist: the framing leads us to believe that Hayami got turned into roadkill only to check in years later and actually she wasn’t hit. Or maybe she even didn’t quite get out unscathed and is seen minus one leg. The mirror vision of his mom’s suicide (or was it a suicide? The framing implied she probably did something much like Hayami did, and let go of Takuma’s hand for a reason) could still have snapped him back to himself with that understanding. It would have been a very cheeky jerk move from the director or writers, but it would have made sense with the setting and scenario. But the way they talk about her, and the way the reunion goes, it’s clear that she was very dead and is now very not.
Otoha isn’t just real, she can do that? Resurrect the dead? Just fish somebody out of Hades? Or since she mentions the “fairy world”, maybe Hayami got the isekai treatment, as Japanese youths who get hit by large vehicles while saving lives so often do, and is now being sent back having beaten the Demon King. That makes about as much sense as anything!
I’m not a monster. I mean, okay, maybe I am – I’m very mean to my characters sometimes. But I still wanted Hayami to get a good ending as much as the next guy. But doing it this way hurts my head. You could have a tragic or bittersweet ending here, those aren’t always wrong. Or if everything was going to come up roses, at least you could have a better excuse.
So, how to break down H2O: Footprints in the Sand?
On the whole, it feels like the material they had didn’t support 12 episodes. There are at least two episodes that are entirely filler, and of the remaining ten, the plot sometimes seems stretched just a little thin. For a story in general, it’s fine to not fit cleanly into an anime season, but it does make this adaptation kind of awkward, along with how compartmentalized some of the scenarios are. Doing things like the Hinata-Hotaru plotline entirely within the bounds of one episode, without much seeming flow from what came before or into what comes after makes the pacing overall seem more awkward and choppy than it should.
The town is crazy. A lot of the random residents seem horrible. I know sometimes prejudices don’t entirely make sense, but how do things just stay in this awkward middle? Why are grown adults afraid of the vengeance of a destitute schoolgirl? What more is she going to do to them? The hatred and bullying, weirdly, I get. It’s their revenge for years of torment at the hands of her family, even if it is just plain sick. Why did Hotaru have to become Hinata? Why couldn’t you just whip the surviving heir into shape in a public sense? The two were little, little kids it’s not like they’re taking over any time soon so I’m pretty sure any rep Hotaru had as the weaker offering could have been corrected rather than being the doom of the Kagura family and the village.
H2O was at its best in the early arcs, pretty much as we followed the redemption of Hayami Kohinata to the point where she and Hinata/Hotaru accept each other as friends once again in full. Once that happens and the bullying stops, the show feels like it should be almost over, and you could pretty much cut right to the festival episode where Hayami and Takuma get together, end on it, and be logically and emotionally satisfied.
The ending was… a mess. Unreliable narrators can be cool, but there are no clues and nothing in the scenario that even in retrospect hint to Takuma not having actually overcome his blindness. He’s surprisingly capable on his own while he’s faking the ability to see, especially compared to how much he fumbles when he’s blind. The rift between him and Hayami over the whole mom thing is a very mixed bag. We weren’t introduced to any hangups Takuma may have had until pretty much when they’re needed, and while seeing the two of them grapple with a very difficult scenario is entertaining, it feels forced how much Takuma lashes out. His nightmares feel like they’re intrusive sendings, not his actual thoughts. And when they have him hit her, going so far as to seemingly think he might have killed her? I don’t buy it. I felt like we knew Takuma well enough to know that he’d never do that. Hayami’s side I buy one hundred percent, it’s fully in character for her, but some of this stuff is painful for the wrong reasons.
And, of course, we have the weird regression plot and Hayami’s pasting and resurrection, which are just downright confused. This plot could have been handled well either to a fully happy ending, a bittersweet one, or even a more tragic one… but not like this.
On the plus side, I did get rather invested in the characters. I liked Takuma through most of this, even if we’re supposed to believe that’s mostly kind of fake. I liked that he fully stood up for Hayami and didn’t usually fall into the passive protagonist trap. I liked Hinata/Hotaru. I enjoyed how forced her affections were and how you could see the cracks in her identity hinting that she wasn’t really who she was playing at being, either in terms of personality or in terms of label. And I liked that she was able to find her strength, find her self, and ultimately call the cops on her crazy grandpa to end the nightmare. And I really liked Hayami. She’s a gloomy self-hating tsundere, but actually surprisingly cute at times, and her self-loathing and relationship with her place in the village is fascinating if painful stuff.
H2O, like most media based on Visual Novels, is very character-driven, so the fact that I roundly enjoyed the major characters and felt for them is worth a lot. However, it’s not worth everything. On the whole, I’ll give H2O: Footprints in the Sand a B-. For what it is, it has a lot of charm points and core strength for most of its running time, but there are those flaws that drag it down and surely append a minus to whatever grade I would otherwise give it, if not worse. As for recommendations… well, you dear reader are spoiled on all the big last-second twists now, so hopefully you can just enjoy the good parts for what they are. If you’re thinking about showing this to somebody unspoiled then sit back, relax, and wait for some probably pretty good reactions when the bull really hits.