If you’re interested in Summertime Render and haven’t read or watched it yet, you should probably go before the cut. I know you probably won’t, because you’re here on a spoiler review site to read a spoiler review, but consider this a starting endorsement of the material: I think it’s worthwhile to experience. I think it will still be worthwhile to experience if you do go ahead and spoil yourself here, but I know some people are of different opinions when it comes to how much damage this sort of thing does or doesn’t do to their enjoyment.
For the uninitiated, who are wondering what the hell I’m even talking about, the basic pitch is this: a boy, Shinpei, returns to the island where he grew up to attend the funeral of his adoptive sister/big-time crush, Ushio. As tragic as that may be, once back home Shinpei discovers a much darker plot, and ends up going through several time loop iterations while attempting to solve the crisis, as told in either twenty-five episodes of anime or six big thick volumes of manga.
Now, you might be thinking that this sounds a little like some stories I’ve already reviewed, and in a sense you’d be right. In the hot days of summer it seems like Japan turns into a broken record, what with KagePro (Aug 14-15), Steins;Gate (Jul 28 – Aug 21), the less comparable Endless Eight arc of Haruhi (Aug 17-31) and now Summertime Render (July 22-24… it’s no coincidence this review is running in that window). Summertime Render is very comparable to Steins;Gate and KagePro in a lot of ways, but it does tell its own story with its own way to use the common element of looping time travel. It’s also very comparable in terms of quality, which if you know what I’ve written on Steins;Gate and KagePro should be saying a great deal in its favor.
The overarching theme has to do with an enemy known as the Shadows. First introduced as a local legend called “Shadow Sickness”, where a person who sees their own doppelganger (or Shadow) will soon die, the Shadows prove to be quite real and very dangerous, implicated in the mysterious death of Ushio and responsible for greater evil to come.
Because Summertime Render is, in a fairly large degree, a mystery, especially in its earlier movements, you wouldn’t know that right away. Shinpei wakes up on the ferry to the island, specifically waking up from some kind of nightmare and catapulting into the chest of the woman sitting across from him. If you don’t like that kind of comedy, don’t worry: this is the work’s only boob joke (shortly to be followed by its only plot-relevant panties), it’s actually quite out of character for most of the tone.
In any case, plus one slap across the face, Shinpei arrives. His younger adoptive sister, Mio Kofune, comes to greet him at the pier, but her bike’s breaks fail on the downhill of the ride and send her headfirst into the drink (affording the plot-relevant panty glimpse to complete the “it’s not like this I swear” opening). Odd, but she’s able to be pulled out fairly well, and they attend the funeral in good time
At the funeral, Shinpei has some odd experiences. There’s a mysterious camera-like flash, and his friend Sou lets slip that while the public story is that Ushio drowned saving a little girl (Shiori Koba) who wasn’t holding her own in the sea, she may in fact have been murdered based on some marks on her neck.
From there, the eerieness continues. Shadows, so to speak, seem to be gathering. People are vanishing, including the entire Koba family, and Mio tells that she may have seen Ushio’s shadow before her death. The day after the funeral, Shinpei and Mio decide to go to the local shrine, but when a glimpse of Shiori distracts them out on the grounds, they find the woman from the ferry mortally wounded and are then killed by Mio’s shadow, wielding a revolver. When Shinpei dies, though, this circumstance gets unwound, and we move on to the second loop.
Shinpei awakens from his nightmare, catapulting into boobs. He finds it odd that things seem to be happening like they did in his dream, especially when Mio’s brakes again fail and she’s even wearing the same panties. Most of the events go similarly up to the first night, where a very confused Shinpei decides, off-script, he needs some fresh air. He witnesses a strange event outside the house: Shadow Mio, staring up at the building, being approached by, killing, and incarnating as a Shadow the island’s main police officer, Totsumura. An untimely phone call alerts the Shadows to Shinpei’s presence, and Shadow Mio stabs him to death.
“Wait, wait, wait, that’s not how it happened…” We begin the third loop with Shinpei standing on the docks. After a moment of disorientation, he realizes what’s about to happen and steps in front of the out of control bike, getting knocked into the water himself. Now more aware of the loop factor, he sets up a crank call to get Totsumura out of danger, makes sure he doesn’t get a call, and rigs his phone to record the appearance of Shadow Mio. With hard evidence, Shinpei recruits Mio and Sou, and they do their best to investigate the weirdness.
The three don’t solve a thing and July 24th rolls around, time for the Summer Festival. Here, a few important things happen. As the fireworks begin, Shinpei is alone on the beach only to discover… Ushio.
Of course, this can’t be Ushio – he saw her body at her funeral, she’s stone dead. Must be a shadow, right? Well, unlike the Mio Shadow we’d seen before, Ushio here acts just like Ushio, thinks of herself as Ushio, and doesn’t even seem to realize that she’s supposed to be a dead woman. She just steps back in to her role as Shinpei’s love interest (there’s a clear mutual crush, but also a lot that needs to be aired between the two) and generally a total goober who, while far from stupid, doesn’t seem to be good at thinking things through, listening, or making non-rash choices.
However, at the heart of the festival, it’s time for mayhem. Shadow Mio attacks as Shinpei tries to make his way towards the Something Evil that’s happening. The woman from the ferry (Hizuru Minakata, normally going by her pen name Ryuunosuke Nagumo (by that name, Shinpei’s favorite author). For clarity later, I will refer to her primarily as Hizuru or Nagumo) appears, seeming to know how to fight Shadows, but it looks like it’s too late: most of the islanders have been slaughtered for some evil ritual, with a giant four-armed shadow monster (“Shide”) and a mysterious white-haired girl in red (Haine) appearing and covering the land in devouring darkness. Ushio tries to fight them, unlocking some Shadow powers, but it’s a doomed cause. As all seems lost, Shinpei calls out to Nagumo to kill him, and she takes the shot, trusting as he does in his ability to go back and try again.
Loop four begins with Shinpei and Mio on the way to the funeral, but that’s not all that’s changed.
Before we really dive in here, I might as well take this opportunity to talk about the cast of Summertime Render. This story has a very intricate web of relationships, many of which come into play over the running time of the story, but also has a heavy plot that’s going to take up most of the summary, so if I want to say anything about anybody, I’m going to have to do it as an aside, and might as well get the major players out of the way here, seeing as the end of Loop 3 marks, essentially, the transition from setup into the meat of the story.
So, how about our lead, Shinpei? As the main lead, it would be all too easy to leave him relatively flavorless, but that’s not what Summertime Render does. Shinpei is very smart and thoughtful. He has a way of seeing through problems, thinking objectively or “taking a bird’s eye view” in order to analyze the situation, making him the Holmes in the mystery aspects of Summertime Render. He has an incredible willpower to get through terrible things… but he’s not without his weak spots, particularly when it comes to the people he cares about. Having Mio, Ushio, or his friends in danger can make Shinpei slip up, which helps him to be more human or relatable. He may be the “Holmes” type in that he’s the intelligent one making deductions most of the time, but he’s not as imbalanced or amoral as Sherlock himself. In the web of romantic entanglements that’s all over Summertime Render (the highly important yet still background romance being another element that’s familiar to Steins;Gate and KagePro), Shinpei has caught the interest of both Kofune girls, Mio and Ushio, and himself has feelings for Ushio made complicated by the fact that she’s at least mostly dead.
That brings us to the most critical secondary character in the first three loops, Mio. Mio’s most notable trait is her kindness, and I’d be lying if I said she didn’t spend most of the story largely as a waif in need of protection. She likes Shinpei, and while he may not be romantically interested in her, she’s still very important to him. Sou likes her, and while she may not be interested back (pining for Shinpei as she does) they’re still close. She’s even closer with Sou’s sister, Tokiko, who seemed to be an insider to the whole evil shadow master plan until Shide and Haine backstabbed whatever stake she had there at the end (particularly when it came to Mio, who Tokiko wanted protected). That said, a good deal of weight is given to Mio’s feelings,and it’s clear she has a time grappling both with the Shadow situation and with her elder sister’s death.
Sou is probably the simplest of the characters. Compared to Shinpei, he’s kind of a meathead and not a planner, but it’s very clear that his heart is in the right place, both when it comes to his affection for Mio and when it comes to the bigger picture. He’s strongly principled and more than that willing to stand up and fight, which despite his limited ability (more than Shinpei alone, but still an ordinary teen boy) is pretty handy to have access to. Of course, he also has potential ins with his father and sister, who seem to be wrapped up in the mess.
Putting off Hizuru and her friend, the old hunter Nezu, since they’ll become more relevant going forward, it’s time for the elephant in the room, (Shadow) Ushio. I’ll just be calling her Ushio unless there’s a reason to disambiguate, since the original is dead as of the main timeline. Ushio makes a lot of this show because she’s able to dramatically change the mood with her presence. She’s not a pointlessly positive character – she gets angry, scared, and sad at various times, but there’s something about her effervescent manner and her fool act (whether natural or artificial) that makes everything feel more like it’s going to work out when she’s around. In short, it’s pretty easy to understand why Shinpei is all about this girl. As a Shadow who isn’t in on this whole evil Shadow scheme, she’s also our window into the supernatural elements of the setting, and a good deal of what we come to understand about Shadows comes from Ushio figuring herself out.
Because of that latter part, it’s very good that she’s an extremely watchable character, since a lot of the show is built on her. The fact that she is or at least plays at being the fool also really helps her play off Shinpei, so that when the two of them get a lot of screen time and a lot of shared screen time, they have very clear and powerful chemistry
So, Loop four is a long one. Loop three ended in Episode 5. Loop four will take us all the way to Episode 12
Shinpei starts out headed to Ushio’s funeral, now very conscious of his looping ability, and having noticed what perceptive viewers will have as well, that his spawn point has moved forward. To cut to the chase, this is absolute movement, not relative: every time Shinpei loops, more events become set in stone by the relentless march of the “save point” forward through time, following Shinpei slowly and steadily. This is a pretty ingenious yet simple answer from the writer to the issue where a time-looping hero can usually “retry” almost infinitely, which would under some normal circumstances risk stripping away the drama.
In any case, Shinpei makes his plans. Chief on his priorities list is getting in touch with Hizuru, who seemed to know a good deal of what’s up. He manages to get information for her, while Hizuru herself is followed for a time, stalking Shadows at the funeral – identifying the Koba family as having been taken over and disposing of a Shadow that had taken the form of Ushio and Mio’s father, Alan.
The contact information leads Shinpei to Nezu, the old hunter who was seen briefly before and who Hizuru seems to be working with. He confirms that Shinpei isn’t a Shadow, in the process giving us the down-low on how the two are able to kill the monsters, which otherwise seemed very resilient: the shadow that a Shadow casts is its real body, and the 3D self a projection. Damage the human form all you want, it regenerates. Damage the shadow by harming what it’s cast on, that damage is real. After comparing notes with Nezu and Hizuru, Shinpei joins them on a hunt for Shadows, specifically trying to take down the Koba family’s replacements. The shadow of the family’s daughter, Shiori, admits to having been the one to kill the real Ushio before being apparently taken out.
When Shinpei goes home and tries to cook curry for dinner (something Ushio had always loved to do in her memory), Ushio appears! Shinpei manages to hide her from Mio, and get a bit of a good talk, finding out that Ushio is indeed a Shadow, but also very much herself and largely unaware of her shadowy nature and abilities. In a worrying change to the timeline, Shadow Mio actually enters the house this time around, but rather than her original, her target seems to be Ushio, who she wounds before being taken out. Ushio is able to cover for the injury somewhat (disappearing her hurt arm to avoid bleeding all over the floor). Hizuru and Nezu decide they’ll be separating from Shinpei in the aftermath of this, as they can’t tolerate Shadow Ushio’s presence.
The next day, Shinpei gets a plot trinket from Mio (Ushio’s necklace) while hiding Ushio from her. Ushio and Shinpei meet up with Sou at the beach where Ushio died. There, Ushio is able to unlock her phone and play back a video the original recorded with her Shadow, essentially telling Shinpei to trust that they’re both the same and that Shadow Ushio will be on his side. With this information, Shadow Ushio is able to recover her memories, and even replay them for Shinpei and Sou.
At first, it seems like a simple dive into the death of the original Ushio, but things get extra creepy in the end when Shadow Shiori reacts to the observers in the memory, and marks Shinpei with a dark hand print.
How could that be accomplished? Honestly, that’s one of the less explained details of Summertime Render, but Shadows are (it’s made clear over this arc) deeply tied with “information” – Shadows use a bright flash to “scan” their target and make themselves into a copy, and must consume the original to stabilize their form, through a process that disintegrates the victim to a black stain. Shadows like Ushio are also able to scan, absorb, and later from their memory print inanimate objects; in many ways such an object will be a hollow prop unless the original is erased, and anything produced by a Shadow has a maximum range at which it can exist, but at the same time, the ability to print has its advantages.
Our heroes escape the memory in a hurry, but the dark mark remains as the fourth loop continues.
The main event becomes the investigation of the old ruined clinic (once owned by Sou’s family) and the discovery therein of a secret passage that could only be accessed by a shadow, since the key was hidden within an eerie statue of the shrine’s main god, Hiruko. This leads them down into a network of tunnels and caves that thread beneath the entire island. At the same time, Mezu and Hizuru end up in one stretch of the tunnels and Mio, along with Totsumura, are lured into another.
The paths end up converging in Hiruko’s Grotto (after some nasty encounters with stray Shadows that don’t have doppelganger forms), where the true form of Hiruko – also the true form of Haine, the Mother of Shadows and origin of their kind on the island – is now awaiting feeding time. Since Shadows feed on information, Haine/Hiruko is given a steady diet of a fairly dense source: human bodies – specifically in this case including the real corpse of the original Ushio. In the process, we learn that Ushio, like Haine, can “hack” other Shadows, and that her hacking may even be stronger than Haine’s.
Shadow Ushio manages to be the one to absorb her original’s data, healing her injuries, but this still ends up a dead ending with bitter losses thanks to having to battle Shide. Since the villains have figured out Shinpei is looping, they try to injure and hold him, but he prepared some poison earlier and manages to take it and an agonizing trip back.
This takes Shinpei to Loop 5, which starts during his early conversation with Nezu and Hizuru. Ushio appears with Shinpei, holding his hand, and is able to share her memories of the prior loop with them in order to win their trust and cooperation. They go on to hunt the Koba Shadows again, but the villains are ready for them this time, and Shide attacks, which rather quickly forces Shinpei to call for Ushio to off him and reset the scenario again.
In the void between loops, we get a vision of Hizuru’s past – how, when she was a teen, she befriended Haine (acting as an only slightly abnormal little girl, not an alien entity of malice), but how this came crashing down when she tastes human blood and the Hiruko personality awakens, which ends up with Haine killing Huzuru’s brother, Ryuunosuke. Some echo of him ends up printed onto Hizuru, so she shares her body, to an extent, with a Shadow-like Ryuunosuke who lacks his own physical form, explaining how she can pull superhuman stunts, as he has a Shadow’s reflexes and a slight temporal displacement that manifests as prescience.
Loop 6 begins almost where 5 ended, as the group is about to enter the Koba household. Shinpei calls off the attack, but the villains realize his “save point” is moving forward and come up with a new plan: rather than keeping him alive through their ritual, they just have to kill him until his loop catches up with reality. Disadvantaged in the moment, though, they won’t strike until somewhat later.
Shinpei draws his forces together to ask for their help, taking most of the day to do it, but he has Nezu watching over the scene from a distance, which affords Shide the opportunity to ambush and kill Nezu and take his (real, not range-limited) hunting rifle to snipe and kill Shinpei.
This sends Shinpei back to earlier in the evening for Loop 7, when he was still making dinner, and it even takes him a little help from Ushio to figure out just how he died there.
Realizing that his remaining loops are few if any, Shinpei does his best to draw everything together for a climactic encounter in the night. He gathers his allies at the Gym, much as in the previous route, but of course without the fatal flaw in his defenses. Shide and Haine aren’t stupid though, so they bring extra muscle, expecting that Shinpei doesn’t have enough time left if they kill him again at about the same time.
What follows is a fairly long action sequence, with Tokiko using her pet Stray Shadows (hacked by Ushio so Haine can’t hijack them with impunity) to fight on the same level as their foes and everything working to channel Shide, Haine, and their Shadow army into a “final” confrontation. They trap Shide and Haine by setting the place on fire with gasoline printed by Ushio. This reveals that “Shide” is a human under Shadow armor, and affords Ushio a chance to hack and erase Haine that’s foiled only when a panicking Haine puts out the fire by scanning and erasing the air in the room (which shortly implodes the windows, so nobody suffocates). Still, Haine is out a lot of her best Shadows, Shide is burned and his armor at least temporarily messed up, and the fire seemed to do a number on Haine herself.
In the aftermath, it’s even revealed that there’s an extra prize: Shadow Mio, to this point the most persistent threat among the enemy Shadows, was immobilized outside and Ushio is able to hack her to remove her loyalty to Haine, letting her come over to the good guy side.
From there, the party tries to storm the Clinic, but cleanup is well underway. They save Sou and Tokiko’s jerk dad from the berserk shadow of his (late) wife and get a lot of answers, but the Shadow nurse makes off with Ushio’s body.
We also here get the truth about Shide: his true nature is Shidehiko Hishigata, the founder of the clinic and several greats uncle of the line that still runs it, as well as the progenitor of the shrine priest line. For the latter, it’s been him the whole time: taking Haine as a bride, he found that the children she bore were clones of him, and she used her Shadow powers to scan Shidehiko’s mind and print it on the next generation when there was a need. In this way, he’s been immortal since Haine’s arrival on the island as a beached whale three hundred years in the past.
To reveal things a little early, this also informs Shide’s motivation – Haine no longer has the strength to give birth to a new generation, so the former immortal now has to face the fact that his life ends with the current incarnation. In his opinion, though, it was never about living forever, per say, just long enough to bear witness to Humanity’s ending. Therefore, the solution he’s come to by this point is that if he can’t make it to the end through his psuedo-reincarnation… he can feed Haine back to a power level where she’ll be able to access her timeless home realm, from which Shide can conduct the destruction of reality itself.
After a day of hunting down many of the remaining Shadows in town, Shinpei and Ushio decide to confront Shide in his human guise. However, he proves more wily than Shinpei anticipated, as there’s actually more than one of his current human body. The one Shinpei can see goads him until Ushio jumps out of the small item form she was hiding in to kill him off, at which point #2 appears and stabs her with the Shrine’s sacred spear, seemingly fatally, before forcing Shinpei to loop. Since Ushio’s information was preserved between loops, that means her demise is carried back as well, and we begin Loop 8 in the middle of the Shadow hunt, with Ushio disappearing as she appeared back on Loop 5.
A devastated Shinpei has little time to mourn the second death of his girlfriend, though, as Haine and Shide are all ready to capitalize on the situation. They use the fact that Haine scanned Shinpei in an earlier loop to have her take his form and imitate him and lure all his friends into various lethal ambushes. Shadow Mio is left nailed to the floor for Shinpei to find as she relates the call from “him” that, with Ushio dead, the hacking would come undone. Mio is dragged one way, Hizuru’s crew the other, and while Shinpei, chasing Mio, isn’t able to find out what happened to the other team, he does learn he was too late for Mio, which prompts him to reset with a bullet to the brain and little time, starting Loop 9
Rushing in a panic to fix the situation, Shinpei is still too late to catch everybody. With the help of Shadow Mio going all out he manages to abort the ambush on Mio and Sou. He then rushes to the other site.
However, while Hizuru in the previous loop put out an absolutely legendary fight, outplaying Haine and Shide alike with Ryuunosuke’s prescience and a burning drive to win, this time around the baddies know everything she’s going to try, meaning that she gets slaughtered before Shinpei can arrive to help. She has just enough life left to entrust her brother to Shinpei before expiring.
Haine calls a withdrawal, though, seemingly running scared. She did something similar right at the start of the loop, declining to spawn camp him, and Shinpei thinks it has to do with Ushio’s necklace, which he’s still carrying. If Haine is afraid of that, it must mean that Ushio is only mostly dead.
Based on this information, Shinpei hatches a plan to recover Ushio and save the day. Much of the details are initially unheard but the crux of the matter is that there should be a second Shadow Ushio in this timeline: the one who appears on the beach on the final night is currently in deep water, regenerating her form from her near-death experience after the real Ushio perished. Using the remaining one of Tokiko’s pet shadows, Shinpei (and Shadow Mio, who by virtue of having super-powers is a lot more active than the real thing) gets out to sea without being able to be tracked by that mark Haine left on him that otherwise would reveal his location, since the inside of the brute shadow’s 3D body is both livable and cut off from realspace. They’re able to find the drifting Ushio before Shide does, and with the necklace containing the looping memories united with her, Shadow Ushio is restored. They face Shide briefly, but then Shadow Ushio is let in on the full plan, and accepts everyone moving on to Loop 10 of their own free will.
As the loop begins, the villains are confused. It’s during the time when Shinpei and company were off the radar… or so it seemed, until Shinpei’s mark reappears at the location he started that swim out to Ushio from: already inside Hiruko Cavern, putting Haine’s true form in check with everything they’ve got.
The resulting battle is long and brutal. Two Shide-incarnations are destroyed, and Hiruko is reduced to a fetus-like state. However, a third Shide intervenes and uses what’s left of Hiruko to open the way to her home, attempting to achieve his Ending. Ushio and Shinpei (with Ryuunosuke) follow Shide in, and we get our final confrontation outside time and space. Shide has Hiruko’s core welded to his armor. Shinpei has what’s been allowing him to loop all this time – Hiruko’s eye, lost when she flipped out after killing Ryuunosuke. Ushio seems to also have at one point been part of Hiruko (In a way more profound than other Shadow offspring) and is able to bring into being a little help for their final adventure: Haine, representing the good and human elements that were once within Hiruko.
The fight in the other realm is long and intricate, and I don’t think it behooves me to get into a blow-by-blow: it’s very good, with all the momentum shifts you’d want to see, but the end result is that Shide (empty armor being remoted by the older-generation human, apparently) is defeated and everyone left – Haine, Ryuunosuke, Shinpei, Ushio, and Hiruko’s remains – is spat out of the timeless realm on a certain beach, three hundred years in the past, where a girl approaches a beached whale that isn’t a whale. Hiruko is trying to loop it all over from the beginning, or so it seems, but Ushio realizes what has to be done. Human Haine is shooed away and Ushio uses her hacking to erase the past form of Hiruko, before any Shadows were created on the island.
As this reality fades out, everyone says their goodbyes: Ryuunosuke to the nice Shadow Haine who had been his sister’s friend, who he wished he’d known better, and Shinpei to Ushio, who seems fated to disappear along with the Shadows and the power over time.
This brings us to our final episode in what could either be called Loop 11 or the “Exit” timeline or such. Shinpei arrives back home after years in Tokyo… but it’s not for a funeral this time, and instead is all to share a summer festival with the Kofunes (on threat of being decked by Ushio). Some things are different, like the shrine priest family being all-new characters. Others are the same, like the love polygon between Shinpei, Ushio, Mio, and Sou. Still others seem to have… echoes. Shinpei is able to tell Hizuru something of an interesting story, which she begins to put down as “Summertime Render”. Ryuunosuke is married to the woman who was the mother of the Koba family in the shadow timeline and has two children: Shiori and Haine. And, at the very end, when Ushio and Shinpei are having a meeting on the beach at the fireworks festival, they both get a clear memory of a promise made between Shinpei and Shadow Ushio (to get her ten or even a hundred takoyaki if she wanted), making it clear that the feelings formed in the loops ate still there.
And that is Summertime Render. It’s hard to believe given the length of this bloody summary but I’ve really only scratched the surface of its depth, complexity, and interest. As a mystery, Summertime Render is a very strong one. It has more than enough moving parts to engage the brain, a clear premise, many layers of reveal, and no circumstances that feel cheap or pulled out of nowhere, beyond that’s necessary for a mystery existing in a supernatural genre.
As an action show, which its gets into, the fights are really well done, showing off serious creativity, cool superpowers, clever tactics, and a clear understanding of what writing and choreography makes combat actually interesting to watch. As a thriller or adventure, it does good work with its atmosphere, letting the mystery/action blend really steep together to get good feelings of threat, employing both suspense in that manner and, when necessary, surprise to make a layered emotional experience. The escalation over the whole show, from the early loops to the crescendo of the climax, is also excellent and couldn’t have been easy to prepare with the premise.
As a drama, the characters are really well done. It was only on writing this review that I had to look back and say “You know, Mio really is a waif being rescued all the time, isn’t she?” and the other folks are similarly dimensional and entertaining. Most of them have very clear voices, but they’re still round where they need to be, which is important for character writing, knowing when you need a clear picture and when you need nuance.
As for faults, it is honestly hard for me to find any. I guess if you were very tuned to the creeping dread of the first four loops and looking for a show with more Horror in its genre makeup, the fact that the gears switched more to action-adventure might not be the most pleasing, but that’s me trying to predict a corner case response, it’s not a particularly substantive problem. The animation is gorgeous, the adaptation work is stellar in translating the manga to the anime, the voice work is on point… what am I supposed to complain about?
This is a show that reaches high, and actually manages to get there. Not just touching the greatness it seeks, but grasping it firmly. In its setup it invites comparisons to a lot of great works, and it gets through those comparisons with flying colors. I can only rate Summertime Render and A+ and strongly recommend that readers seek it out to experience if they haven’t already.