This is it, the show that revels in
everything dark and twisted. From its very premise, Mirai Nikki
promises death, mayhem, and bloodshed and boy does it ever deliver.
This may not be literally the bloodiest show I’ve ever seen, nor the
one with the highest body count of characters with speaking roles
(though it’s at least a solid competitor on both scores), but it
absolutely and without reservation leverages its gore and brutality
to create a cohesive and uncompromising image of itself and its
world.
Normally, I don’t tend to gravitate
towards shows that are this brutal, but that’s not so much out of
having a problem with dark stuff as it is having a problem with
darkness for the sake of darkness, which is a trap far too many media
products fall into. You can go as miserable as you want, as long as
there’s some sort of reason for it… and Mirai Nikki, at least, has
plenty of reason.
A basic summary for those of you out
there who may not be familiar with Mirai Nikki. Yukiteru Amano
receives a gift from his imaginary friend: Deus ex Machina, the God
of Time and Space (just roll with it). The diary he was keeping on
his cell phone now has new entries, ones that record the future
rather than the past. After the shock of this being real (along with
the fact that a literal god just decided that his imagination was a
comfy place to set up shop) he learns some of the rules of the diary,
like how it reports almost everything that goes around Yuki and
updates if his actions change the future. He also learns in the most
desperate ways that coming into possession of the titular Future
Diary has enrolled him in a savage “survival game”. He and
eleven(ish) other diary-armed individuals have to kill each other,
and the last one standing gets to inherit Deus’s mantle and become
god. Also, the diaries are the future of the person who holds them,
so if your diary breaks, you die.
On the bright side, by the time this
all comes out at the end of the first episode, Yuki has already
eliminated another diary-user (his serial-killer school teacher, in
self defense, with a dart through the diary). On the less bright
side, while the rest of the users have their identities initially
concealed (referred to with ordinal numbers; Yuki, for insance, is
First, while the deceased was Third), Yuki’s initial win sees him
revealed and, by that act, a target painted right on him. On the
crazy side, he has help – his classmate and fellow diary user Yuno
Gasai. Yuno Gasai is a sweet girl who absolutely loves Yuki when
she’s not busy being an ax-murdering stalker who will do absolutely
anything to have Yuki. Yeah, Yuno may not be the first Yandere or
even the most stereotypical, but she is the supreme example. If you
look up Yandere in the dictionary… you probably won’t find
anything, but if you did you could bet it would be accompanied by her
mug shot. She’s got an absolute obsession, a great talent for
killing, an eagerness to employ that talent on anything that would
threaten her relationship with Yuki, a diary that reports everything
about him in 10-minute intervals, and even a few literal skeletons in
the closet.
The craziest thing is that, by the end
of the show, you’re really rooting for her.
Most of the arcs of the show represent a clash between Yuki and his allies (mostly Yuno) and one of the other diary-users, interspersed with all the drama of trying to manage Yuno herself. As the players in the Survival Game dwindle in numbers, things naturally get more intense. The show has a good sense of how to escalate, rather than stagnating. The early battles against Sixth, Twelfth, Fifth, and Minene Uryuu (Ninth, who manages to get out of her first battle with our leads down an eye rather than her life) are intense contests of wit and ability, and when you’re watching them it’s hard to imagine how they could be topped without things getting silly. But when the show steps up its game, the tone and emotions support it. The early struggles are mostly framed as personal struggles, cat-and-mouse games between combatants who can see and manipulate the future, but with different mechanisms and specialties. Even when the action gets big, with Minene planting bombs all over Yuki and Yuno’s school or Sixth commanding an entire cult of devoted worshipers, the way the show is focused, in writing, the dialogue, the atmosphere, and even the cinematography, supports that the conflict is one of individuals, quietly but deliberately limiting the scope that the audience feels so that there’s room to grow into the mid game and late game opponents.
The cat-and-mouse games continue or
even increase into the mid game, but the feeling of the scope is
different. When we actually come into conflict with former ally
Fourth, Tenth, or the pair of Sevenths the world is made to feel
broader and the impact of the characters and their struggles more
significant. Former conflicts were smartly kept in fairly confined
scenarios, both in place and in time. The clash with Minene all took
place in school, the battle against Sixth and Twelfth all in Sixth’s
cult compound, and the clash with Fifth in Yuki’s house. With
Fourth, the final battle takes place in a hospital, but Yuki and Yuno
are fugitives. The Sevenths, Eighth, and Eleventh clash with Yuki
and Yuno multiple times, over an assortment of battlegrounds. The
scale of the Survival Game increases from a contest of persons to a
battle raging across the city.
The endgame of Mirai Nikki provides
another jump. Even with godhood on the table for the winner from the
very start of the game, we don’t really feel that this is a matter of
universes until the end… but when it hits, it really hits. The
status quo in the city changed from “normal” to “war zone”
with the conflict against the latter half of the diary wielders.
With only the last few turns left in the game, the situation becomes
downright apocalyptic, with no illusion of normalcy – the likes of
which persisted even in a damage state through the darker parts of
the show – protecting anything or anyone anymore. After Eighth,
the last other contestant, falls, Yuki and Yuno are essentially alone
in a universe that’s coming apart at the seams. Then the final arc
hits, and with it even more terrible perspective.
Before I really get into what happens
there, I’d broadly like to talk about some of the characters. Most
of the people we meet and interact with over the course of the show
act, essentially, as arc antagonists. They range from mostly flat
(Third, Twelfth, and Fifth come to mind) to very well detailed and
developed (The Sevenths and Fourth at the very least) but they have
their time in the spotlight and, since that’s the nature of the
Survival Game, die when we reach the end of that. I could talk about
most of these characters at length, since with the possible exception
of Third they all have either some interesting notes from a
craft-of-writing perspective or an engaging character, but in the
interests of this review being less than an eternity long, I’ll be
keeping most of them out of it. They leave their marks and some even
do manage to not be introduced and eliminated in one go, but their
primary purpose remains to be obstacles for Yuki and Yuno to
overcome.
Minene Uryuu, Ninth, is different.
She’s a bomb-happy hardened terrorist who initially attacks the
school in order to draw out the revealed Yuki and kill him. She gets
a dart to her eye for her trouble but manages to pull an escape
thanks to her diary being especially focused on showing her exit
routes. From there, she goes through a bizarre journey of (still
bloody-handed) redemption, starting with her getting picked up, in
one of the show’s more brilliant moves, by Twelfth.
I call what happens here a brilliant
move because it’s one of the major points in the show that can have
some very deep, different reads to it. You see, Twelfth is a man
obsessed with the idea of being a ‘hero of justice’ (all the way down
to getting himself a silly costume and putting it on in a
‘transformation sequence’) and the specialty of his diary is to tell
him what acts of justice he is destined to perform. One would think
that he (a self-proclaimed hero) and Minene (a terrorist) would be
natural enemies, and at first that’s what it looks like is going on.
True, Twelfth doesn’t kill her immediately, but he’s also a total
loon so maybe he wouldn’t. What ends up happening though is that
after holding her for some time, dragging her along on his crusade
against the manipulative cult-leader Sixth, and removing her ruined
eye in what was probably necessary medical attention even if not good
medical attention, he leaves her in a state where she can easily
escape as he goes off to to his ultimately fatal showdown with Yuno
Gasai. In effect, though Twelfth’s actions towards Minene didn’t
look friendly at first, he ended up nursing her back to health and
then unleashing her on the world again… but after she escapes, she
ultimately ends up singing a slightly different tune.
Here’s a question I want to ask, that I
feel the setup of Mirai Nikki invites, and gets a few points for
inviting: how much of Minene’s own turnaround from unrepentant
criminal to reluctant ‘hero’ did Twelfth’s diary predict? Did he
take care of her in his own weird way because he wanted to be a
basically good person or because he knew that, even if he was marked
with a Dead End, Minene would carry on his principles of justice
whether that was what she meant to do or not? Normally, when it
comes to the conflict of fate against free will, Mirai Nikki comes
down hard on the side of free will being an actual thing; the future
can be changed (and is changed fairly constantly, even if usually by
the direct or indirect actions of Diary users), and not even Deus ex
Machina himself seems capable of really predicting what mortals will
do when given something resembling a choice, since while he would bet
on Yuki he doesn’t know who the winner of the Survival Game will
actually be. But in the case of Twelfth and Minene, there’s a
curious question of scope. How much of the broad strokes of the
future was predicted, and how much was Minene’s own choice? Or is it
both, her choice but influenced by actions predicated on future
knowledge?
I haven’t totally checked, but it’s
possible that Twelfth is the Diary user with the least screen time
(if not, it’s Third), but while he dies fairly quickly in a conflict
that isn’t even centered on him, his actions end up having a huge
ripple effect through the story of Mirai Nikki, through his
interactions with Minene.
As for Minene herself, as I mentioned
she does move forward and upward. Much like this show gets you to
root for the ax-murdering stalker, it does a good job of getting you
to root for the bomb-happy terrorist too. Part of that comes when
her next appearance after escaping Twelfth is to, in little more than
a Cameo, drag an unconscious Yuki and Yuno out of a house filled with
poison gas, saving their lives though they’re not exactly aware of
who did it or why.
From there, Minene may remain in the Survival Game for a long time, but there’s a degree to which her purpose shifts, as she no longer expresses a strong interest in winning the game and taking Deus ex Machina’s place. She makes few if any attempts to kill other Diary users, and throws in her lot against the more dangerous ones. She even gets a romance arc, of a sort, as a rookie cop falls head over heels for her and for her part, well, she turns into a little bit of a tsundere because she’s not entirely prepared for that scenario, and a surprising amount of screen time actually goes to building her up as a person with interests of her own outside the Survival game, making her someone who you can still see as the dangerous Minene we’ve known but can also find personable, even likable.
Eventually, during the final battle
against Eleventh (and, essentially, the end of the mid game section
I’ve talked about) Minene comes into lethal conflict with Yuki, but
by that time she’s become Deus ex Machina’s ace in the hole and,
appearances or not, cheats death to come back for the climax of the
show…
Then there are Yuki’s school friends.
Mostly met in and used through the midgame section, they are a set of
four characters who, despite being relative normals, end up working
together to help Yuki (and not so much Yuno) as he struggles to
survive the oncoming danger. Kousaka is one of the earlier
introduced of these characters, being a classmate from the school
they attended that was closed for reasons of being bombed by Minene.
He started out as a bully, but gains respect for Yuki and… yeah,
that’s about it for his role in the story. He has something of an
interesting journey himself, learning humility and also providing a
family property as a later battlefield, but the other school friends
are more interesting.
Hinata (with Mao as a clingy add-on to
just about everything she does) is the first person who shows Yuki
some genuine kindness and actually tries to befriend him, with
neither of them aware that the other is involved in the Survival
Game. Yuki by being First, of course, and Hinata as the daughter of
Tenth, acting in his stead. Hinata clashes with Yuki, Yuno, and Aru
Akise (the last ‘friend’ character I want to address) in a
particularly brutal sequence, at the end of which Yuki earns her
friendship all over again by mediating the final moments of the clash
so no one has to die, even successfully calling off Yuno from an
attempt to murder Hinata (What did you expect when a girl makes
friends with Yuki?), and she proves to have a good and level head on
her shoulders – something that’s in fairly short supply otherwise.
Lastly, we have Aru Akise. Akise is
first introduced as a boy detective, and he’s on the cast of Yuno
Gasai with a very definite… interest in Yuki. It’s eventually said
outright that Akise loves Yuki himself, but at least in the early
parts of the story his emotions don’t come off as exactly healthy.
Though it decays over time, there’s a sense of menace from Akise so
that when he first implicates Yuno the audience might prefer the
devil they know. Again, as the show progresses, Akise is shown in a
steadily better light; his dogged investigation is not without reason
and does bear fruit, his emotive scenes seem less weirdly stilted,
and his biggest opponent – Yuno – has some really off-her-rocker
moments (most notably, when feeling cornered by Akise’s
investigation, kidnapping Yuki and holding him against his will).
There’s a good reason for all of this;
It turns out, approaching the endgame, that Akise was never a natural
human. Instead, he was a plant by Deus Ex Machina. This comes out
when Deus moves to deconstruct Akise and reclaim the power invested
in him, and involves the show’s one good discussion (that is, with
direct words rather than implied truths) about free will: Akise
protests that he’s become a real boy, so to speak, and Deus counters
that everything he did he was created preprogrammed to do. Loving
Yuki doesn’t save him (that was apparently part of the plan)… but
gaining a future diary of his own from Eighth’s apprentice diary
system? That surprises Deus, and by surprising him validates that it
wasn’t part of the plan. Akise wins the debate and with it his life,
along with the possibility that his other actions might have elements
of free will as well. He is who he is as a person, no matter how he
was brought into being. It’s interesting stuff, and the show knows
how much to come out and say and how much to leave to the audience to
figure out.
How about the main characters, Yuki and
Yuno? I’ll address Yuki first and I’ll say that I understand why he
gets a lot of hate as a protagonist. He has the power to manipulate
the future, but he spends most of his time terrified out of his mind,
so he comes off as something of a wimp. However… I can’t really
blame him. Yuki is, basically, a normal kid. Unlike the other diary
holders (for the most part) he isn’t hardened or mentally prepared
for a kill-or-be-killed existence, and realistically it’s not easy to
get there. Not to mention, the only thing really consistently
offering him salvation from the horrors of the Survival Game is Yuno,
who is plenty terrifying on her own.
Plus, unlike other wimpy anime
protagonists, Yuki does actually step up to do what he has to do.
Even in the early parts of the story Third and Sixth die by his hand,
and he doesn’t fail to kill Minene for a lack of trying. He avoids
conflict when he thinks he can get away with avoiding conflict,
because he’s a decent person and not a bloodthirsty psychopath; when
conflict comes to him he typically does rise to meet it, even if he’s
scared the whole time.
Yuki has two major concerns for most of
the show: how to address the Survival Game, and how to address Yuno.
The Survival Game offers a huge prize, but does require murder to get
there, which isn’t something Yuki is initially comfortable with; he’d
rather stalemate the game and live out a normal life if that’s an
option. On the Yuno front she’s attractive and attentive, smart,
charming, and the person who saves his life more often than not…
but she’s of course also a repeat killer and dangerously unstable, so
at first Yuki is more afraid of her than anything else… it just
happens that working with her is less dangerous than trying to avoid
her. With regards to Yuno, Yuiki’s opinion of her seems to shift
positive over time. Call it Stockholm syndrome (or the suspension
bridge effect) if you want, but it’s certainly there despite setbacks
like finding skeletons of murder victims in her house. There’s a
brilliant episode where Yuno is on her best behavior (and having her
way going on a date with Yuki) and he asks himself, repeatedly, why
it is, again, that he can’t fall in love with her only to flash back
to the morbid discovery. It’s telling that, despite the utterly
gruesome truth, he needs to remind himself of it even by that point.
By the end of the show, no amount of murder and kidnapping can
outweigh the affection Yuki feels for Yuno, and the two of them act
fully as a couple.
As far as the Survival Game goes, there
comes a point where Yuki makes a turn… and when he does, I’m not
sure whether it’s more fun to see him going full evil mastermind, or
nauseating to see a basically nice person brought around to such a
level. You see, he comes to the conclusion (thanks, Yuno) that as
God of Time and Space, he could simply undo the deaths of anyone
killed unjustly in the game. So, working on that principle, Yuki
takes the point of view that any amount of killing is justified
and… yeah, he makes a surprisingly effective villain protagonist,
using his diary and plenty of guns to go after his marks, no matter
who gets in the way. It’s weirdly cathartic for all those moments
you wanted to shout at Yuki to grow a pair and take the Survival Game
seriously and at the same time chilling.
Last but certainly not least, when it
comes to discussing characters, is Yuno Gasai. In all honesty, Mirai
Nikki wouldn’t work without the time and focus dedicated to Yuno. In
a lot of ways, the show is really about her, and Yuki (the technical
main character) is the lens through which we discover her character.
As for what that is, I said before that
Yuno was probably the most famous and influential Yandere character,
even though she’s not the most stereotypical. So what are the
secrets to how much interest she continues to hold? Honestly, I think
it’s down to the fact that she works on a lot of levels, and we see
her in a lot of different ways over the course of the show. There’s
the eager but still proper school girlfriend Yuno, which is the face
she prefers to show the world and tries to show Yuki. I’d say the
mask slips, but there’s actually not an indication that it’s a ‘mask’
(that is, something fake rather than earnest; probably the biggest
delta between Yuno and the raw stereotype of a Yandere) so much as
the tip of the Yuno iceberg. The next most common state that’s seen
out of her is probably screaming fury; she’s clearly capable of
incredible and brutal violence, especially if she’s ticked off.
These are the two farthest poles, but that’s not all there is to her;
rather than having a switch that flips, she has a continuum of
bloodlust that leaves her a consistent character. She has her
earnest sweet moments, and her terrifying moments… and her sweet
moments that are less than earnest and actually terrifying.
Honestly, her berserk moments are
mostly justified, coming out at situations where she’s facing
immediate provocation; it’s her not-quite-sweet moments that are
actually scary; times like when she breaks into Yuki’s house… to
welcome his mom home properly, but prepared to brutally murder her if
she doesn’t approve of their relationship. Or when she’s talking
sweetly to Yuki and tending to his every need, which she needs to do
because she’s tied him to a chair and he’s mentally and physically
abused enough that he’s not even speaking. Or when she’s gunning
down civilians at the mall with just the cutest little smile on her
face, because she’s doing it for Yuki with his love and attention.
From the start, we want to know more
about who Yuno actually is because she has a bizarre persona (what
with her absolute devotion to Yuki, as perhaps best expressed by the
fairly famous ‘yandere face’ she makes at the end of episode 1, an
image that communicates both how powerful and how unhealthy her
feelings would seem to be). We see her tactical acumen as well, but
the literal skeletons in the closet (well, back room) come out, and
now we’re left to wonder – who do those bones belong to, did Yuno
actually kill them, and more importantly, if she did, why?
Those answers are slow coming, but we
can develop some suspicions early. Mirai Nikki is clever enough to
only show us as much of Yuno’s inner workings as we need to see. For
instance, we get early (compared to the game over all, at least) that
two of the three bodies are her parents, who apparently tortured her
by locking her in a cage and on whom she turned the tables. She
doesn’t even seem like she really meant to kill them, just to extract
an apology, but starvation’s a tricky thing. All along the line,
until the very end, the show wants you to question how far you should
trust Yuno, just like Yukiteru has to find an answer to the same
question. Is she a reliable narrator? Probably not. Does she
really have Yukki’s best interests in mind? Maybe. Is she even the
‘real’ Yuno Gasai? Now that’s a tricky question.
Over time, you feel like you get to
know Yuno. It might not be a pleasant knowledge, but there is a
palpable sense that whatever the truth is, she does the things she
does for a consistent reason, because her character has been painted
in a way that supports that.
Yuki goes a step farther, and
ultimately fully embraces Yuno. Which brings us to the discussion of
the endgame.
What I consider the endgame begins when
Deus ex Machina starts to die – ahead of schedule, thanks to
prepping Minene – and the world begins to go to hell. It turns out
that the whole Survival Game for a successor wasn’t just Deus having
a laugh, but more of a resolute and unyielding need. Along the way
to this point, we’ll have encountered another character: Murmur, Deus
ex Machina’s imp-like servitor. Murmur initially provides the show’s
comic relief, showing up rarely to say something silly, and in the
comedic segments at the end of each episode. However, from the
battle with Fourth onward, there are some hints that Murmur is more
than just a goofy mascot and less conspicuous pair of hands for Deus.
Murmur steps up at this point, taking the failing Deus out of the
picture to preserve the world from annihilation until the proper
time, but we’re still left in a desolate, ruined city rather than the
environment we’d known. It’s downright post-apocalyptic. At this
point, there are three proper diary-users alive: Yuki, Yuno, and
Eighth (whose diary has the ability to generate “apprentice”
diaries, the reason I have to specify the twelve holders as being
‘proper’).
At this juncture, Aru Akise makes his
last play. Believing he has proof positive that Yuno is the lying
baddie here, he and Yuki’s other friends work to protect Eighth,
hoping that some sort of permanent truce can be managed. Yuki, at a
critical moment of truth, people he cares about standing between him
and a goal he didn’t desire in the first place, has to choose between
trusting his friends and trusting Yuno. He chooses Yuno, and in a
gut-wrenching scene guns his friends down (with the exception of
Akise, who was locked in a life-or-death struggle with Yuno that she
barely managed to turn the tables on him regarding). Akise spends
his last breath attempting to warn Yuki about what he found regarding
Yuno, but in the moment the information falls on deaf ears.
It serves, however, as the gateway to
further craziness. After a time simply trying to live together,
having learned that one with Deus’s power can’t really bring back the
dead, Yuki gives in and gives Yuno her happy end… only to be
confronted with the show’s biggest twist.
Yuno had already won the Survival Game.
This is her second time around.
This is, in my mind, a really great
twist, and it deserves to be analyzed as such. It’s not something
that would be easy to guess, but all the pieces are there: the show
presents evidence, mostly through Aru Akise, that Yuno might be an
impostor, and not who she says she is, since the bodies discovered in
her house match the entire Gasai family. On the other hand, we see
her do things that only the real Yuno could do, most notably killing
Eleventh in a sealed vault that couldn’t be opened without the
biometrics of one of a small number of people, including the real
Yuno Gasai. On the other side, there’s the matter of Murmur; if
Murmur isn’t the loyal servant of Deus ex Machina, as Deus himself
believed, than what is Murmur’s game? The little imp doesn’t seem to
be motivated by self-interest, which implies another player in the
game. And while the subject of actual time travel has never been
directly addressed until this point in Mirai Nikki, the setting as we
know it is absolutely established as one where the twist could
happen, and with the twist everything falls into place as far as what
the viewer can understand.
Yuno already fought and won once
legitimately. We see that, at the end, she cheated her way out of a
suicide pact with Yuki, not taking the pills that would have done her
in, believing that she could simply resurrect him once she came into
possession of Deus’s power. Having been mistaken in that assumption,
what’s left for Yuno Gasai to do? By this point we know that Yuki is
the only thing that really matters to her; we’ve had nearly twenty
episodes pretty much establishing her love/desire/yandere-ness as
something akin to natural law, so it makes sense that Yuno wouldn’t
rest in a universe without Yukiteru Amano.
It turns out that what she could do is
travel through time. However, the act of time travel basically
creates a new world (the Second World, in which the show up to this
point has taken place). Yuno kills her past self and her version of
Murmur binds and replaces the Second Murmur. With most of her
godlike powers and unfair foreknowledge locked away to prevent the
Second World’s Deus ex Machina from noticing the swap, Yuno gets to
live out her romance with Yuki all over again. Her master plan, if
you can call it that, is to answer reaching the point where there’s
no longer a way for them to move forward together by doing it again.
And again. And again. She’ll gladly go through the Survival Game
and all its horrors time and again in order to, in a twisted sense,
stay with Yuki.
The thought does occur to me,
summarizing the events now, that you could probably find a small plot
hole: with Yuno possessing the full powers of a Deus ex Machina and
her Murmur servant in possession of the core of Second World Deus,
I’m not sure it’s explained that or why she couldn’t stabilize that
world and end the Survival Game rather than going on for a third…
but not only did this not occur to me until well after the fact, but
Yuno is clearly not in the best mental state when she makes the
choice to head back in time again and start over in the Third World,
considering she messes up the time travel and arrives years early.
This is also when Minene returns, in
possession of the power Deus decided to grant her as insurance
against Yuno and Murmur, serving as Yuki’s ticket to the third world
and some valuable fire support against Yuno and her Murmur.
The off-schedule arrival of Yuno,
Murmur, Minene, and Yukiteru also has a huge impact on the future of
the Third World. This, in my mind, is also one of the show’s best
sequences. Many of the diary holders were tragic figures, or at
least had some implicit tragedy involved in making them as awful as
they were. And in one night, for the most part not even
intentionally intervening, we see brief cuts to how time is going to
be pushed off track. Sixth’s parents avoid a fatal car ride when it
was their absence that turned the cult she was part of into something
monstrous. Twelfth escapes arrest himself thanks to distracted
police, and left to his own devices manages to apprehend the serial
killer Third three years before the Survival Game finally brought him
to his end in the First and Second worlds. Hinata and her father
Tenth have an encounter that seems poised to them becoming closer.
And even Yuno seems to be set on course for a brighter future, her
father realizing the abuse her mentally ill mother was putting her
through before lives were put on the line.
None of this, however, is playing out
according to Original Yuno’s scheme. It’s actually kind of amazing;
she has all the power in the world, but her emotional stakes leave
her at the end of her rope. I’m not gonna lie, though, this climax
gets a little weird. There’s good stuff in it – Yuno and Yuki both
admit that their love is unhealthy, and founded in circumstance; Yuno
would have fallen for anyone who showed her kindness and Yuki for
anyone who offered him protection. At the same time, it’s
well-debated whether those facts are actually meaningful, and Yuki
(and the show) ultimately come down on the side of believing that
love is love, however it was created. All the while we have some
super-powered fighting between Murmur and Minene that… could be
better, but could be a lot worse.
To an extent, the crux of the issue
becomes a bizarre sequence where, to free him and let him be happy,
Yuno seals Yuki into an illusion world where everything is fairly
perfect for him except for the fact that Yuno utterly doesn’t exist.
He rejects the illusion and breaks free and we get the good debate,
but it’s still a strange choice to focus on that sort of thing.
The ending is similarly… not wrong,
but odd. Embraced by Yuki but trapped between a rock and a hard
place when it comes to the whole ‘god of time and space’ thing, Yuno
kills herself. Yuno’s Murmur scoops up her core and declares that
this isn’t over, only to get zapped into a trap itself while the
proper Second World Murmur declares Yuki the winner of the Survival
Game and drags him back to the second world kicking and screaming so
that it can be saved from total existential collapse (as presumably
had already claimed the First). In some ways, there’s no question
that everything is wrapped up, and the story brooks pretty much no
continuation, but the handling of Yuno’s death and Murmur’s existence
seems to be setting up for a sequel all the same. To an extent after
the end we cut to Yuki, who has been brooding at the center of
creation for untold eons, unwilling to properly forge a universe that
won’t have Yuno in it, when suddenly his diary emits the familiar
‘future has changed’ noise and declares that Yuno has come to visit.
We hear her voice call for Yuki in the exact tone that tells us the
psycho that we and Yuki came to love over the length of the show is
back and… that’s where it ends. There’s one more little Murmur
post-script that if anything makes the situation a little more
confusing, but that is seriously where we leave off.
It’s a good ending that gives us both
what we want and need as an audience, but if this makes any sense
it’s also the worst kind of crazy. In a lot of ways it feels like
the opposite of the Yuno twist. Instead of being perfectly set up
and everything falling into place, answering the viewer’s nagging
questions, it raises more questions than it answers even if they
ultimately don’t matter.
That’s what the OVA Mirai Nikki Redial
is for.
When I was first being introduced to
Mirai Nikki, I was warned of two things. The first was to avoid the
dub like the plague (I prefer subtitles anyway), and the second was
to make sure to watch Redial, because it was ‘basically the true
final episode’. I understand where that sentiment was coming from,
but I’m not sure I quite agree. Redial does help, and it acts as a
good capstone, but I think if it didn’t exist I would have been able
to stop with the end of Mirai Nikki proper just fine. I’d say it’s
probably more essential if you aren’t a fan of trippy sci-fi/fantasy,
because it brings the ending much more into a human perspective, even
if it still has some out-of-body elements.
Redial is basically two parts: the
first is checking up with the Third World at the time the Survival
Game would have started. Deus ex Machina has discarded the idea of
the game (and Eleventh’s continued pestering for an alternative) and
seems to have worked out managing his energy so the universe will be
able to survive even if its god still perishes (which he isn’t quite
as ready to do). The check-in is largely fluff, which after the grim
darkness of the Second World timeline of Mirai Nikki is very welcome
and cathartic, getting to see these people interact without the
horrors that the time-traveling intervention spared them or the
murderous burden of the Survival Game, along with outliers like
Minene (Second world Minene) having formed a happy relationship with
the rookie cop who fell for her and died in the Second World as they
work to catch and presumably rehabilitate her Third World self. I
think we get at least a glimpse of everyone, except maybe Yuki whose
status in the Third World isn’t addressed very well, other than that
he clearly never meets Yuno.
The second part is Yuno’s story. Third
World Yuno is the real focal character of Redial, and though she’s a
much happier young lady, with actual friends, she can’t help but feel
like something is off, as some of the thoughts and feelings of the
First Yuno seem to be bleeding over into her: for instance, Third
Yuno keeps a diary on her cell phone in ten-minute intervals, just
like First Yuno, but where First Yuno’s diary recorded Yukiteru
Amano’s actions and status, Third Yuno’s records… nothing at all.
These sort of things eventually lead us to an otherworldy sequence
where Third Yuno enters the Akashic Records, Deus ex Machina’s
domain, in search of a something that seems to be drawing her. She
faces off against both Aru Akise and Second Minene who try to stop
her progress, but eventually reaches where the First World’s Murmur
is imprisoned. From Murmur, Third Yuno receives First Yuno’s
thoughts and memories, effectively fusing the two into one, and from
Deus ex Machina she receives leave to go to Yuki, leading us to the
B-side of Mirai Nikki’s final regular scene. Why eons passed for
Yuki, I don’t know.
I’ll give Redial this: at least it’s a
satisfying answer. All too often when something mysterious like
Yuno’s arrival in the ending of Mirai Nikki is actually addressed
with answers, the answers aren’t good. You end up wishing, in those
circumstances, that the exact mechanism for getting from point A to
point B had remained a mystery. With Redial, there’s none of that;
the answers don’t quite line up (at least not with the Murmur scene
at the end of Mirai Nikki), but they are logically and emotionally
satisfying. Redial does, at least, give you what you wanted to see
out of a single-episode continuation of Mirai Nikki, resolving the
dangling threads in the Third World and getting us to our bizarre
happy ending.
On the whole, I give Mirai Nikki a high
A. It isn’t perfect, but it is damn good and other than the fact you
have to be in the mood for the bitter taste of blood and suffering I
can’t find too many points to really complain about. Redial is still
a flat A, but a little less enthusiastic since it’s largely fluff and
not exactly necessary… but for an OVA filling in the spot it fills,
it does it just right. If you’re in the mood for some bloody,
twisted, psychological death games with brutal action and high
concept mixed in, I’d seriously give Mirai Nikki a watch.