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Yuno kono yo no hate1/3/2024 His father is a researcher who’s missing and presumed dead, and he’s living with a woman who seems to be his stepmother. None of the characters really stand out much, but the only one to really get the chance here was the protagonist Arima Takuya. If a series can get through that without excessively annoying me it’s at about level par, and YU-NO pretty much met that modest threshold. Some of that it down to the nature of visuals novels and some to the burden of transitioning them to anime form – there’s just a lot of crap that has to be laid out there in the first episode. The last one I really liked, I suppose, was Little Busters and that started off kind of slowly too. It’s also true that VN adaptations, even good ones, rarely start out in really arresting fashion. Even the small town setting seems almost de rigueur for VNs. The protagonist, the butt-monkey best friend, the sexy older female, the harem, the missing family, the mystery. Honestly, this was the kind of VN adaptation that plays like the part of the medium that’s changed very little – the basic formula is both nostalgic and current. It was perfectly fine but didn’t do a whole lot to stand out, yet left me modestly intrigued by the end. I’m not ready to commit myself either way after the first episode of YU-NO. VNs probably haven’t stylistically changed as much as LNs in the past 20 years, but they’ve still changed an awful lot. My hope, I suppose, is that YU-NO will prove to be sort of a VN version of Boogiepop wa Warawanai – a throwback to a bygone narrative style for anime that respects the audience more than is the current fashion. It so happens this one is about 20 years old – quite respected in that circle, but hardly of mammoth popularity or with an extensive franchise built around it. That brings us in roundabout fashion to Kono Yo no Hate de Koi o Utau Shoujo YU-NO, which is in fact based on a visual novel. There are plenty of LNs, too, and it’s not as if the bar could possibly be lowered any further there. But there’s clearly something bigger going on here, and with so many seemingly worthy manga out there waiting for adaptations, it’s a bit puzzling. Sometimes – as with Fujita Kazuhiro’s friends in high places – there’s a straightforward explanation. I find it interesting to say the least that anime has over the past couple of years become so obsessed with old properties as source material, even as it seems to be ramping down overall production volume.
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