The wayback machine is going to need new tires soon at this rate…

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.  Sometimes – as with Fujita Kazuhiro’s friends in high places – there’s a straightforward explanation.  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.  There are plenty of LNs, too, and it’s not as if the bar could possibly be lowered any further there.

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.  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.  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.  VNs probably haven’t stylistically changed as much as LNs in the past 20 years, but they’ve still changed an awful lot.

I’m not ready to commit myself either way after the first episode of YU-NO.  It was perfectly fine but didn’t do a whole lot to stand out, yet left me modestly intrigued by the end.  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.  The protagonist, the butt-monkey best friend, the sexy older female, the harem, the missing family, the mystery.  Even the small town setting seems almost de rigueur for VNs.

It’s also true that VN adaptations, even good ones, rarely start out in really arresting fashion.  The last one I really liked, I suppose, was Little Busters and that started off kind of slowly too.  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.  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.

None of the characters really stand out much, but the only one to really get the chance here was the protagonist Arima Takuya.  His father is a researcher who’s missing and presumed dead, and he’s living with a woman who seems to be his stepmother.  Takuya is fine – snarkier and more cocky than most of his character class, with an obvious problem with authority and a comfort level around females that’s definitely unusual for said character class.  He might prove annoying but there’s enough solidity to Takuya to imagine he could be likeable enough.  As to the girls, who knows about any of them at this point – they’re all just archetypes for the moment.

The premise is a little grabbier than the characters so far, at least for me.  Obviously Takuya’s father was involved in some alternate worlds stuff, and obviously Takuya is transported to one at the end (though there are no apparent differences apart from the characters’ memories – is this a precursor to the Reading Steiner?).  I have no idea if there’s enough there to sustain a series but YU-NO’s high regard with VN fans has me at least hopeful that this thing has legs.  feel’s production is (that word again) fine – there’s nothing of the obvious wit and distinctive tone they’ve achieved in some of their recent fine run of form, but nothing made my eyes burn either.  All in all, it’s totally impossible to come to any conclusions – so we’ll see if that changes next week.