Re-main, Re-vengers, Re-make… Review? I guess so. This one was a double episode, in fact, which I didn’t realize until I started the video a half-hour before my bedtime but oh, well. If it hadn’t held my attention I likely would have bailed and come back to it tomorrow (today by the time this is posted, probably). But it did – quite successfully, in fact. There were a couple times when the forehead hit the desk but on the whole this was a very involving start – a story about people doing relatively normal things and worrying about life.
Now obviously, I have a reflexive fear of commitment with any anime based on a light novel. I try and least one and often a few every season – at this stage they’re so dominant in anime that it’s impossible to totally avoid them. And while over the years there have been a literal handful I’ve ended up really liking (as in, five or less) the vast majority don’t click. And worse, it’s not that uncommon for me to quite like the first couple of episodes before the material’s genetics seem to take over and boom, that’s that. So yeah – lots of scar tissue here.
That said, if anything is different this time it’s that author of the source material – also the one in charge of adapting it – is Kio Nachi, whose main gig is as a scenario creator for visual novels. That brings its own set of yellow flags but at least they’re different ones. There’s also the fact that Bokutachi no Remake comes from feel., a studio that’s not only done some excellent and quirky work over the past few years, but one whose sensibility often seems to overlap with mine. I can’t possibly be more than cautiously optimistic after one (well, two) episode(s), but I am that – this was quite a good beginning.
One thing that’s rather obvious is that there’s a lot of practical overlap with ReLIFE – which for the record predates Bokutachi no Remake by four years. That is what it is – you’ve got a “Re” title, a premise about a guy in his late 20’s whose career and personal life have stalled who ends up jumping back a decade into his teenaged life – hell, even Sawashiro Miyuki playing a teacher in the anime. The details are going to be quite different I’m sure – we don’t yet know why what happened to the protagonist here happened or even if it really did, for example. But there’s no sense ignoring something that’s pretty hard to miss.
In the end that doesn’t bother me so much as long as Remake doesn’t end up abjectly copying ReLIFE, which I doubt it will. the protagonist, Hashiba Kyouya (Itou Masahiro), is rather likably average in many ways. He chose economics over art college (even though he was thrilled to be accepted), tried a career-change to get into game design, his real dream, and failed through no fault of his own. He even wound up getting a second bite of the apple (like, not magical realism but normally), but that too failed through no fault of his. Eventually he goes to sleep and wakes up 18 again, only this time having accepted the art school admission and (seemingly too good to be true) getting to walk the road less traveled to see if it will make all the difference.
I like a lot of this depiction of the early days of college. The bonding with the others in the share house, the combination of exhaustion and exhilaration, everyone trying to figure out who they are with no one now telling them every five minutes. Kyouya is interesting because his superpower is basically competence and responsibility, seemingly. He works hard and does more than he’s asked to, and he’s quite good at many different things. So far that hasn’t gotten him anywhere in life, but as Miyuki’s Kanou-sensei warns the freshmen at their indoctrination, only 8 of the school’s 135 graduates the prior year got jobs in their chosen field. The creative arts is a tough gig.
On the flip side, the main female characters all have some very cliche LN moments that are quite unnecessary to telling the story. And Koga Aoi’s performance as female lead Shino Aki – all helium and chirpiness – is a lot to take. She’s one of the “platinum generation” and destined for big success, so hopefully this is a character with a big growth curve, but I never take that for granted with LNs. Those are really the only major quibbles I have with the premiere though, which for a double-episode is actually pretty good.
Lots of unknowns here, then. But broadly speaking an art college setting has a lot of potential, and the character interactions in the first episode are pretty engaging and well-written. We need to see how this premise plays out, and how well-reasoned the conceit is – in effect this is basically an isekai where the other world is your own life, after all. But Remake has managed to convince me that I want it to work at least, which is pretty much the first step on this journey of a thousand miles.
