I think I was right about this one:
Spring 2019 anime preview 18: Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO
Based on a classic visual novel apparantly so I expect harems, metaphysical pounderings and people telling me I really should’ve played the game to understand the story pic.twitter.com/JXySybvuki
— Martin Wisse (@wissewords) April 1, 2019
This was very much what you expect from a belated adaptation of an nineties visual novel. A lot of setup, as we follow our protagonist around school talking to the various girls he knows before the plot kicks in about a quarter to the end. Quite a lot of the shots actually resemble those you’d see in a visual novel, overly rendered static backgrounds with the characters talking in front of them. To be honest, it’s not a very visually interesting series, so-so character designs matched with sub par animation and boring backgrounds. And when it does try to be interesting you get shit like this:
That’s the obligatory sexy school nurse, who has heard of the notion to dress professionally but didn’t think it applied to her, waking up the protagonist by standing over him and giving him a good look at her panties. Dude himself starts propositioning her immediately in a way that’s clearly a routine between the two of them. Again, it’s all visual novel stuff we’ve all seen a million times before and you have to wonder why anybody would create this particular adaptation now. Even if the original was ground breaking in its time, that’s almost twentyfive years ago and we’ve seen a lot better since than what this first episode promises. The rampant sexism of the protagonist doesn’t help either.
If the plot is interesting a lot of this can be forgiven, but so far the story has barely kicked in. There’s a mysterious controversial scientific project going on which the protagonist’s step mother is involved with, there’s a mysterious shrine and an archeaology club at school investigating it, led by an obviously evil professor and finally there’s the strange object protag-kun’s dad — who disappeared a few months before — sent him. And finally there’s the mysterious naked glowing girl, who is not his father in disguise. All of which comes together at the end of the episode, when Something Happens and our hero wakes up again in his own bed, with nobody having noticed anything strange…
Again, all stuff I’ve seen before but for the moment just about enough to give this a second episode. I don’t think this will be a good series, but I’ll settle for mildly interesting. I need something to play in the background while doing the dishes after all.