In Search of the Lost Future | Episode 12 (Finale)
Buckeye: Overall, this show took awhile to get into as the show starts off introducing a mystery that it would not revisit until much later in the series. But in the end, it does a nice job developing the characters and bringing the club members close to each other, and this show gets much more interesting as the series progresses. It’s one of those shows that requires a lot of patience that not everybody has. One really nice thing about this show are the characters, and they are all good people who each gets solid development to build a sense of community. That said, the biggest negative I have to say about this show is definitely the animation quality as it just looks sloppy and that changes the atmosphere of the show to something it’s not supposed to be. But despite having a lot of problems from the outset, the mystery behind everything makes for a show that improves as it goes forward.
General Hentai: The weak point has been the animation; it’s a shame it didn’t have the level of, say, La Fruit de Grisia. That said, I’m a bit disappointed by the final episode. Yui is erased from one timeline…but in such a haphazard way that it really feels arbitrary. What is erased and what stays is just too Deus ex Machina and inconsistent. Erased from the picture and most of their memories but her badge remains as does the dress Kaori made for her. And then there’s Karin remembering her better than anyone, all for someone they’ve only known for less than 2 weeks.
Karori/Sou shippers **cough**likeme**cough** get (or seem to) their happy ending in the future timeline, but Kaori’s awakening is again arbitrary. We still don’t know where the cube came from. Or why it didn’t vanish. We do have the acknowledgment from future Airi and Sou’s conversation that their Yui couldn’t have been a first attempt to change the timeline, and that there are multiple possible outcomes, a nod at both the theme of this anime, and the visual novel/eroge genres multiple path systems. We also have a key piece of untranslated material: Sou’s career choice.
I had a problem with Sou’s choice of Yui and rejection of Kaori, as I’m of the opinion that while he was fine with how things were, he really did love Kaori underneath it all. As I’ve already said, his relentless pursuit to save Kaori and closure of all other avenues of going forward emotionally are not that of someone who isn’t in love with Kaori.Like I said, you don’t do all that just to giver her a rejection. For him to toss that aside all because of less than two weeks of exposure to “mystery girl with troubles”, well, I hate that. The pre-Yui Sou is the same one who will pursue the ends of the very laws of physics to save Kaori, even knowingly and willingly sacrificing Yui, knowing that Yui probably knows that Yui will be erased if she succeeds, something future Airi describes as cruel. So the same Sou who is so obsessed with saving Kaori to the point of cruelly using and disposing of Yui is the same Sou who suddenly dumps Kaori. I just don’t buy it.
So, the series ends on a note of dissatisfaction for me. I’d felt that this show had been pushing the lower “A” range for most of it’s broadcast, despite the animation quality, but the last 2 episodes slide it back into “B” territory for me. The flaws of it juggling too many balls at one time became too apparent to me. That said, this is still a recommended show, and it certainly aimed higher than many other shows. The characters are really good and likeable and the story, even though I think it stumbled at the end, is intelligent and intriguing. A definite recommendation.
EmperorBrandon: “My grandpa has forbidden me from crossdressing”: Haha, is that meant to poke fun at Otoboku?
Pretty uneventful for the most part. Everyone getting to carry on normally, but with a melancholic feeling for the audience knowing Yui was there and seeing the vague feelings of the characters (even Karin) over her no longer being there. Looks like Sou got to the point of remembering enough where he will create Yui again, this time without her sad mission, though we didn’t get to see it come to fruition. The future scenes were a bit confusing, but I guess the idea that the timelines would be merged played out differently than Sou expected and that is how the timeline where Yui was sent back for the last time continued (and did so a bit happier than before, since Kaori wakes up).
General Hentai: One thing I forgot to mention: Yui. So, a Yui is sent back in time, fails her mission, and years later, her existence is revealed to Sou and Airi. They then find out everything they can, and make a new artificial body, identical to Kaori, in order to upload Kaori’s consciousness into it. They upload it, but it doesn’t turn on. Sometime later, Sou redesigns the artificial Kaori body to look like the Yui they knew, in order to send her on her mission to rescue Kaori. We never know, therefore, how much, if any of Kaori might have somehow made it into Yui’s consciousness. Which means that the Yui Sou falls in love with was originally an artificial body that looked like Kaori, and even had Kaori’s consciousness implanted into, which never activated, though it still remains unknown if that had any impact on Yui’s personality. Which raises the question: was any part of the Yui Sou falls in love with also a part of Kaori? If so, and there doesn’t seem to be anyway to know, it would go a bit towards explaining the “mystery girl in love who somehow sweeps the hero off his projected romance course” syndrome that bothers me somewhat about the romantic outcome.
So, Sou and Kaori end up together in one timeline, while they don’t in another, with the possibility of him recreating Yui. The mystery cube could be used as a Deus ex Machina here, (more than it already is) but the only way they were able to recreate an artificial body for Kaori, was to extensively study the artificial body of the original Yui, and there’s no body to do that in this timeline.
I get the feeling that this show really needed another episode or two to adequately explain, set up, and resolve the contradictions that this show attempts to deal with.
