Alternative titles: Ushinawareta: A la Recherche de Futur Perdu, Waramete
Visual Novel Adaptation by feel.
Streaming on Funimation

Premise

Our show starts out in some strange future lab, but quickly transitions to an established club in the middle of preparations for its big school culture fest. This club also has the strange double-duty of school mediators, both using information and force to resolve conflicts. After a conveniently tragic accident steals one of their lives, the future is somehow changed to stop it.

Marlin’s verdict: Timebomb

There are a lot of confusing things about this show. The show starts out in this weird sci-fi lab only to immediately abandon that for another school setting. The bewildering in medias res story we got about this club was entertaining, but it always just felt so disjointed. It is really hard to understand why we should care about these students, let alone why we should accept that their skills range from high level planetarium engineering to kung fu to NSA level surveillance. I guess I do give the show some credit for having such an accelerated romance subplot, but now that time has been changed I’m worried that means it’s just an excuse for it to stay in the back until it can become dramatically relevant.

Even on a technical level this show is strange. As we were talking on the Skype chat for the blog, it seemed as if someone had rotoscoped 3D CGI in order to create something with a large range of motion that seemed 3D but just barely wasn’t. It’s very jarring, like the anime version of the uncanny valley. You know it’s close to the genuine article, but some very minor stuff feels just off enough that it stands out even more for it. I do tend to like a good time travel plotline. Not exactly off to a great start with magical future girlfriend showing up naked, but I think I can give this show one more episode to prove its worth any more of my time.

Jel’s verdict: Hard to Find

I know we preach “show don’t tell” storytelling around here but this episode might be going overboard. We leap right into a group of students preparations for a big festival with several established relationships already reaching a boiling point. I think I kind of like that in theory as the characters were simple enough to let your mind fill in the blanks, but by the time we hit the bizarre last few minutes I felt thoroughly confused rather than intrigued. Throw in the weird choice of animation style – sacrificing level of detail for extra motion, which does not help you in a boring school setting – and the whole episode kind of felt cheap and all over the place. The story could seriously go anywhere and I wouldn’t be surprised at this point, so at least that’s a positive moving forward. But considering this episode offers up nothing beyond boring, predictable character types and sub par production, there’s no indication that it’s going to be good.