Hello everyone. This is my first anime review and I can’t wait to tell you about the show, Future Diaries. Future Diaries has been that show that I have wanted to watch really bad, but just never got around to doing it. That is, until recently when my girlfriend suggest watching it together! I had mixed thoughts about the show, so I am just going to jump on in and tell you about it.
For those of you that do not know, future diaries is a horror thriller show. It is about a group of people that are selected to receive flip phones that can tell the future. However, by taking these phones they are entered in a survival game, in which the winner becomes god. The story follows two characters, Yukki and yuno, while they attempt to win this game. Yukki is the male protagonist and Yuno, his stalker girlfriend. The first time my friend told me about the show and described it, I thought it sounded absolutely terrible. I still think it sounds really bad to describe to people, but after watching it, the silly plot kind of grew on me. The phones work very similar to Death Note, which is what I had to keep reminding myself in order to get over future telling flip phones. Despite my reluctance to watch because of the description of the show, all the merchandise I saw at anime conventions and the rants and raves I’ve read online about it outweighed how silly the plot sounded.
To make this review simple for my first one, I am going to talk about the pros and cons of this show. I’ll start with the pros, but I’ll let you know now I decided to write this because of the cons. The best part of this show is the character development and the differenct characters present compared to other animes. This is the selling part of the show in my opinion. Yukki is the only character that seems to be a cookie cutter character that can be seen in any anime. He is the clueless main character that always tries to do what he thinks is the right thing to do. However, this slowly vanishes as the mental pressure of constantly having your life at risk presses on this character stereotype to make way for Yukki to do some unfathomable things as the show progresses. The rest of the characters, especially Yuno, also have amazing depth to their character, which is primarily illuminated by their reasoning for wanting to become god. Getting to know more about these characters throughout the first half of the show and how they all interact was the highlight of the show for me. New characters were always being introduced and they all played their own special important role in the story. The pacing of the character development felt great to me and intensified the sense of the survival element of the show. Due to the speed at which it is done, it feels like the game is progressing quick, and it could be anyone’s turn to die next. This about covers the pros, for other than this element of the show, I was fairly annoyed.
So I thoroughly enjoyed this show until they just decided to throw curve ball after curve ball of plot “twists”. These “twists” in the plot seemed interesting at first, but then just got annoying and took away from the story for me. To explain without spoiling the show, I would say that the ending gets way too “anime” for me to full appreciate. By too “anime” I mean that it went over the top with ridiculousness. This is my go to saying when a show loses all sense of reality and blows off into some other realm of absurdity that so many bad anime happen to do and so many good anime know to avoid. This made the ending and events leading up to it seemed forced and confusing, where they might not of been in the manga which could have had more time to explain. Having not read the manga, I do not know if this is the case or if they did keep to the manga. Near the end of Future Diary there were probably 5 twists or so, in which only one of them seemed worthy of putting in the show. Even the genre of the show seemed to shift near the end due to these twists, going from a survival horror to a almost space opera. The whole world the show created is very rapidly broken, rules change, and it seemed like a completely different anime by the end, in a bad way. All the things I liked about the show were ruined in order to make it force some twist like you would expect in death note, but lacking the intelligence that death note is known for.
There is so much to say, but it would ruin the show for others, and despite my many issues with the show, I can say I enjoyed 80% of what I watched. Again, the start to the show is great, but it quickly lost its steam as the ending approached. Would you like it? Maybe. I honestly do not think Future Diary is for every anime fan, but if you like interesting characters that you do not see often in most shows, then I would give it a try. Also, if you are a fan of horror movies and anime, I would recommend watching it. It is not the scariest show by any means, but it’s more of a psychological character exploration that the author is letting us experience, which I thought was entertaining enough to keep me watching.
Outspoken Otaku 