Mirai Nikki

Well... After reading the manga I was really looking forward to this. I was a bit disappointed though for a few reasons. This was more of a trailer. It started by speeding through the intro to the manga not even giving a chance to anyone who hasn't seen the manga to understand the plot. Then, all of a sudden it jumps to what happens a few chapters later giving no context. It feels really rushed. Almost no time is given to get to know the characters, (that goes double for Yuno who I was looking foward to seeing). All of a sudden things are happening andanyone who hasn't read the manga (which is awesome!) is left in the dust. If they intended to make an anime out of this I hope the pace is slowed down a lot. In my opinion this story should be told in about 50-80 episodes.

The Mirai Nikki OVA is a short, eight minute OVA that was bundled with the eleventh volume of the manga on December 9th, 2010. (My birthday – a coincidence? Hahah! …Not the year, of course.) It basically takes a bunch of random scenes from the first volume of the manga and shows how they would look in animation form. I was actually rather pleased with the scenes they depicted, since they were very accurate (almost word-for-word) with the manga. For those of you who don’t know what Mirai Nikki is, it means “Future Diary” in English. It’s about a boy, Amano Yukiteru, who isn’t very interestedin many things. The one thing he does like to do is record daily events in his diary in his cell phone – he calls himself an “observer”. He also has an imaginary friend, aptly named Deus Ex Machina. One day, Deus decides to make Yuki’s cell phone into a “Future Diary” (Mirai Nikki) which records his future for the next consecutive ninety days, as if Yuki had already made entries for them. At first, Yuki thinks he is the only one with this mysterious diary, until he has a near-freakish encounter with Gasai Yuno, the most popular girl in his school. Suddenly, Yukiteru is plunged into a dangerous survival game where having your cell phone broken or destroyed means that you yourself will die as well. Getting back to the OVA, it’s quite obviously aimed at people who actually read Mirai Nikki, which makes sense considering that it was bundled with volume eleven. As stated before, I was pleased with the OVA in general – the scenes were adapted accurately, the animation was pretty good, and the seiyuu were good as well. I’ve always imagined Yuno’s voice a little deeper for some reason, but it’s passable as well. The only thing I’ll nitpick at is that Deus’ CGI looked a bit weird, but that’s really all. All in all it is a good OVA for the manga, although I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t actually read it before. In all honesty, it seems more like a long trailer than an actual anime episode (which is what it was probably meant to be, anyway). I really do hope that Mirai Nikki gets a chance to become a full-fledged anime series, since it has a lot of potential and, judging by the OVA, it’d look pretty good, too. And with the manga having just ended, I hope that an anime series is in order. (Coincidentally, as I post this review, the anime is nearing its end.)

So after having watched 12 episodes of Mirai Nikki (TV) and being thoroughly impressed by it, I decided it would be worth spending the 8 minutes it takes to watch the Mirai Nikki OVA. In my honest opinion this is more of a preview or a commercial than anything else. Scenes switch so fast without any explanation that it is next to impossible to tell what is happening unless you have watched the show like I have. In fact, it appears they squeezed the first 2 episodes into this 8 minute long ova. So if you think about it this is just pretty much an 8minute long trailer. So overall I rate this trailer a 3, simply because I feel this wasn't meant to be watched as anything other than a preview; if it was the actual anime adaptation I would have given it a 1. It does serve its purpose as a preview though and I'm sure if you were a Mirai Nikki fan before October 9, 2011 this might have been cool to see, but today it serves no real purpose.

I'm going to say what everyone already knows. This looked like an animation and concept test. Much like how marvel studios leaked a concept animation for Deadpool. So when I watched this particular OVA I was doing it to clean up loose ends with the series. (Like I do with all series). Watching it right off the back I could tell it was a trailer or a concept test footage. However if you are wanting to get into the series I would suggest watching this first, (there are spoilers, but they are very mediocre and don't really ruin anything). It was also a reminder abouthow much I love Yuno Gasai as a character. I am giving it a lower score because of the fact that it is a concept trailer, and doesn't seem to flow correctly

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