This manga is an adaptation of an anime film. I really don’t like the art and animation of the film however, due to how it’s heavily CGI based with not particularly good CGI, so I’m reading this instead. Thus, this is from the point of view of the manga only with no use of the film for context or comparison.
The story involves an indecisive high school student named Naomi, getting visited by his future self (who is henceforth referred to as Sensei) so that Naomi may save his soon to be girlfriend, Ruri, from a tragic lightning strike. The interesting twist is that Naomi isn’t exactly a time traveler, rather the world that the world Naomi lives in is a virtual recreation of the real world running on what’s called the Alltale. Something like this turns out to be the final major twist in a lot of stories, but what makes things somewhat fresh here is that this is explained from the start and it builds off of that in terms of Sensei’s motivations and how Naomi chooses to proceed.
The first half or so of the manga is pretty solid. It involves Sensei helping Naomi grow closer to Ruri while also training him in how to use what are essentially special admin powers. The protagonist works hard in following the plan Sensei lays out for him, and his character shines through even stronger in the parts where he chooses to deviate from said plan. His interactions with Ruri also result in pretty solid relationship development and help establish Ruri’s character to a decent degree. The sci-fi pretty much comes down solely to “that’s the way to the world was programmed to work so just deal with it”, which isn’t a particularly deep explanation, but is a reasonable enough explanation for pretty much anything so it works well enough.
The second half definitely jumps the shark and becomes a mess. The sci-fi becomes nonsense. Lots of crazy stuff happens beyond the scope of the virtual world, but the only explanations given are a bunch of random terms thrown around that are only loosely related and don’t explain anything. Thus, it’s pretty much just a stream of sudden events to make whatever the plot needs to happen happen with no proper world building. The ending is pretty strong in a vague sense, but due to how messy everything is the emotional beats just don’t land all that well.
The plot becoming a mess is fine if it allows the characters to shine through better, but in this case the writing involving the cast fell apart too. Naomi’s character arc is rushed, but it still progresses and concludes in a decently solid manner so overall it fared well enough. However, Ruri is also implied to have gone through major character growth, but this was never properly developed. The relationship between Naomi and Ruri is also supposedly super strong, much stronger than the relationship between Sensei and the Ruri of Sensei’s world, but that too isn’t really properly developed either. And everything regarding Sensei’s personality and motivations in this phase just seems like a mess with lots of inconsistencies. Thus, it’s really hard to stay invested in the cast and thus nothing has much of an impact.
The art was pretty nice in terms of style and quality and character designs pretty solid. It felt like there wasn’t enough of just using nice art to establish tone and atmosphere, with essentially every panel being used to advance the plot, and thus the art didn’t shine through all that well.
