I’m so glad I did. This was absolutely fantastic! I did have a few moments of irritation (mostly as Noein kept shoving his depressing future down Haruka’s throat, despite *multiple* episodes having already established and reinforced the lesson that each future was only a possibility, not a certainty), but despite this, I can’t remember the last anime I enjoyed so much.

So anyway, this is just a quick note to thank you for recommending it.

Thank you :).

While inconsistent animation i consider to be forgivable. Lackluster storytelling i dont. Towards the end the storyline just sort of slips away into hammy dialogue and completely arbitrary scenes. Theres no real progress, the characters dont feel like they take any action towards the impending peril and it just feels half baked.

Ive always liked the idea of normal people being put into exceptional circumstances. It seems a very common thing for animes to have kids facing things well beyond their years. which lets face it, is an interesting idea. BUT the point is that they evolve and develop.

This show suffers from the same reason ive stopped watching Naruto. While i feel Naruto at its peak (a long long long time ago) was a very good anime. It suffers now from the “lets get stronger” ideology. Which i find huugely frustrating. Watching a group of kids stand around saying “lets get stronger together” i find annoying. and to repeat it every episode (like naruto) or ever few (like Noein) is unbearable. Its as if rather than provide actual physical and emotional development to these characters its easier to just have them say “im determined to get stronger!”

Its the same in Noein. Yuu in particular i found deeply annoying. For a character who had some much screen time he does very little for the story other than proclaim his weakness and desire to get stronger. Karasu on the other hand while being a powerful character and obviously one who creates alot of excellent action scenes throughout, says very little and his motives and dialogue is identical from something like episode 10 to the end. He yells at yuu every few minutes telling him to be stronger and he proclaims his will to protect haruka no matter what. Theres no conflict, no interest.

I find a similiar show like eureka 7 to be by far better told/ better animiated and with a far more cohesive storyline to boot.

Now this may come off as an incredibly negative review but in actual fact i watched all of it and had the ending been better my review may have been much more positive. That is to say i enjoyed much of it and kept watching, but the shows ultimate shortcommings left me feeling sour i suppose. it was a disappointment to see how it all ended.

Spoiler-y confusion rant to follow.
Initially, I was annoyed by most of the characters, and Atori and Kosagi were two of the worst-yet, as the series built up, I grew to like them, and those two were pretty much my favorites. When Atori was going on about Sara, and then called Kosagi Sara, I came to the conclusion she was his sister, and that it’d be entirely natural for him to despise the angst bucket that ignored his sister’s feelings, and for Kosagi to be distancing herself from an unstable brother. And then it turns out that his real sister got blown up in whatever warzone they lived in, which explained Atori being not entirely sane, but made me wonder where Kosagi came in. Then they let the two of them get owned and just left it at that?

My wife just picked it up @ Right Stuf for 24.98 as a box set.What a steal ! We likely would not have heard of it right away without your help.

I saw the first few episodes on SciFi channel and immediately pre-ordered the set, which I think I’ve now watched…maybe 5 times? Mostly in Japanese because I’m trying to learn that language–or at least, that’s my excuse.

This work stays with you because it is not fluff. Every episode is an essay on the role of friendship and community (metaphorically, to echo Ai’s comments in La’Cryma during ep 24, ‘recognizing each other’) in keeping people sane and happy and getting folk through hard times.

It also comments on such issues as making a conscious decision about how to react to loss or a bad situation, and how sometimes compassion itself can be self-destructive (if the dimension is going to be assimilated anyway why not tear down a dam now and give people a mundane death instead of having to face what may come? or on a larger scale, why not avoid painful futures by…..?) It also comments on not turning away from living life or retreating to fantasy just because life contains some suffering and the risk of pain.

There’s a lot going on here in terms of philosophy, and overall it is optimistic–a future of infinite choice.

Hakodate having escaped the fate of La’Cryma, I do wish I knew what happened to these kids in the future that they actually wind up with. Do they remember all that happened this incredible summer? Do they think it was all a dream, or play, or do they forget these events? Do they remain good friends, or drift apart? Do any of the things Noein used to mess with their heads actually come to pass in their dimension (we can guess that La’Cryma’s Fukuro lost his eye in a way similar to what Noein showed; La’Cryma’s Ai, however, stood on her own two feet. So, not everything Noein revealed was necessarily false, but neither was it necessarily true.)?

As for the fate of LaCryma and its people…I refer you to Schroedinger’s cat. So long as you don’t look, the characters remain in an overlapped state of dimensions in which they are alive, and dimensions in which they are dead. Do you really want to open the box and collapse that ambiguous state into a certainty of life or of death?

Besides, there’s probably a cadre of dimensions in which each possible outcome occurred; take your pick. ;)

cdk

This has got to be my favorite anime ever…just god damn…the fight scenes in this were better then animes BUILT around fighting, the story was so amazing and lots of plot twists and turns, the characters were just amazing as well…

parmenides and the sophis (history of Greek civilisation the being/not-being problem…)