This anime is not well known. This anime has a reputation of being extremely hard to understand.
This anime gets a lot less respect and fans than it deserves.
It’s just that is has been deliberately aired in reverse order.
To be specific, while the production team have intended for the series to be understood in reverse order, which is evidenced by the inclusion of episode 25, there to clear up the lost points of the plot, the beginning of the plotline is actually in episode 26 and the ending is in episode 1. But understanding it in this manner requires such dogged determination, that those who weren’t fans of the original game did not bother to watch it beyond a few episodes, not understanding a thing.
Which is a crying shame.
If you can’t afford a large memory stack to file plot points away, watch it exactly backwards, starting with episode 26 and ending with 1, but skip episode 25. Watch that one once you’re done to see if you missed anything important.
If you have played the original Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito, or saw and understood the anime1 and remember which side of the book the titles are on there,2 and carefully study what happens in episode 14, which is a direct Yamibou crossover, airing it in reverse order actually makes a wicked sort of sense.3 Because it’s a very, very Japanese anime…
- Which, unfortunately, left huge chunks of the plot on the cutting floor in adaptation from the game…↩
- It is very common in anime to see the titles of books in foreign languages where Japanese books would have their titles — which would be the back of a real book in all European languages. Yamibou is, suprisingly, far more particular about getting it right than usual, and it took Touka Gettan for me to notice that it is.↩
- They might not have wanted that meaning in there, but now I got it out, so it’s mine. :P ↩
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Sounds interesting. Does this mean one can actually watch the whole thing backwards and have fun nevertheless?
I mean, see, the team that did the Suzumiya anime made the same move and aired the episodes in more or less random order, but in the end they’ve just ruined all the fun in those episodes which went out of order, as it was plain impossible to understand what’s going on without knowing some plot twists, which they scheduled to air later. And like this, these episodes just ended up being dead boring. So I’m rather suspicious now to all these airing order games.
That’s precisely what it means, yes, you can have fun by watching the whole thing backwards. Watching the first two or three episodes in airing order first (and then rewatching them again when you get to them) to puzzle yourself utterly so that later revelations by watching in order are more fun can be recommended but definitely isn’t required and probably isn’t for everyone.
No, when I talked about “backward order”, I meant the order in which the episodes were aired, as opposed to the “straight order”, the storyline order, that is. The thing is, I’m definitely willing to watch everything as it was meant to be watched by it’s creators, if only it’s possible without having to miss much fun. So is it?
That would be much easier if the series was half-season long, but it’s a full season of 26 episodes. You’d need to make notes of everything that even remotely looks like a plot point (a lot of it actually is) which you’d be able to go back to when further information becomes available. That, or keep it all in your head and watch it in a single sitting, otherwise, you’d need a better memory than mine.
Even then, going backwards might be required later to mop up the pieces.
Then again, trying to make sense of it actively might be half the fun in itself.
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