Yesterday wo Utatte | Episode 12 Review

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Episode Twelve Thoughts

I’ve finally gotten around to finishing the anime, took ages but it got done and that’s what matters. So what were me thoughts on the final episode? To sum it up in one word it was, meh. I didn’t think that the end justified everything that happened beforehand. I think what bothers me most is that the majority of the anime surrounds two characters Rikuo and Shinako, two characters that are the similar in many ways, they both know how to make a mess of whatever they’re thinking or doing.

We spent twelve episodes building relationships, getting to understand the characters and their feelings. Something that I thought was a reasonable story, however Yesterday wo Utatte‘s biggest downfall is that it fails in execution. A lot of the time, we see our characters enveloped in their own thoughts to the point where it becomes overwhelming and doesn’t add to the overall storytelling. We spend more time watching Rikuo and Shinako being confused about their feelings to really know what to do with them. Heck they even get together but they don’t really know why they’re together or if they still have feelings for one another but they still get together. Then we have the other characters in, Haru and Rou who we don’t really see develop at all. In my opinion, all they really did was add to Rikuo and Shinako’s ongoing confusion about their own feelings.

Episode twelve is a half-assed attempt to save everything the anime has undone in episodes ten and eleven. let’s keep in mind that essentially, Rikuo and Shinako kind of got together and basically ruined their relationships with the other characters in two episodes. Episode twelve tries to undo that mistake by making Shinako confused about her feelings (once again). Does she like Rikuo? Yeah. Does she like Rou? Yeah. So what does she do? Picks neither and apparently that is good enough for Rikuo to be like “That’s fine we’re friends, I’m going to go confess to Haru instead”. Throughout the series, I never really understood Haru and Rikuo’s relationship. We knew that Haru liked Rikuo from the start, however, Rikuo’s feelings for her was never really there because he clung onto Shinako because he too was confused about himself. So seeing him confess to Haru at the end was confusing since there wasn’t really development with regards to them.

All this is a shame because I want adaptions of original sources to properly reflect the overall vibe and story that was being told at the time; after all there are good adaptations and bad adaptations. I don’t know how accurate the anime is to the manga, however a part of me doesn’t want to find out because of how average the everything about Yesterday wo Utatte was. The best aspect of the anime was the artstyle, other than that, nothing really stuck out at me. None of the characters stuck out of me, nor did the story really keep me entertained.

Overally my experience with Yesterday wo Utatte was okay. If I were to put Yesterday wo Utatte on a scale from 1 – 10. It’s probably a five leaning towards a four. Not really impressed.