English Dub Season Review: YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Takuya Arima is an asshole with a super smart scientist father. But we always lose the good ones early, and Kodai Arima passes away while Takuya is still a teenager. Or does he? Takuya has strange visions and dreams about his father telling him about magical machines and other distant dimensions. When he receives an odd-looking device referred to as the reflector device, it allows him to navigate between other dimensions in a way that’s much like time travel, as he’s able to go back to various ‘save points’ in his life.

He has to overcome a scheming Class A Dimensional Space Criminal as well, who goes by the name Ryuzoji. This antagonist is able to use Niarb, a form of mind control, to influence others to accomplish what he wants. (Which is basically just the destruction of everything in existence.) Along with friends such as Yuki, Kanna, and Mio, Takuya fights back against Ryuzoji while trying to uncover the mysteries of the reflector device, his father, and what exactly is going on in his world. Strange lightning strikes have been occurring at his stepmother’s company’s construction site. Investigating leads him underground Mount Senkaku, where he discovers the ruins of a civilization.

Eventually, he’s able to use the reflector device to its full power and travels to Dela Granto, the world/dimension/planet where his father supposedly tried to go to. He starts a new life there, marrying Sayless, a priestess, and raising a daughter named Yu-No. But bad things happen when the royal guards find them living in the wastelands. Takuya is arrested, his wife killed, and Yu-No took away. With the help of the resistance, Takuya escapes from prison months later, only to find that Yu-No has lost her heart and is about to perform a sacred ritual that will end her life. However, if she doesn’t perform the ritual, all of them might die. To complicate things, Ryuzoji is hanging around, too. In the end, everything comes full circle and many answers are revealed as Takuya and Yu-No merge with time itself.

Our Take:

This is a weird show. You can probably tell that just from the title, which is a good reflection of the series itself. YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World is lengthy, awkward, and thinks its a lot more meaningful than it is in reality. Based on a romantic adventure visual novel video game originally released in 1996, YU-NO contains almost as much fan-service as actual adventure. Maybe, even more, depending on your definition of what constitutes an ‘adventure’.

The plot itself is somewhat confusing. There’s a lot of sci-fi terminology and fuzzy concepts that aren’t explained very well, if at all. To be completely fair most shows that deal with such conceptual forms of thinking is the same way. It’s hard to create crazy new science that feels both exciting and real and understandable. One of my main problems with the show was the factor of the reflector device itself and how it’s referred to. Takuya and his father call it traveling across dimensions, but for all intents and purposes, it’s time travel. He can set it for one point in time and then travel back to that point later. One explanation is that each point splits off into its own dimension, I suppose, but it still just feels like time travel.

Takuya is the main character, and one of the best or worst parts of the show depending on your point of view. He’s an arrogant prick who doesn’t hesitate to commit verbal harassment. He pretty constantly demeans everyone he talks to, and he cuts school all the time. But he’s alone intensely determined, loyal to those he considers friends and has got fairly good street smarts. Basically, he’s every main male anime protagonist ever in this genre. I know I hated him at the start. Hell, I hated him until about halfway through the show. Then he started to grow up a bit. (Living with a priestess and becoming a father will do that to you.) I guess more of his bad qualities show up near the beginning and you don’t really start to see his better traits until he reaches Dela Granto. I still wouldn’t be buddies with him in real life, though.

The turning point for the show really does come when Takuya travels to the dimension of Dela Granto. Things are relatively stale until this point, but entering an entirely new world gave the show an injection of fresh plots, characters, and life. Removed from most of the women he knows, Takuya is a lot less insufferable and even starts to become somewhat sage. The animation and visual design become a lot more interesting too, since they depicting foreign and strange creatures and landscapes.

To sum everything up, YU-NO is a show that you might enjoy if you’re the kind of person that likes this sort of genre. It sexualizes its female characters a lot (even the minors), so if that’s something you’re not into, give this show a pass. While I wouldn’t choose to watch it again for myself, I did start to enjoy it more in the second half, when there was a little more going on than simply Takuya making sexual jokes every five seconds. The dub is solid, with Eric Vale giving an average to good performance depending on the episode. YU-NO might be worth a watch – if you know what you’re getting into.