Anime Review: Bokutachi no Remake

Time travel always sucks me in… game design, a passion that I still have (hey, I have a degree in it!), will also always interest me. Mash the two of them together and you have created a premise for a show that I could not simply ignore. Bokutachi no Remake takes game development and time travel and marries them to create an interesting concept; however, concepts can seem good but mean nothing without the execution. Did Remake Our Life execute its concept in an enjoyable way?

Let’s roll!

The Story

The story is simplistic.

Kyouya Hashiba regrets how his life turned out. He got released from an indy development studio and ran into Eiko Kawasegawa, a director at the game studio he dreamed of working at. Suddenly, he found himself within reach of his goal… until he was laid off. He goes to sleep and wakes up 10 years in the past with a chance to redo his life.

Kyouya does so by going to art school. This was something he passed on and ended up regretting it. Here, he begins to meet the people who could go on to become the Platinum Generation… a group of talented creators that he idolized.

As Kyouya works side-by-side with them, they decide to make a game together. Things don’t go smoothly so Kyouya becomes determined to make it work. He comes up with solution after solution and the project is completed; however, there is a detrimental side effect to it all… he became everyone’s person to lean on and this, ends up causing some of them to lose their passion.

From here, Kyouya must learn what went wrong, what the solution is, and apply it. He does so in a way that seemed a bit jarring for a late addition to the show but it served its purpose.

The Characters

Kyouya Hashiba

I don’t know what more I could say since the entire story is about Kyouya. Everything from his over helpful attitude, the redo of his life, and everything else in between is the entire premise of the show. I can offer my thoughts that I don’t think Kyouya is a bad main character. I get why he felt that everything going awry was his own fault. The reasoning behind it was pretty sound logic. He recognized the problems and is actively trying to find a way to fix them all.

That brings an air of nobility to Kyouya. He could have let things go and accepted the harsh reality and even though the problems were working themselves out, he still chose to find a way to intervene and fix them himself.

When you think about it… does that mean Kyouya changed? Honestly, I don’t think he did. He’s still doing the same thing that caused the problems, to begin with. He’s taking matters into his own hands to fix the issues except when he realizes how to solve them, he’s not being so invasive about it. The fact of the matter is, invasive or not… he’s still trying to implement solutions on his own. It’s kind of weird because Kyouya did change and didn’t change as a character at the same time and I, honestly, don’t know how I really feel about it.

Aki Shino

Aki is a cute girl with a bit of bumpkin dialogue who loves to draw. Much like the other girls in this series, she has a bit of a crush on Kyouya and ends up helping him on their game by being their official artist; however, the problem stems after the game releases that she lost her desire to create artwork. This is one of the problems that Kyouya has to solve as she becomes the famous artist of Platinum Generation in the future and… trust me… that’s not a spoiler because if you look at her name vs the pen name she used as a part of the group, it’s biggest “WELL, DUH!” moment in the whole show.

I know Aki is supposed to be that cute, adorable girl and all but I just couldn’t get into her character and a lot of it has to do with her seiyuu. I can’t stand that style of voice at all. The pitch, the nasally sound to it, it’s not something I really prefer and, even though it’s a petty reason, it became the sole reason I just couldn’t get behind her.

Nanako Kogure

Nanako has a talent for singing but she’s very unsure of herself. Kyouya does everything he can to try and encourage her but this ends up causing more harm than good. While Nanako does, eventually, start to put trust in herself, Kyouya soon learns that it is only short-lived and she ends up disappearing from social media where she used to sing to her fans.

Nanako ends up becoming N@NO in the future so, again, this is another problem that Kyouya has to solve. Nanako is a mixed bag of emotions. In some instances, she can be sweet, but most of the time, she’s brash, forward, and a little blunt. She’s also got that insecurity about her and a lot of her brashness is a branch off of that. I thought that there was a nice mixture of archetypes here to make her an interesting character but despite that, she ran into the same problem a lot of the other characters did… and that’s they felt more like a segmented focus rather than a constant mainstay.

Tsurayuki Rokunoji

He’s someone with a talent for writing and ends up being the scriptwriter for their game. Like most writers (me included), he loves having creative control over a story and is unwilling to compromise on doing revisions. This leads to a fallout between him and Kyouya; however, Kyouya finds a way to fix the script and get Tsurayuki to accept the changes but once he finds out that Kyouya made even more revisions without him… and did as good of a job as him… his ego takes a massive hit and he ends up leaving the group and dropping out of college!

Talk about an overreaction! Even I’m not that egotistical when it comes to writing!

In a way, Tsurayuki was the catalyst that began the events which led Kyouya to realize that he caused everyone’s downfalls. Because as such, Platinum Generation isn’t a thing in the future. If it wasn’t for this happening, I think Kyouya would have still learned about things and how he was at fault but it would have been a longer process and, by then, who knows? Maybe things would have been irreparable?

All I saw Tsurayuki as was a whiny little bitch of a writer… which is why I related to him so much!

Eiko Kawasegawa

Finally, we have our tsundere of the show! In the original timeline, she was a director and Kyouya’s boss until he got laid off. Here, she’s simply just another college student going to the same school; however, there is a bit of a rivalry when they had to make a short film for a project. Eiko watched Kyouya from afar and secretly admired his work ethic and problem-solving skills. This led her to fall in love with Kyouya but that was something that she kept to herself well into the future.

I think out of everyone, Eiko was the best girl for Kyouya but her own ego and unwillingness to acknowledge Kyouya’s ability stopped her from pulling the trigger. Plus, being a tsundere, her shell was a little too thick to where nothing was going to crack it except for herself. Usually, when you have that situation, the shell will never crack and that ended up being proven here in this show.

It’s a shame, though, as I thought out of all of the side characters, Eiko was the most interesting!

Art & Animation

While the artwork and animation were nothing more than the standard fare, something actually stood out! I know that Japan usually likes to focus on the eyes when it comes to character design but they really went out of their way to make the eyes the focal point of everyone’s design and… I actually applaud that choice!

Let’s face it… even when there is science fiction mixed in, slice of life is always going to be slice of life. This means that you’re going to get average, run-of-the-mill character designs in normal, everyday clothes that just look like copy/pastes from any other show in the genre. We’ve seen these types of character designs before but at least Studio Mausu did something to make each character have a standout feature and that was their eyes.

By mixing solid, overlapping colors with hints of gradients, it produced a unique look to their eyes! This could be seen as a double-edged sword, though. While it does make their designs pop, I found myself looking at their eyes more than the rest of their body. It almost worked too well…, especially whenever a close-up of one of their faces was shown. The detail on the eyes was more pronounced and you couldn’t help but look away. Perhaps if the rest of their designs had a little more to them, it wouldn’t have been so glaring but this is a rare case where I can say that it was a distraction but a much-needed one to save their designs from just being another average SOL design.

Speaking of SOL… the soundtrack was about as slice of life as it could get. In other words, completely forgettable and only good for some background noise. As I say all the time when it comes to these kinds of OSTs, that doesn’t mean the soundtrack was bad… it just means it’s not something that’s going to reach out and grab you.

Overall Thoughts

I’m going to be completely honest here… I didn’t enjoy this show as much as I thought I would have. I don’t know if I just had a different level of expectation but I was really hoping that it would have focused more on the game development aspect than the slice of life aspect. I guess because the story turned out a different way than I had imagined, disappointment settled in.

Putting me expectations aside and looking at the story for what it was, I don’t think it was bad. There are some deep lessons embedded into the show with the overarching message being that you shouldn’t really try to force change when it’s not warranted. Sometimes it’s best to just let things play out naturally and accept things for what they are.

Now… without spoiling the ending, I will reiterate as I do so many times that I believe that the ending is paramount and here, we get a non-ending ending that annoyed me to no end.

The goal of the show was for Kyouya to find a way to redo his life so that he could, one day, work alongside Platinum Generation. I mean, I get that he, technically, did that through college and had to figure out a way to get them back together so he has another shot of doing it in the future but…

We don’t ever see the results of those efforts!

Instead, we’re left drawing our own conclusions as the show turns on the typical narrative to give an unsatisfying explanation with an underlying life lesson mixed in.

While some people could be satisfied with that kind of ending, I’m not. If a goal is established early on in a series, I want to see that goal reached in the ending! I treasure DEFINITIVE CLOSURE over just being left to assume everything will work out. I know that there are a lot of reasons that support the ending… reasons that should be viewed and not spoiled but when those reasons come at the very tail end of a 12-episode series, you get a sense that things were just slapped together as an afterthought.

In fact, there was a character I completely skipped over for good reason… because she gets ZERO EXPLANATION as to how or why can she do what she does… or how Kyouya even realizes that she can do the things that she can do.

I found it really odd that she shows up, says some stuff, and Kyouya just accepts it as if he knew all along, yet, there wasn’t anything in there that even remotely suggested that Kyouya knew.

Maybe there was and I missed it? (Remember, there was a hint TO THE VIEWER but I’m not counting that). If I did, feel free to correct me but it just struck me oddly that Kyouya just nodded as if he knew all along.

Because of the last few episodes being a rushed mess, I have to deduct some points. Again, I wish it focused more on the game development aspect, and, perhaps, had more than 12 episodes to do it but I thought the show was fine for what it was.

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Until next time…

Ja ne!