My final and favorite premiere of the season.

While I have surprisingly little I want to actually say about Fumetsu no Anata e (To Your Eternity), this lies in stark contrast to the emotional impact I felt from the first episode. Maybe it’s partly to do with how I’ve personally been viewing life recently, and/or can be put down to some kind of primal, deep-rooted reaction to a story that’s all about survival, but this one hit hard, despite (or else precisely because of) the all but screaming inevitability of the episode’s conclusion.

I don’t necessarily expect everyone to have the same sort of emotional response, of course – for all I know, others might find this episode dull or lackluster – but for me, it stands as a powerful beginning to a show that honestly feels like it could go in any direction and deliver any kind of message, whether that be cynical and fatalistic or ultimately hopeful and uplifting. I haven’t read the manga so I have truly no idea, but perhaps, akin to something like Kino’s Journey, this show might even choose to do (and be able to pull off) both.

At this point, I’m still being cautiously optimistic despite my almost immediately strong liking to Fumetsu no Anata e for two reasons. First, we still know basically nothing about the main character in terms of his (?) presumably newly-forming personality and motivations, so I can’t really say whether he appeals to me or not. Since this first episode covers nothing more than the synopsis provided on MAL, I don’t even know if there’ll be any other main characters to fill out the cast (I’m purposefully not reading any background info regarding the source material, so no spoilers, please). Second, the artwork is admittedly rather patchy, and although there’s nothing here I dislike here as far as the general style goes, I did definitely notice some pretty off-model visuals during the long shots (of which there were plenty), which may not bode terribly well for the rest of the production from a purely technical standpoint.

Overall though, this seems like a highly compelling start to a potentially heartbreaking or heartwarming narrative – and either way, I’m very much looking forward to seeing where the series goes from here.

Score: 8/10