The Summer 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World?

The war between the five races on earth—the humans, the Demonic Race, the Wild God Race, the Spirit Race, and the Phantom Beast Race—has ended in humans' victory. It is said that Prophet Sid sealed the other four races in the black pyramid now called the "Crypts." Kai's job is to watch the crypts and ensure that nothing changes. He is also training to save humans when the other races break the seal and return to this world. The crypts looked quiet today, but after Kai felt the world bending in front of his eyes, everything changed. World Rebirth was activated. Now Kai is in a totally different world where no one knows him, but he remembers everyone.

Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? is based on the light novel series written by Kei Sazane and illustrated by neco. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

I think the most important thing a show like this needs to do is clearly establish the premise. If nothing else, Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? accomplishes this. The first half of the episode is spent showing us Kai's world—a world where humankind won the war against all the other fantasy races. We meet his friends, his obvious love interest, and (through some clunky expository dialogue) learn his past and motivations. Then we spend the back half of the episode being introduced to the opposite world—the one where humans lost the war.

The strongest aspect of this episode is its sense of mystery. What happened to change the past—not to mention how it happened and why? Sure, Kai has concluded that the absence of the prophet Sid is the point of divergence for the two timelines but that's not the only major change—and not the only thing that should have changed. In a pyramid designed to seal the demons (something that should not exist in this new timeline), he finds both Sid's sword and a girl who appears to be the child of several different races imprisoned. What this all means and how it is connected with the changes to the timeline are left unexplained—making them more than a decent hook to keep you coming back.

I also want to mention that I loved the visuals—both in the character design and animation. For example, I thought it was great that Kai's uniform is similar in color and design to the human fighters of this world but the details, including his patches, were all slightly different. That's some good subtle visual storytelling there—showing that things are similar but still off. And on the animation front, I found the action was exciting and easy to follow—even if it wasn't the flashiest of the season.

So all in all, I enjoyed this one and will be back for more next week.

Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? feels a lot like a JRPG. Speaking as someone who likes JRPGs, this is a double-edged gunblade – humans process interactive media like games and passive media like TV. As a result, stories that work in game format can feel clunky and badly paced when placed in a fully linear experience.

The first half of the episode took me back to the bad parts of JRPG adaptations. My hater's brain had been activated by a fully gratuitous shot of a chained-up angel girl's thighs forced into a W-pose. As Kai and his friends drove past the Bass Pro Pyramid in their ugly military vehicle, their dialogue was overstuffed with clunky narration that, robbed of the ability to press a button to get through at my reading speed, made my eyes want to glaze over. I mocked their ridiculous armor, which appeared to be made out of see-through mesh from their solar plexus down. You know, where all the squishy bits are. Fingerless gloves expose their palms so they can get lots of nice blisters when wielding their gunswords.

Then the mid-episode twist hit and you know? I'm an absolute sucker for this kind of narrative. The world changes, and nobody but Kai remembers. His best friends treat him like a stranger, but there are moments when there's a glimmer that their old memories lurk in there somewhere. Not some grand, “I don't know why I trust this guy, but I do,” speech, but small subconscious actions and habits, practically muscle memory. When Ashran tosses Kai the keys to the truck without thinking about it, it's a comfort to Kai but also painful. It's not a lot, but it certainly softened me on the whole thing.

It's not a great show, but it does have the potential to be better than the bad first impression it gave me. If you're looking to while away some hours with a mid-range action fantasy that, according to my husband, resembles a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game, Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? looks to be a perfectly acceptable choice.

Either this inaugural episode of Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? tells us exactly what the rest of the series will be like or it's trying to fool us in some way. It's hard to decide, really – the bookended scenes of a young woman with wings chained up while wearing not a whole lot, tearfully begging protagonist Kai to save her, seem like they belong to a different story, while the middle portion of the episode is trying hard to imply that this is a science fiction epic, with the distinct possibility that the entire world is a simulation. Admittedly, neither Kai's Five Race Harem nor Kai Rewrites Reality seem like particularly interesting stories, but the disconnect is at least intriguing.

The reset of the world is perhaps the strongest element of the story. Kai lives in a version of reality where humans won the Great War of Five Races and trapped the other four in "graveyards," which Kai religiously keeps an eye on. He and his friends Saki and Ashran are part of the official human army, as is the obligatory childhood friend Jeanne. But when everything distorts around Kai and resets, Saki, Ashran, and Jeanne are all part of the human resistance after humans lost the war, and Jeanne is masquerading as a man – and more importantly, Kai doesn't exist. The implication is that Kai's childhood encounter with a graveyard somehow altered his existence, meaning that when the simulation (if that's what it is) ends, he's aware of it when the system reboots into a different version of reality. He's somehow managed to put himself outside the program, and if this really is being run by some computer genius in the sky, that stands to make Kai a very interesting bug – or a chance to get things right rather than resulting in the oppression of the losing parties.

I'm very mixed about the whole thing. I don't love the sexualization of the chained woman, even if the terrible practice uniforms are equal opportunity fanservice. This episode also features some of the worst animated walking downstairs I've seen. The whole "five races war" thing also feels like it was ripped from The Seven Deadly Sins (or vice versa, depending on the dates of source material), and even the world variants are a little too familiar to be entirely successful. I don't think this is terrible, and it may even merit another episode to see what path it plans on heading down, but right now this is riding on its possibilities rather than anything actually happening on-screen.

The best way to explain the quality of this premiere's writing is probably to just explain a single, five-second sequence. Our hero, Kai, is in pitched battle with a giant demon. Using his sword-gun, he fires several bullets to cancel out the magic energy beams his enemy had sent toward him. The demon is surprised at this, to which Kai responds by whispering, under his breath, to nobody but the audience:

"A modified elven bullet. It's a bullet created using elven magic as its base."

That's about the level of world-building and graceful exposition to expect from this entire episode. The basic world building is functionally dirt-simple, attaching various adjectives and lore words to generic magical concepts, but buried under so many Capital Letter Proper Nouns that it's simultaneously convoluted. To remedy that, every character in this episode operates as an exposition factory, bringing up important history and lore for no discernible reason. It's a stiff, robotic way to communicate information to the viewer, and keeps any of these characters from feeling remotely human, while making the world feel terribly artificial.

That's a big problem because the entire hook of this story is seeing Kai ripped away from the world and people he knew as he's throne into some corrupted alternate timeline. We're supposed to be shocked when his friends don't recognize him, and heartbroken when his love interest doesn't remember the future they promised to reach. However, none of those things are possible when those characters were cardboard-thin plot devices for the 10 minutes we knew them. It's kind of the problem with having an entire show based around the bad timeline concept – this sort of thing works better as arcs within a larger show, where viewers can fully appreciate the contrast between the AU versions of the cast.

That kneecaps the show pretty much from the get-go, and the production values certainly don't help. The show manages to string together a halfway decent action scene, but otherwise, it always looks on the verge of falling apart. Every shot of these character designs in profile is a joke, and they already didn't look great from head-on. The overall aesthetic feels like dollar-store Final Fantasy, and not even one of the good games. It's threadbare and generic, which only serves to further suck the drama out of the story. It all combines for a dull mess that doesn't have the writing chops to back up its ambitions, and can't even manage to raise up mild curiosity for its central mystery.

The best and worst thing that I can say about Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? is that it exists. This fairly straightforward mashup of fantasy tropes and military sci-fi contains all of the basic ingredients of its more impressive forebears, but none of the spice. Kai is the affably bland hero at the head of a cast of barely characterized young people with distinct, multi-colored haircuts. They live in a world where humanity is just one monster breakout away from descending into chaos, and our young heroes are the only hope for etc, etc. One day, Kai gets whisked through a portal into an alternate timeline that has descended into that very chaos, and now he must lead his friends — who no longer recognize him — to save the world.

If you're old enough to remember browsing through the Dollar Deals bins at your local video store and marveling at all of the cheap and forgettable straight-to-VHS shlock that filled them, then you know the score. Heck, I even have a more up-to-date analogy I can use: You know how, when you're scrolling through a digital games store like the PlayStation Network, and you see all of those tacky looking visual novels and RPGs that regularly sell for five bucks or less? Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? is kind of like one of those products. Does it deliver on the basic promise of being a science-fantasy action anime with big swords and even bigger monsters to slay? Sure. Does it give you any reason to spend any of your time or money on it over its obviously superior competition, no matter how little it is asking for? No, not really.

The show is so milquetoast that I'm having trouble nailing down any one thing that keeps it from passing muster. It's more that every single element of it is mired in mediocrity. The characters are functional, but completely forgettable; the art is serviceable but lacking in any personality; the world is bog-standard; the demons that Kai fights have been ripped straight from the Monster Manual for Stories that Don't Particularly Care If Their Monsters Are Any Fun; and the story can't even find something cool to do with the alternate-reality twisting of its science fiction setting. None of it is terrible, but that doesn't automatically mean it deserves your attention.

If this were a video game, I'd fully expect it to consist of around 10 hours of mindless dungeon crawls and item hunts, with maybe an hour or two of stiffly written textbox cutscenes to stitch things together. A young kid with too much time on his hands and money to burn might be more than happy to take a gamble on wasting 20 hours, but for me, even 20 minutes is more than enough time to know Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World? is just not worth it.