The Future Diary

The Future Diary

The Future Diary Cover Art featuring Yukiteru Amano and Yuno Gasai
The Future Diary Cover Art

Overview

The Future Diary is an action/psychological thriller anime about a killing game between 12 people to determine which of them will become the new god of the world. Each player has a diary, usually in the form of a cell phone, that can tell them a specific type of future which they can use to their advantage to win the game.

Most of the show is about the various players trying to eliminate each other which is fine, but much of it still doesn’t make sense. For instance, there’s a child in the game who apparently has access to chemical weapons.

But even if we look past the things like that which make no sense, the final two or three episodes really ruined the show for me. It got even weirder than it already was, but not in a good way. It’s like the writer wasn’t sure how he wanted the show to end so he just threw something together that didn’t really have to do with the rest of the show.

Honestly the plot doesn’t sound that good because it really isn’t that good of a plot, but bear with me because the show does have at least one good thing going for it and that’s Yuno Gasai. Yuno is basically the sole reason the show is any good.

Characters

Like with Parasyte, there are only really two characters that matter in The Future Diary. These are Yukiteru Amano and Yuno Gasai.

Amano is a loner, as is often the case with male main characters in anime, who spends all his time writing on his phone about everything that goes on around him. Because of this, his diary tells him the future about what’s going on around him indiscriminately. This should be a good future diary to have except if something is happening from a distance or if something involves him directly he won’t know about it.

Yuno is a psychopath who is also one of Amano’s classmates. She’s obsessed with Amano and so the diary she wrote was just filled with notes about Amano. Her future diary is similar in that it tells her Amano’s future, and only Amano’s future.

As the yandere character, her obsession with Amano drives her to violence and furthers her psychotic breakdown. She’s unpredictable to an extent which makes her character the most entertaining and interesting one. Sure, you know she’ll probably do something violent, but it could literally be anything and there’s no way to really guess what she’ll do next.

Yuno Gasai firing an MP5
Yuno Gasai

Conclusion

Despite the ending of the show being bad, and other parts of it not making much logical sense even within the scope of the series, The Future Diary is still a good anime. If nothing else, it at least introduced us to Yuno, an example of how one character can carry an entire anime.

In the end I gave The Future Diary a 7/10 because despite the issues, it was enjoyable to watch.

The OP for The Future Diary is available here as always.

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