English Dub Review: Island “Love Me When We Meet Again”

Some plot twists that come out of nowhere.

Overview:

Setsuna and Rinne find themselves back on the island.

Our Take:

I really can’t stress enough how god-awful this series is, and this episode only solidified it.

So I’ve said this before in a previous review, but besides having a serious tone problem, this series can’t decide what genre it is. Of course, genres can overlap, but this time it jumps all over the place. It’s particularly bad in this episode. Setsuna, or really the mystery person this time around, has said he’s a time traveler. This has been something that everyone weirdly accepts, which is strange because that’s never explained but is in line with a small island and their superstitions regarding reincarnation. The thing is, Setsuna’s statement of there being time travel has never been proven beyond statements. People in the series accept it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s true because, we, the audience have never seen any proof. This is (trying) to be a mystery series, and while it’s necessary to trick the audience somehow, deliberately denying the audience a very crucial part of worldbuilding is very counterproductive.

The only real mystery has been whether reincarnation is real or superstition, and how Rinne managed to stay perfectly preserved for five years. And then came this episode, which not only introduced machines that create artificial stasis but that this is a secret hidden is… confusing. There was never any sort of indication that futuristic technology existed, so this came out of absolutely nowhere. The series has given more leadup into the existence of magic as opposed to something technology based. The island that the original Setsuna and Rinne was abandoned on it turns out had a stasis machine that was never revealed to the public, one that washed up on shore. Does this sound familiar? It shouldn’t, because it has absolutely never been introduced before.

So all of this added together is just a confusing experience, and not a very good one. Perhaps this was better paced in the visual novel but here it’s a time travel macguffin. Everything can be fixed with a time stasis machine that we thought to introduce right now! This solves everything!

Thing is, if this was a gag/humor series, it would be great. After all, absurdity is one of the ingredients for good comedy. Unfortunately, this is not a gag series, this is something meant to be taken completely seriously, and it’s so ridiculous that there’s no way to do that.