English Dub Review: ISLAND “I Want to Keep Liking You”
Recover what you’ve forgotten.
Overview:
Just when Rinne and Setsuna seem to bond, some unexpected problems occur.
Our Take:
For a mystery to be mysterious, it has to have tension, not just have random curveballs thrown at the audience. I’ve said before that this series has a very dire tone problem, and while that seems to be fixed this time around, as it’s finally more serious, it really shouldn’t have taken seven episodes to get to this point.
Another problem is that it can’t seem whether to decide whether it’s a mundane story or a fantastical one. The first episode began with Setsuna declaring that he’s a time traveler, and everyone seems to take this in stride, indicating that the supernatural is something normal on the island. However, later Setsuna goes back on that, despite his original confidence that his adventures as a time traveler were real, indicating that it could possibly be some kind of delusion. Here, he seems to be wavering between the two, dismissing it as ridiculous and then instantly deciding that it’s real. While this could be showing Setsuna’s indecisiveness, it doesn’t come off as such and seems more like the writers being unable to figure out what they’re doing.
A lot comes out in this episode, such as Rinne recalling some of her memories after she fell into the sea, but that still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The most being, how did she and Setsuna manage to barely survive for five years, and why were the clothes she returned to exactly the same as when she left. Also, how did she manage to keep her looks the same? Is the supernatural real or not?
A mystery needs confusing and unclear elements. However, a mystery also needs some things to be clear, certain things to be regarded as fact as something that the audience can purely rely on. In this case, we aren’t really left with the ability to trust anything, with curveballs being thrown left and right. There’s little that the audience can rely on, so there’s little that we’re left with to believe. Having the audience in a constant state of disbelief isn’t helpful to your story- quite the opposite.
Adapting a visual novel is hard, but this one is done so sloppily that no tension exists when there should be. Also, the line of how Rinne isn’t a kid is only more hilarious since she looks maybe 12 at most. But apparently, she’s 23, as expected of anime. She’s supposed to be 17 actually, but even that’s a stretch.
Hi Ashley, thank you so much for reading and we love the feedback. Note that on that day we had 14th posts go up and only ten posts show on the front page, so it's possible the preview had already been archived by the time you got to it. One recommendation would be to add our RSS feed to your favorite news aggregator service like Feedly, this way you get all of the latest posts!