A friend of mine once complained about anime that starts off action-oriented, but at the end gets "All Glowy" and metaphysical, with your robot jocks having deeply meaningful conversations with ephemeral beings on a blooming white background, spouting pseudo-spiritual/psychological gobbledygook until the final credits.

And it's a valid complaint. (I'm looking at you, Evangelion.)

Yesterday I finally polished off Kono Yo no Hate de Koi wo Utau Shoujo YU-NO, and man, it was a slog. Yeah, they tied together all the crazy "Path" stuff that was kind of interesting about the show in the beginning, including why the adventure went into a pseudo-medieval floating island in another dimension that had been founded by ancient super-science, which plugged into some of the background stuff. And why did our hero's suddenly adult daughter have to perform a religious ritual in order to merge with the ancient computer to save the floating continent from destroying the world in a cross-dimensional crash with the Earth (A cycle that repeats every 400 years)?

Yeah. So the ancient super science society that evacuated the Earth with a chunk of floating continent they shunted into another dimension became medieval and forgot their technology even though they'd been bio-engineered to live there - yet the Emperor knew. (And then the Emperor turned out to be a manifestation of some immortal time criminal, but he got politically ousted by our hero's mom who got zapped there by lightning effectively a decade earlier.)

I'm sorry, have I lost you yet with how Derpy the plot is? I forgot to mention the high school teacher who turns out to be some kind of time cop, who temporarily takes, then restores the hero's memories, and is chasing the criminal slumming it as the floating continent's Emperor because he wants to sabotage the ritual and wreck a lot of stuff?

Well, at least they kept track of a bunch of abandoned sub threads. After Yu-No, the hero's daughter goes off with the computer (The virtualization of the scientist who shunted the continent into another dimension), she seems doomed and will probably be destroyed or lost to time. But she can't because they foreshadowed at the first episode that our hero would find her appearing out of nowhere in his home town. So the hero unwinds his path, bringing the magic jewel one girl he liked needed which he went into the other dimension to get, then abandons her - phasing out of existence without the use of this device he's had that let him navigate the alternative paths, and jumps back to where he found his naked adult daughter on the beach in the beginning.

And then they get all glowy, and he shares Yu-No's fate, getting sucked into the blackness (okay, less glowy) outside of time, where they will be all nakey and hugging together forever, while they watch the tree (thought it was a metaphor, but it's literal!) of all possibilities sprout. They decide to name it, and just before they say the name, it cuts to white, The End.

Yggdrasil! Say the name! Say it! Sheesh, if you're going to go that far to set that up, follow through!

26 episodes, for that. On the plus side, at least the hero got laid a few times. Offscreen of course, which puts him leagues ahead of your typical Shonen hero.

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