The Summer 2024 Anime Preview Guide

ATRI: My Dear Moments

Natsuki Ikaruga is a boy who lost his mother and his leg in an accident some years earlier. He returns disillusioned from a harsh life in the big city to find his old countryside home half-swallowed by the sea. Left without a family, all he has to his name is the ship and submarine left to him by his oceanologist grandmother and her debts. His only hope to restore the dreams for the future that he has lost is to take up an opportunity presented to him by the suspicious debt collector Catherine. They set sail to search the sunken ruins of his grandmother's laboratory for a treasure rumor says she left there. What they find is not riches or jewels: it is a strange girl lying asleep in a coffin at the bottom of the sea. The robot Atri.

ATRI: My Dear Moments is based on Aniplex.exe's visual novel game. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Quick question. What does “I'll be your leg, Master!” even mean? That's what Atri announces to Natsuki at the end of the episode but I can't seem to fathom exactly how she intends to do that.

Does she mean literally? Like she'll transform from a human-shaped robot into a leg? As hilarious as that would be, that's not how this visual novel genre tends to roll. I could see it happening in a weirder gag comedy but in a moody, melancholic setting like this with a mopey protagonist, nah.

Or does she mean metaphorically, like she'll give him all the emotional support he needs to keep walking forward, literally and metaphorically? Because, uh, that's not going to be super helpful, either. Dude doesn't need a cute, squeaky anime girl cheering for him. He needs a new leg in a very material way because his natural leg was amputated a long time ago and his prosthetic is busted. No amount of high-pitched encouragement is going to change that.

I may be more inclined to give ATRI: My Dear Moments the benefit of the doubt if it didn't positively reek of male otaku-oriented visual novel contrivances. Natsuki was fine, if a bit mopey, and I always appreciate a disabled character who is presented as actually disabled, relying on mobility aids and dealing with challenges unique to their situation like prosthetic pain. The rest of the cast, on the other hand, were all Types of Characters: the mercenary older lady with a low-cut shirt who would hop into bed with the protagonist the moment he let her; the childhood friend who is vaguely worried about him wants him to live a Normal Life; and the peppy, childlike girl who will inevitably be revealed to have a Tragic Past. Even if the world and story were interesting (and I didn't find them to be), the trope-y characters would drive me away.

And to be clear, I'm not dunking on VNs. My favorite genre of game is “visual novel with puzzle elements.” I'm dunking on cookie-cutter characters that just reiterate tropes, and then when the inevitable tragedy happens, I'm expected to cry over them. Thanks, but I'll pass.

…but maybe first I'll learn what that line means. It's baffling.

It's funny, from practically the first scene of this anime, I was certain that this was adapted from a visual novel. Something about the dialogue and visuals—the exposition and the static shots—made it obvious. But more than that, there was the weight hanging above the story that I've seen only in visual novels and their adaptations. Everything is so saturated with emotional drama that it feels almost self-indulgent.

We have Natsuki, a boy who lost his leg and now deals with an ill-fitting prosthetic. In this episode alone, we watch him deal with not only his disability but claustrophobia, a panic attack, almost drowning, and massive amounts of guilt over deciding to sell Atri. We're thrown into the emotional deep end and are expected to take all this in—to be invested by default. And frankly, I don't quite think it pulls it off. There's not enough setup. I don't feel particularly invested in either Natsuki or Atri. Even the mystery of Atri's past does little to interest me.

Without that connection, I am largely distracted by the fact that parts of the show clashed with my memories. When I was a kid, I was on a local swim team. Our coach had only one leg—and it didn't stop him from swimming circles around all of us. (I also have a particularly vivid memory of him playing tag with all the kids—him, sans prosthetic, hopping on his one leg up and down the pool-side bleachers, outrunning us all with seemingly no effort.) So I was thrown by the fact that Natsuki was seemingly unable to swim—and that we're just supposed to accept that like it's a given.

Despite my inability to mesh with the show, I don't think I'd call ATRI “bad” exactly. After all, it's both visually pretty and vocally well-performed. However, I feel that this is an anime aimed at the emotional masochists among us—those who enjoy being swept away in a torrent of emotion. If that sounds like you, I bet you'll like this one. But I don't see ATRI being much of a hit for everyone else.

They had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie. Through the opening act of this premiere, I was intrigued. The setting was rather unique – a post-climate disaster world where vast swathes of land have been lost to the ocean, with the survivors struggling on to maintain some kind of normalcy. There was atmosphere, a sense of tragic foreboding as Natsuki descended into the depths and saw the sunken ruins of his old home. It really felt like we were building to something intense, and the mysterious robot hooked me when he discovered it down there. I was excited to see where all this was going.

Then we came back from the first eyecatch and my excitement deflated with every word out of that robot girl's mouth. It's kind of astonishing how much of a buzzkill Atri's insufferably pwecious personality was for me, but she really did suck the energy out of the whole affair. Sure, I wasn't thrilled by the other characters besides Natsuki – Catherine is an annoying clone of Misato without the charm, and Natsuki's childhood friend is a timid wallflower – but adding in Atri's squeaky robot lines, complete with calling Natsuki her master, dragged everything down below the water.

More than her dialogue, it's Atri's obvious role in this story that I'm just not interested in. Natsuki is clearly suffering from a lot of trauma: he has nightmares about the incident where he lost his leg, is purposefully distancing himself from his old friend, and has a full-on mental break when he first sees Atri. There's a lot you could do with that, but this episode telegraphs its goal way ahead of time: Atri is here to be the precious, selfless companion who will heal Natsuki's pain and, in her own words, be his leg so he can keep walking forward. That's not a terrible idea, but it's about the most common and sappiest direction to take a story that seemed to have so much more promise when the episode started.

It's the kind of story that works better in visual novels, where the dialogue and humor is more up to the player's imagination, and a certain level of interactivity can make these characters feel more intimate. As an anime, though? I liked it more before I really knew what it was about.

I haven't played the game this series is based on yet, but it's just moved up my wishlist by several places. I perhaps ought to mention that stories about drowned cities are like catnip to me – Port Royale, the mythical Lyonesse, Atlantis…something about the idea of a town continuing to exist beneath the waves has always been very appealing. So the moment Natsuki dives down in his submersible to find his childhood home still standing beneath the waves, I was hooked. The scenery of the telephone poles still standing, wires remaining strung while the fish swim down the streets was honestly enough for me. To then add to that by having our first glimpse of Atri herself looking like a maritime Snow White with fish watching over her glass coffin just solidified my enjoyment.

That's a good thing, because even within the short space of this episode, I already despise one of the characters. Atri and Minamo may be too sweet for their own good, and Natsuki may be a touch potato-like, but Catherine (not her real name, apparently) is detestable. Her drive to push Natsuki to explore his recently-deceased grandmother's drowned home in search of a nebulous "treasure" is unhinged, even without adding in the fact that Natsuki is a disabled child, and then her more or less forcing him to agree to sell Atri mere moments after he promised Minamo that he wouldn't (and when he's also clearly conflicted about it) is just as bad. Her argument appears to be that if he sells Atri, he can afford a more advanced prosthetic leg, but that doesn't quite pass the sniff test when we factor in her pressure for him to dive in a rickety machine and the way she speeds up when she sees him running after her bike, crutch thrown aside. No, I don't believe that she was speeding up because of the car, uncharitable of me as that may be.

As with many first episodes, this functions as a prologue, or at least it feels that way. It works because it gives us the backstory for Minamo and Natsuki, explains the world, and allows insight into Atri herself and her status as a Humanoid – a far too human Humanoid who was recalled and discontinued. None of it is fully explained, but we get enough to make us ask questions, and crucially for a visual novel adaptation, there aren't yet any points where we can tell that players were originally supposed to make a dialogue choice. It isn't perfect, and I'm leery of both Atri and Minamo devolving into Natsuki-worshiping non-characters, but right now, I'm very interested in seeing where this goes while hoping for more beautiful imagery of a world overtaken by the sea.

ATRI -My Dearest Moments- is a very Waterworld-coded anime, so my interest in the series was already piqued when I started its premiere, because Young James was inexplicably fond of that weird move. What can I say? Maybe it's because I'm a Pacific Islander, but I've always dug sci-fi and fantasy stories that revolve around vast oceans, creaky boats, and spooky undersea ruins. ATRI has all of those things, and it even tosses in a mysterious amnesiac robot-girl unearthed from pod, so the part of Young James that was obsessed with Outlaw Star on Toonami is also satisfied!

That said, ATRI is far from a perfect show, and the main issue holding me back from recommending it wholeheartedly is its weak cast of characters. None of them are terrible, but they are all being drawn from obvious tropes without much in the way of extra embellishment or creativity. In some cases, that is alright with me, like with the conniving and mischievous Catherine, because I'm fond of that particular archetype. On the other hand, you have our main character, Natsuki, whose generic personality can't be offset by the interesting wrinkle of living with a prosthetic leg. I couldn't even tell you the name of Natsuki's pouty friend-girl, who shows up for a few minutes to do the whole "It's not like I like him!" shtick before promptly being scuttled back off into the void.

The biggest letdown, though, is Atri herself. Despite being a fully functional android with mysterious memory gaps that survived decades at the bottom of the ocean, she is probably the least interesting element of the show. This is a problem, seeing at the series is named after her. Her whole cutesy-little-sister-that-also-calls-you-"Master" shtick feels like its trying so hard to make you adore this robot, and it is too cloying by half, reeking of a lack of confidence in simply telling an interesting story instead of pandering to assumed audience expectations.

There's enough care and artistry in this premiere to make me think that its creators, at least, are convinced that this is a story worth telling, and I'd love for ATRI's characters and story to live up to their potential. It presents itself well enough, and I have to believe that this whole setup has a plan to go somewhere. I'm not going to get my hopes up, and I'm not telling anyone that they need to rush out and see this premiere right away. Still, I'm willing to give it at least one more episode to see if there's more to it than what we got in this premiere.