What happens when you take twenty-seven volumes of manga and try to condense it down to twelve episodes of anime? It's an issue that we've seen many times before with mixed results, but in the case of A Town Where You Live, based on Koji Seo (of Suzuka fame)'s manga, the answer is unfortunately "nothing good." With its plotlines abridged and its characters distilled down to their most striking (and least likable) elements, A Town Where You Live suffers from heavy-handed symbolism and players who are more cardboard cutouts than real people, making it a chore to sit through.

The story follows Haruto Kirishima, a high school student from Shobara, Hiroshima. Just before he began high school, his family took in Yuzuki Eba, the daughter of a family friend from Tokyo who was having trouble getting along with her new step-sister Rin. While Haruto is at first less than thrilled to have this new girl thrust upon him, she quickly changes his mind, and the two eventually begin dating. When Yuzuki returns to Tokyo, the two try to maintain a long-distance relationship, only for her to cut him off (via text message) without any real explanation. Crushed, Haruto moves to Tokyo for the rest of high school, moving in with his older sister. Things quickly get complicated when he befriends Asuka and Kyousuke – Asuka falls for Haruto with impressive speed, while Kyousuke quickly turns out to be the ultimate nice guy who suffers from a disease. Needless to say, Kyousuke is part of the reason for Yuzuki's defection, as well as an attempt to inject a note of tragic poignancy into the story.

If this all sounds melodramatic – it most certainly is. What would work drawn out over a longer stretch of time, with the chance to truly develop the characters and make us care about them, backfires in the time crunch of minutes per episode. The Kyousuke storyline, hailed by manga readers as some of the strongest and taking roughly two and a half volumes, is over and done in two episodes, never even telling us what Kyousuke's particular illness was or what kind of operation would lead to either a cure or instant death. This gives us less of a chance to understand Yuzuki's feelings on the subject or Haruto's own conflicted emotions, merely mentioning that she has feelings because of the past and he feels conflicted without developing either angle. This glossing-over of the deeper emotions tangled up with the plot renders the characters much more unsympathetic than they need to be, making us question why Haruto is so invested in Yuzuki in the first place.

It becomes all too apparent that Yuzuki's first response to an issue she doesn't want to deal with is to run away. She and Haruto first meet as children because she's run away from her father; later she comes to live with the Kirishimas because she's running away from her issues with Rin. When she can't figure out what to do with Kyousuke and Haruto, she runs from Haruto, and the cycle continues through the end of the series. She has good intentions, but her first instinct to flee rather than work things out has negative consequences for everyone else in her life, and that's never really sufficiently addressed. If Yuzuki had even once faced up to her problems, about half of the melodrama could have been avoided.

The narrative of the series does try to cope with some of its issues by using flashbacks within each episode to show us how things got to the point where the anime begins, with Haruto moving to Tokyo. In some respects, this is a good way to go about cramming in as much content as possible. We get a real sense of how long it took for Haruto to fall for Yuzuki and a good idea of his hometown, arguably the most important setting in the show. The continued use of this device does begin to wear thin as it is used too frequently, but in the first four episodes or so, it gets the job done. Animation is also consistently attractive, and if character faces can be a bit immobile, it's made up for by gorgeous scenery, cats who move like felines do, and a generally good flow to motion. The voice work is also well done, especially Ayane Sakura's Asuka, who does one of the best jagged crying scenes I've heard.

None of this is quite enough to make up for the fact that the story is clearly abridged within an inch of its life. While this doesn't technically adapt all twenty-seven volumes of manga – more like fifteen, which is still a sizable amount – it does condense things as much as it can, making this feel more like a whiny teen romance than it should. Adding in the extensive use of symbolism like the spider lilies that fill the Kyousuke episodes or the over-abundance of Stray Cats, (meant to indicate that everyone is just searching for their place to belong?) to say nothing of the broken red umbrella, A Town Where You Live mostly feels like a lost opportunity to create a moving story.