When I say I sometimes like exploring the science fiction genre, I mean a 400-year-old alien looking like a 25-year-old tsundere professor falling in love with her celebrity neighbor. Parallel universes are okay, but only within the Kingdom of Corea and Seoul. I didn’t have to listen to how it works. But somehow, To Every You I’ve Loved Before and To Me, The One Who Loved You explained what a parallel universe is and my brain could only contain so much geeky science stuff. The two movies don’t have to be watched chronologically, you’d just get a different ending depending on which movie you saw first.
And that got me curious.
So Nicole and I watched the movies simultaneously, me seeing To Every You I’ve Loved Before first, and this is my experience.
What is it about
Our main guy is Koyomi Takasaki, whose first huge life decision happened when he was seven. His parents were divorcing and he had to choose with whom he is going to live. In the first movie I saw, he chooses to live with his mom. He enters his local high school, tried and failed to improve his social life, until one of his classmates Kazune Takigawa, approaches him, telling him that she is the Kazune of the 85th World, where she and Koyomi are actually lovers.
The experience
The story didn’t make sense to me at first. It went by in a blur and it was all about how parallel shifts, optional shifts, and other kinds of shifts work. I am not sure if I wasn’t just listening intently to the explanations, or somehow I missed the part where they explained where Kazune’s 0th-world version went missing. I had so many questions until Kazune read a letter that I knew maybe, just maybe, my second movie will make everything make sense.
And making sense of the whole story it did. To Me, The One Who Loved You showed a little bit more of Shiori Sato, Koyomi’s childhood friend who got stuck in another world and Koyomi made it his life mission to save her. The second movie gave me a lot of a-ha moments, which makes it a requirement to watch both movies in my opinion. The premise is good, and I must say the concept is original. There are just some parts that I didn’t understand and I would need someone else to discuss them with.
Overall, I liked the movies and the experience. I love the idea that the 100 Koyomis would love the 100 Kazunes of different worlds, hence the title. Oh yes, the romance side of the story still won me in the end.
