Mirai Nikki - Another:World - (Ep 1) First Impression

Arata (Okada Masaki) is a college student who is lazy and has no motivation in what he is going to with his life. However, he does have the motivation to update his status on his diary in his cellphone. One day, while having lunch with his friends at school, one of his friends accidentally spills his drink on Arata's cellphone. But Arata is not angry at all. However, his friend Rui (Hongo Kanata) happens to be carrying an extra cellphone with him, so he gives Arata a limited edition Chronus smartphone to use for now, until he can repair Arata's damaged cellphone. Arata gets all exited to be using a new smartphone.

When Arata returns home to his parents. His parents are worried about his future with no goals in his life. But Arata tells them to not be worried about it and he will figure things out on his own. He returns to his room and continues to update his diary on the new smartphone. But the next morning, he notices something strange going on with his smartphone and that it is automatically updating his status on his diary for him. Later on, he notices his diary updates every few minuets on whats going to happen to him ahead of time. He uses this to his advantages to win the lottery, win pachinko games, and even to cheat on his Economics exam.

Later, after the exam, a girl walks up to him and introduces herself as Yuno (Gouriki Ayame),  She tells him that she knows everything about his past and future. Arata gets confused by all this and slowly walks way from her. He later returns home with only his mother inside the house. His smartphone diary gets an update saying that his parents are getting an divorce. Arata is shocked about this news and so he tries to call his dad to tell him to return home immediately. But Arata sees Yuno waiting outside of his home, in the middle of the night (stalker alert!), and wants to talk to him. Yuno tells him that she knows about his parents divorce and wanted to meet him just to cheer him up. However, Atata is creeped out by her and tells her that this type of situation is called stalking someone. Yuno apologizes for bothering him and runs away.

After that, he gets an "Dead End" message from his phone. Meaning that he will die. He also gets another message that he will meet Rui at the Planetarium. So, he does that. But when he arrives there, he gets chased down by a serial killer who was on the lose. Lucky, he got rescued by Yuno with a baseball bat. Yuno then tells him that she has a phone just like his, but hers is about Atara's furture, hence she calls it the Akkun Diary. But the serial killer continues to chase them down. Arata almost gets stabbed by the killer, but instead his father took the hit for him. As his father lays there dying, Arata discovers that his fathers also has a Chronus phone.

Eventually, Arata and Yuno met up with Rui who came to the planetarium to rescue his sister who was kidnapped by the killer. Rui tells them that he purposely gave them the phone because he was threatened to do so by the killer. All the sudden, the lights went out and a giant "happy face" projects on the planetarium screen saying that he is Deus, the host of the game. He explains that they are part of a game where people take other people's future and there's only one winner.

Thoughts: The first episode alone was very fast paced and all these events just happens so quickly that there was no time to rest in between. Anyway, it felt very weird watching this live-action adaptation. I guess I'm use to watching the animated version. So, it will take some time for me to get use to the changes occurred in this drama. For example, not all characters are going to be similar to the original story. And, Deus will be shown as an "happy face" avatar. Obviously, the story needs to be changed in order to fit into approximately 11 episode series. Overall, the first episode did not make a big impression on me, but I am hoping that as the story progresses, it will get better and hopefully stays true to the essence of the original story.