What a dull way to start Summer off…

This has to be one of the blandest visual novel adaptations I’ve seen, and it’s not that it didn’t have the potential to be interesting, but it just buries all that potential under massive loads of cliches and lets the plot carry the protagonist along.

That second problem is sort of a reverse-Another situation, where in that show, the protagonist contributed almost literally nothing to the plot and he just kind of bumbled through it like an idiot. In ISLAND, our boy Setsuna seems to have read the script, because he seems to run on pure plot contrivance fuel without us getting any idea what’s going through his head.

And in this very first episode, we’ve set up:
* Uncomfortable sexual encounters involving high school-aged or younger girls
* Amnesia
* Time travel
* Weird illness that doesn’t physically show (a.k.a. Soap Opera Disease)
* A shut in character
* Impromptu singing
* An insular culture who hates outsiders
* An incredibly vague goal for the protagonist that he can’t remember

It’s an awful lot to take in, or at least it would be if that wasn’t just an easy list of overused visual novel tropes, but either way the result is that I have trouble remembering what happened because it all just came out to be boring on the other side. The shows this most reminded me of were Eden of the East, Steins;Gate and The Lost Village, but it doesn’t have the script to be able to stand up next to any of those (and yes, I do totally count Lost Village as a great show because it’s supposed to be a stupid B-movie).

It’s just a twelve-car pileup of 2000′s-era visual novel trash with no sense of how to maintain tension or frame a scene. The art isn’t the worst thing, but it’s not interesting either, and I can’t imagine a world where it makes a turnaround. 3/10.