Here is another series that our anime club, S.C.A.M., is watching at the moment from the Fall 2011 lineup, and it’s a series that has been deeply recommended to me for my manga reading comeback. It’s Future Diary, which has been said it’s a lot like Death Note, but more complicated–or more fun to watch than Death Note. The second comment is holding true already.

Impressions

A student, Yukiteru, finds that his cell phone acts as a diary of the future: a “Future Diary”, where events written it actually occur. Him and 11 others have the same diaries, which drags Yukiteru into a game of survival. The losers run into a DEAD END, while the winner is elected as a god.

Thoughts

Yukiteru's victorious life is about to get interesting...

Going back to when I watched–or rather read–Death Note for the first time, I was sceptical of how it would go. The first chapter got me hooked from beginning to end. This is how I felt about Future Diary. But with Future Diary, the pace is a little faster, because there are more characters than the previous series in question. And I have to admit that it made more sense.

Deus Ex Machina oversees the events of the diary holders.

Yukiteru is picked on for keeping to himself. Maybe that's a good thing, in his opinion...

The first episode matches the first chapter very well, but with some changes being set in place for the second episode. Having read only one chapter of the manga (yes, I need to change that), it would be fun to see what happens here and there. With Death Note, I read the manga from beginning to end, and the anime slowed it down for me. Watching the anime for Future Diary first, it’s a challenge of stomaching both changes from anime and manga changes. It’s for the better, of course. But there is one thing that sets Future Diary apart from Death Note at all: humor.

Yukiteru meets Yuno, another diary holder and an obsessed fan of his. This familiar to another series...

In the second episode, things get crazy when another user of the diary is revealed. I’ll only give you this–spoilers, obviously: a school is taken hostage; a girl announces her intentions as if this were a sporting event, and someone gets hurt. Who will it be? In the third episode, we find out more about Yukiteru’s new friend, Yuno, and the other diary keepers with their impending demise. I wish I could have read the manga first, but let’s see how this goes before I decide to finish reading.

- Future Diary is currently streaming on FUNimation and Hulu.