Edge of Tomorrow, by Tom Cruise, is a box office hit and is critically acclaimed for its fresh take on the time-loop concept in the modern era. It is a brilliant story in itself, based on the Japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which was adapted into a manga in 2008.
The story follows William Cage, a soldier who has never really fought in a real battle before and is assigned to a suicide mission where he eventually gets killed within minutes. However, he soon finds himself stuck in a time loop, forced to live out the same brutal combat and die over and over again. With each failed attempt Cage gains more insight to engage the bloodthirsty aliens with increasing skill, alongside Special Forces warrior Rita Rose Vrataski.
Even after all those cool concepts, it still cannot hold up to the complexity of storytelling and artful geniuses that some of the anime have. Here’s a list of 5 anime series that have integrated time loop scenarios with character growths and emotional depth so well that it makes Edge of Tomorrow look like a creatively bankrupt film in comparison.
Summertime Rendering
Shinpei Ajiro was brought up with the Kofune sisters Ushio and Mio after his parents died, then later moved to Tokyo to live completely alone. Two years later, in July 2018, he returned to his hometown of Hitogashima Island, Wakayama Prefecture to attend Ushio’s funeral on notification of her death by drowning.
However, Shinpei’s suspicion arose when he received news of strangle marks around Ushio’s neck, which implies she was murdered intentionally. Now haunted by her “shadow” and aided by Mio, Shinpei tries to find out what really happened to Ushio and maybe save the residents from some strange dark enigma.
The series comprises a bunch of different genres, like Fantasy, Magic, and Supernatural Beings combined with the intricately written time loop aspect of the story, which easily sets it apart from Edge of Tomorrow by far.
Summertime Rendering is a 2022 TV series and is available to watch internationally on Disney+ and Hulu.
Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World
Subaru Natsuki is a NEET who is suddenly summoned to a fantasy-like world. Just after arriving, he is killed while trying to help a young half-elf he befriends, Emilia, who is a candidate to become the next ruler of the Kingdom of Lugunica, only to revive some hours in the past. After dying a few times, Subaru realizes that he has the power to turn back time after his death.
After successfully helping Emilia, Subaru starts living in one of the Mansions of Roswaal L. Mathers as a butler. Out of gratitude and affection for Emilia, Subaru makes use of his newfound ability to protect her and help with her ambition to be successfully appointed as the next queen, also assisting other friends he makes along the way.
However, he still suffers due to the pain inflicted on him every time he dies, and carrying along the memories of everything that happened before his power activates, which is forgotten by everybody except for him.
Re:Zero would be the closest representation of Edge of Tomorrow, where both the MCs get revived from the previous spawn point, only to change the future in a better way. But, the way Re:Zero presented it was overwhelmingly dark which Edge of Tomorrow lacks with its rather straightforward approach.
You can stream Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World on Crunchyroll or can also watch it on Apple TV.
Erased
In 2006, 29-year-old Satoru Fujinuma, a struggling mangaka living in Chiba, possesses an involuntary ability known as “Revival” that sends his consciousness back in time moments before a life-threatening incident. It enabled him to prevent the incident from happening again.
When his mother is murdered by an unknown assailant in his own home, Satoru’s ability sends him back eighteen years into the past and Satoru is given the opportunity to not only save his mother but also prevent a serial killer from taking the lives of three of his childhood friends including a young girl from another school.
Erased crafted a perfectly balanced story of time loop consisting of the suspense murder thriller aspect, with a rather grounded cast. The characters here are relatable, which helped the story to have a long-lasting effect on the viewers that Edge of Tomorrow certainly couldn’t.
Erased is available to watch on Netflix.
Link Click
Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang run Time Photo Studio, accepting clients’ requests to eliminate their regrets! With a photo given by a client, Cheng Xiaoshi can travel back in time at the moment when the photo was taken to assume the role of its photographer.
In so doing, he also acquires all the memories and feelings of the photographer. Meanwhile, Lu Guang is able to count events in time and helps Cheng Xiaoshi replay the photographer’s experience. The two work under conditions such that they have only 12 hours and one chance to travel in time to find what the client is looking for while managing to leave events in the past unchanged.
Although Link Click is a Chinese donghua (Chinese animation), it surpassed even some of the highest-rated anime of all time with the amount of impact it shattered with the release of its first season. The core mechanism of the time traveling in Link Click far surpasses most of the well-written time travel shows, subjectively making it a better watch than Edge of Tomorrow.
Link Click is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.
Steins;Gate
Steins;Gate is an anime adaptation of the visual novel under the same name. It is set in Akihabara, Tokyo (2010), where a self-proclaimed “mad scientist” Rintaro Okabe runs the “Future Gadget Laboratory” in an apartment with his friends Mayuri Shiina and Itaru Hashida (Daru).
Okabe attends a conference about time travel where he discovers the dead body of a neuroscience researcher Kurisu Makise and sends a text message about it to Daru. But later he finds out that Kurisu is alive, and the message had arrived before he sent it.
The lab members soon found that this cell phone-operated microwave oven they were working with could send messages back in time. So they joined forces with Kurisu and started investigating it by sending messages as “D-mails” to the past to change the present. Later, Kurisu eventually created a device that could send memories through the microwave oven, effectively allowing the user to time travel.
No amount of praise would be enough to justify how masterclass of a show Steins;Gate is. Not only in the anime medium but also spanning the whole entertainment industry, one who has watched and understood Steins;Gate would say that it’s the closest to perfection for explaining the concept of time travel. With no open loopholes left, this can easily be called the best this genre can ever offer.
Steins;Gate is currently available to watch on Crunchyroll.
