Terrible Anime Challenge: Kamisama ni Natta Hi and The Path To Pursuing What Counts

“History isn’t kind to men who play God.” –James Bond, No Time To Die

When a mysterious girl proclaiming herself God appears in front of high school student Yōta Narukami and declares that the world will end within a month, Yōta is skeptical. However, the girl, calling herself Hina Sato, manages to convince Yōta of her power by correctly deducing the outcome of a horse race, and she offers to help him pursue his feelings for Kyōko Izanami. While Yōta is initially irritated by Hina’s pompous and all-knowing attitude, he is shocked that his parents would allow Hina to stay with them. Over the course of the summer, Yōta comes to follow her suggestions as he tries to impress Kyōko and set in motion the events to help her accept her mother’s death, helps to revitalise a failing ramen shop, participate in Sora, his younger sister’s, film, attend a summer festival and even win a mahjong competition. Yōta learns that Hina had been abandoned as a child because of an untreatable neurodegenerative disorder, but her adoptive grandfather moved heaven and earth to create a quantum neural control interface that gave Hina a normal life, and moreover, his parents had agreed to look after Hina. Quite separately, Hiroto, a foreign computer systems prodigy, learns that Hina possesses a unique device far surpassing anything available to humanity, and when denied the opportunity to study it, realises he was being used and elects to help Hina. While Hina is captured towards the end of Sora’s filming project and taken away for surgery, Yōta is unable to move on and ends up pursuing a lead from Hiroto. Against all odds, he is able to find Hina, who is living at an assisted care facility. While he is initially unable to elicit a reaction from Hina, his unorthodox methods leads Hina to demonstrate that she still possesses memories of their time together during the previous summer. After Hina returns home, they watch Sora’s film together, and Yōta promises to be together with Hina no matter what challenges cross their path. This is Kamisama ni Natta Hi (The Day I Became a God), P.A. Works’ title for the fall season of 2020. With its intriguing premise and Ayane Sakura in the leading role, Kamisama ni Natta Hi drew my interest, only to drop off my radar as I became swamped with other matters and hit a roadblock with the introduction of mahjong. Kamisama ni Natta Hi thus fell to the back of my mind, and for the longest time, I simply lacked the motivation to carry on. However, the anime community I’m a part of wouldn’t hear of this and suggested that I continue. On their suggestion, I continued watching Kamisama ni Natta Hi, learning in the process that beyond the barrier of mahjong and Hiroto’s initially-disagreeable traits, Kamisama ni Natta Hi was in fact, right up my alley.

At its core, Kamisama ni Natta Hi is classic Jun Maeda, who is best known for his stories that deal with an appreciation for the ordinary, and treasuring the time that one spends with those important to them. While Maeda’s themes invariably focus on how having memories and moments to reflect fondly on give individuals the strength to overcome seemingly-insurmountable challenges, his stories differ in terms of background and context. Angel Beats! is probably the closest of Maeda’s previous works to Kamisama ni Natta Hi; both stories deal with the significance of being able to live a normal life and participate in the things that youth typically would. While these things are easy to take for granted, folks afflicted with medical conditions or live in difficult circumstances are denied these luxuries: Maeda’s works all share this theme, and it becomes clear that to Maeda, there is no greater treasure than normalcy. However, Angel Beats! had placed the characters in a new world to give them a second go at things, while here in Kamisama ni Natta Hi, Yōta is dropped into a situation where Hina’s origins and claims are initially unclear. However, like Angel Beats!‘ Yuzuru Otonashi, Yōta quickly learns of the significance of what Hina had intended to accomplish, and in the aftermath, is able to appreciate what lies beyond the deadline that Hina continued to mention. With this strength in him, Yōta is able to summon the strength to continue caring for Hina: in this way, Hina becomes Kamisama ni Natta Hi‘s Yui, and Yōta is an amalgamation of Yuzuru and Hideki Hinata’s characters. While the contexts might differ wildly, the end message is the same: as people spend time together and come to appreciate one another, the ensuing bonds that form are resilient. Yōta’s words parallel that of Hideki’s, with the two promising that no matter what the distance, they’d always find a way to be together. When it became apparent that Kamisama ni Natta Hi intended to take this path, my enjoyment of the series skyrocketed, and I found myself feeling foolish to have considered dropping the series. Kamisama ni Natta Hi initially opens with events that seem disjointed and unrelated, but as the series progresses, it becomes clear that there is a reason behind the choices made within the series.

Screenshots and Commentary

• My initial decision to watch Kamisama ni Natta Hi was almost entirely motivated by the fact that Hina is voiced by Ayane Sakura, who I know best as GochiUsa‘s Cocoa Hoto, and for the fact that I’d not seen something from P.A. Works since 2018’s Iroduku: The World in Colours. The series had been a little slow to start for me, with Hina’s energy and enigmatic presence being the primary driving force behind my interest in the series. Smug, conceited and possessing the powers to match her mouth, Hina is an interesting character, resembling Angel Beats!’ Yui.

• Yōta, on the other hand, is an ordinary high school student. He’s reluctant to believe that the world could end in thirty days, and continues to study for his entrance exams after Hina’s arrival. I was quite intrigued to see what this entailed – Kamisama ni Natta Hi didn’t seem like a series to deal in large-scale cataclysms that could trigger an extinction-level event, and being set in the real-world, one wonders about Hina’s true origin.

• All of Jun Maeda’s works follow a very well-defined pattern, utilising over-the-top, excessive humour in the beginning to give viewers the sense that we were dealing with distinct characters whose traits would bounce off one another. Of course, this would inevitably mean that the story will, at some point, take everything away from the protagonists. Maeda is famous for this approach, and while they were very successful with things like AIR, Kanon and CLANNAD, audiences have become very divided his works owing to how little variety there is: since the method was used originally, reusing it means that viewers inevitably know what to expect.

• I happen to be in the camp of folks who enjoy Maeda’s approach – his exaggerated portrayals of mirth and sorrow speak to the spectrum of emotions people can experience in life, and the juxtaposition between melancholy and joy has always been something I found to bring his works to life. Early in Kamisama ni Natta Hi, almost everything is nonsensical as Hina settles in with the Narukami family. Sora doesn’t really get along with Hina all that well in the beginning, being nonplussed at Hina’s mannerisms.

• I personally found Hina to be adorable, doubly so for the fact that Sakura voices Hina the same way she did Cocoa and Iroha. Here, Yōta and Hina share watermelon together – like Angel Beats!, Kamisama ni Natta Hi places a large emphasis on the mundane, and something like enjoying watermelon is something to be celebrated. However, despite giving the impression that she’s here to make the most of the 30 days remaining, Hina also pushes Yōta forwards, determined to help him make his feelings known to childhood friend Kyōko.

• Kyōko had known Yōta since they were children, but after her mother passed away, she became withdrawn. Yōta’s persistence is impressive, and with Hina’s predictions, he is able to set up scenarios to get closer to Kyōko, although more often than not, he feels like he’s cheating and backs down, frustrating Hina. While Kyōko continues to reject Yōta’s kokuhaku, he persists, and it turns out that she does have feelings for him. Here, as Yōta performs a song of Hina’s design, he does manage to impress Kyōko, who takes over. The incidental music in Kamisama ni Natta Hi is reminiscent of Angel Beats!, featuring a combination of more unremarkable pieces as well as the more poignant songs that are of an exceptional quality.

• When Sora’s friend, Hikari, shows up at the Narukami residence and explains she’s in debt, Hina uses her powers to elevate a local ramen joint to prominence, blowing the loan shark troubling Hikari in the process. The first few episodes of Kamisama ni Natta Hi are all over the place, and when the fourth episode dealt with richi mahjong, as well as formally introducing Hiroto and his investigation into one Shuichiro Korogi, I was thrown off. I decided to take some time to regroup, but with both GochiUsa BLOOM and Road to Berlin demanding episodic reviews, I subsequently fell further and further behind.

• After GochiUsa BLOOM and Yuru Camp△ 2 ended, however, I ended up developing Cocoa withdrawal. I thus hopped onto Discord and received feedback from the community I’m a part of: folks encouraged me to give Kamisama ni Natta Hi another go, and I resolved to finish the series. I therefore pushed through the fourth episode, doing my best not to worry about the arcane mahjong terminology, and at the end, was met with a hilarious reward: lawyer Kako Tengan had taken a liking to Yōta, who participated in the tournament at Hina’s behest so he could meet a role model, but ends up getting more than he bargained for when Kako tries to seduce him.

• Once the fourth episode was past, Kamisama ni Natta Hi really began to hit its stride. When Yōta learns that Kyōko is more reserved than usual, he resolves to get her father out of the house to visit his wife’s grave. With Hina’s help, Yōta manages to show Kyōko’s father how much the world’s changed when he develops an interest in new restaurants, and he finally opens up. Armed with the knowledge that Kyōko’s mother had left video messages for the two of them, Hina arranges to mimic a call with Kyōko as her mother and does a profoundly good job, causing Kyōko to realise what needs to be done.

• As father and daughter watches these videos, in which Kyōko’s mother implores them to push onwards with life and live as fully as they can, they come to understand that clinging to the past would be to disrespect her wishes. Both Kyōko and her father come to accept this, and for the first time in Kamisama ni Natta Hi, Kyōko smiles. This episode is classic Maeda, and it was here that I finally felt the motivation to continue watching to see what would happen next. This was the single turning point in Kamisama ni Natta Hi – from the fifth episode onwards, I realised that beyond the blocker that was mahjong, and Hiroto’s yet-to-be-determined significance, what the series required from me most was patience.

• The magic moment in Kamisama ni Natta Hi lay past the three episode mark, and while three episodes is a widely-adopted practise, different people set store by different standards when it comes to anime. Being a hobby, I have no consistent rules for when I drop a series. I do, however, vehemently disagree with the idea that an anime necessarily needs to make its central theme clear within the first three episodes; themes are something that must be built out over time, and the payoff comes from seeing the whole journey and the context of the individual moments.

• At Kamisama ni Natta Hi‘s halfway point, Yōta’s able to assemble an impressive group to bring Hina to the summer festival: even Kako attends, despite sparring with Hina almost immediately after meeting up. Here, Hina munches on a festival delicacy that impresses everyone in the group when they try it. Between her facial expressions and the fact that she sounds like a brattier (but still adorable) version of Cocoa, Hina’s been the life and soul of Kamisama ni Natta Hi thus far. Like Yui, who was noisy and annoying, but charming in her own right, Hina brings a great deal of life into the series.

• What led to the inevitable comparisons between Kamisama ni Natta Hi and Angel Beats! was the sixth episode, during which Yōta manages to save Hina from being shipped off to Tokyo in a freezer truck after she grows jealous of Yōta and Kyōko seemingly grow closer. Hideki had died with regret in his hear about a baseball game, and wonders if he’d find peace in catching a pop fly. Asura has this part of Hideki in him: after sustaining an injury, he was never able to play basketball quite the same way again, and here, implores Yōta to make the jump that he couldn’t. In the end, the misunderstanding is cleared up, and Hina is moved that Yōta cares for her to this extent.

• As Kamisama ni Natta Hi progressed, I became increasingly engaged with the series and found it to become more enjoyable, the further I went in. However, I’ve heard that reception to Kamisama ni Natta Hi in some segments of the community became increasingly cold with the passage of time to the point where Jun Maeda disappeared off social media from the sheer volume of hate mail and threats he received. Rather than Kamisama ni Natta Hi, this speaks poorly of the community and speaks to their misplaced sense of entitlement.

• A respectable anime fan would never resort to detestable means such as vilifying a show or its creators incessantly on social media, and those who spent week after week doing so cannot count themselves as someone I would liaise with willingly, much less accept. I have no qualms with those who disliked Kamisama ni Natta Hi: everyone is permitted their own thoughts on the series, but I hold in contempt those who go out of their way to degrade a show with this level of fervor: this is the lowest of the low, beneath even those who’ve gone to lengths of creating hundreds of false accounts to give an anime a poor rating or downvote opinions contrary to their own. As it stands, I was pleasantly surprised by Kamisama ni Natta Hi, and the series hits its stride by the time Sora kicks off her film.

• What I particularly liked about Sora’s project was that by this time, Kako and her bodyguard are active, willing participants, and even the loan shark who’d troubled Hikari earlier had reformed entirely, being an affable sort of character. Sora’s film gives everyone a chance to be their best, and these changes mirror Maeda’s thoughts that people can be redeemed with patience and understanding. Those who we are quick to judge are simply those we’ve not given fair chance to. With this in mind, I began to see even Hiroto in this light: despite having found him arrogant and disagreeable early on, Kamisama ni Natta Hi would help me to understand where he’s coming from, similarly to how Angel Beats! did the same for Ayato.

• No longer burdened by her mother’s passing, Kyōko is positively radiant as she helps out with the film. It is not lost on me that Kamisama ni Natta Hi is set in Kofu, Yamanashi: Sora decides to capitalise on the spaces at Fuefuki Fruit Park as her filming location, and the stone patio overlooking Kofu, seen in Yuru Camp△ as the place where Aoi and Chiaki catch their breath after ascending the path up to their campsite, is also where Sora shoots her footage. Unlike Haruhi, Sora is actually a competent directory and script-writer: she has a clear vision for her film, and with Kako’s resources, filming proceeds very smoothly.

• The change in Yōta’s attitudes towards Hina is apparent, and while he initially brushes her off in pursuit of his studies, he finds that this past summer has been very memorable thanks to Hina. As Kamisama ni Natta Hi steps into its penultimate act, the deadline Hina prophesises suddenly doesn’t seem so intimidating: were the world to end here and now, Yōta appears to have lived his summer very fully, achieving numerous things that certainly wouldn’t have been possible were it not for Hina.

• The secondary story with Hiroto and the enigmatic CEO is that they’re pursing one Shuichiro Korogi’s research. This is related to Hina, and it turns out that Korogi had independently developed a quantum microprocessor in a bid to free Hina, who’d been born with a condition that left her immobile. The quantum microprocessor gave Hina a normal life in an unexplained mechanism, and the organisation Hiroto is drafted into intends to hold onto this discovery to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. In retrospect, this is a noble choice, as quantum computers could be used to trivially circumvent computer security if malicious actors got access to them.

• On a hot summer’s day, Yōta decides to take Hina to visit her biological parents after learning from his parents that she’d been abandoned and Korogi had taken her in, as well as making the request that the Narukamis look after Hina after he was gone. The pair thus take a bus deep into the Japanese countryside. While the trip opens with enthusiasm, it is also surrounded by melancholy. There is a charm about the inaka that invites this set of emotions, and it is therefore fitting that the visit to Hina’s biological parents would send the pair out into the rural areas of Japan.

• It turns out that, unable to bear the thought of having brought Hina into a world only to have her suffer, her father ultimately left Hina and wanted to restart, distancing himself from a problem he imagined was completely outside his power to save. While perhaps understandable, this only serves to demonstrate that Hina’s original father was also weak-willed. While Yōta might be more naïve in his decision, his heart’s in the right place, and the series ultimately vindicates his decision. With the truth in the open, Yōta becomes closer to Hina than before, and as the two overnight in a ryōkan, it does feel like a date of sorts.

• As Hina’s deadline approaches, she reveals that she deemed the end of the world to be the point where she could not see beyond, and indicates that she never meant the entire world would blink out of existence. On a rainy day during filming, shadowy agents show up to take Hina in and retrieve the quantum computer embedded in her brain after a council decides that Korogi’s technology would threaten humanity at present. Despite Yōta’s efforts, the agents catch up to him and overpowers him easily, separating the two. In the aftermath, Hina is operated on and sent to live at a remote facility.

• While Yōta does his best to move on with his life as term starts, he cannot help but remember Hina. When Hiroto transfers to his school and attempts to subtly befriend Yōta, the latter remains so distracted that he is unable to see that Hiroto’s interest in activities parallels those of Hina’s. It turns out that Hiroto, intending to atone for his past, wants Yōta to see Hina again. I was surprised at this turn of events, and it typifies Maeda’s characters to become allies once the time is right. However, like Charlotte, Kamisama ni Natta Hi suffers from the same problems: too much occurs towards the end, and Hiroto’s character is never given time to develop.

• Seeing Hina lethargic and completely lacking the vigour she previously had was a sobering moment, but it speaks to the genuineness of Yōta’s feelings that he intends to bring her home anyways. Armed with a fabricated identification, Yōta has two weeks to accomplish his goals. The path is fraught with setbacks, and initially, Hina rejects Yōta. The paediatrician tending to Hina, Shiba, dismisses Yōta and explains that post-operation, Hina has developed a fear of men. In spite of this, Yōta pushes on. Much as how Charlotte saw Yū embark on a worldwide tour to save others with unique powers and lost his memory in the process in the final episodes, Kamisama ni Natta Hi only had two episodes depicting Yōta’s efforts to bring Hina back home.

• Shiba is initially presented as cold and indifferent to Yōta: however, it is revealed that after losing her own daughter, she took up the posting to help other children and spare them her daughter’s fate. In spite of this, when she notices that Yōta’s reports do not align with what he’d been doing with Hina, she alerts security. Up until now, Yōta had actually made some progress with Hina, who vaguely recalls her love for JRPGs. Yōta is ultimately escorted off facility grounds, and as a final act of kindness, Shiba takes Hina out to watch Yōta leave.

• Out here, Hina suddenly begins expressing a desire to be with Yōta. Shiba had argued earlier that Hina’s personality and traits were likely a product of the quantum computer’s processes, but the fact that Hina still remembers Yōta, enough to reject an image of him because she wants the real deal, indicates that the computer had simply been ampifying what was already there. Through Kamisama ni Natta Hi, then, it is suggested that regardless of their sophistication, computers will not be able to replicate something as sophisticated as emotions for the foreseeable future. In their haste to dismiss this series as a “dumpster fire” (a phrase that I regard as indicative of someone whose arguments have no merit), folks skate over some of the topics that Maeda wished to cover in his latest work.

• As it becomes clear that Hina still remembers Yōta and her feeling for him, Yōta is overjoyed and rushes off to embrace her, leaving Shiba and the security staff in shock. This revelation convinces Shiba to authorise Yōta to take her back home, having proven that Hina had indeed responded positively to him. The symbolism here is clear enough: it’s a new start for Hina and Yōta, and what lies ahead for Yōta will be difficult. However, the moment also shows what Hideki would’ve done for Yui had they met earlier or realised their feelings for one another sooner. Maeda had always been fond of the idea that love can take many forms, and Kamisama ni Natta Hi is no different in this regard.

• With Hina back, the old crew finish off their movie, and one evening, Yōta takes Hina to the viewpoint at Fuefuki Fruit Park overlooking Kofu. Nadeshiko had shared a photo with Rin here during their simultaneous camping trips, as a sign that their hearts were drawing closer, and to have Yōta and Hina up here suggests something similar. Yōta’s found his calling in life at this point, promising to go into medical research so that Hina may one day be fully cured and able to live freely again.

• Sora’s movie is shown at the end of Kamisama ni Natta Hi, and unlike Haruhi’s movie, which barely worked in spite of the troubled production, Sora’s film is well-produced, well-written and well-made. It acts as a reminder of the time Yōta and Hina spent together, and how these memories will always be with him no matter what, giving him the strength to pursue the future in the knowledge that their happiness was very much real. This was the overarching theme I got out of Kamisama ni Natta Hi, and since at the heart of every Terrible Anime Challenge is whether or not there was a coherent theme, the fact that Kamisama ni Natta Hi has one (regardless of what more popular folks than myself assert) means that the series deserves a passing grade in my books.

• Altogether, Kamisama ni Natta Hi exceeds my expectations for the series. In this terrible anime challenge, the yardstick were my own expectations coming in and the overwhelmingly negative impressions on anime Twitter. I am pleased to say that both were soundly proven wrong, and I had fun with Kamisama ni Natta Hi, more than I originally thought. While the series leaves a great deal unexplored and would’ve benefitted from a more extensive runtime, I nonetheless find that the series did succeed with its core messages. As a result, this one earns a B grade (3 of 4, or 7.5 of ten) in my books: the merits outweigh the shortcomings, and the presence of a unifying, cohesive message tied everything together in a satisfactory fashion. With this post in the books, it’s time to head out into a snowy May day and grab my Pfizer vaccine: booking’s been a nightmare in my side of the world, with my age group eligible, it’ll be nice to finally kick things off.

Consequently, Kamisama ni Natta Hi becomes yet another reminder that patience is oftentimes a virtue in anime: this series did not really hit its stride until its fifth episode, when Yōta manages to set in motion the events that help Kyōko and her father to reconcile. I note that while I found Kamisama ni Natta Hi to be an entertaining and worthwhile series, it is by no means perfect; the series possesses the same pacing as 2015’s Charlotte, starting out slowly and then accelerating wildly towards the end. Similarly, both Kamisama ni Natta Hi and Angel Beats! leave several elements unresolved in favour of ensuring that the central characters reach their resolution as a result of their short runtime. The existence of quantum neural control interfaces would typically result in all sorts of interesting discussion, and the CEO of the unnamed organisation curious in pursuing this research wind up being tangential to the discoveries that Yōta makes. In addition, while Hiroto is similar to Ayato Naoi and Takeyama, being a character viewers could come to sympathise with and playing a major role in setting Yōta with a shot at getting Hina back, his screen time and backstory is minimally explored. The series definitely would’ve benefited from an increased runtime, which would better flesh out the secondary elements that were relevant to the story. Despite these limitations, Kamisama ni Natta Hi matches my own expectations going in, beats the expectations I had of the series following the fourth episode and vastly exceeds the impressions I got of the series from reading the inevitable and unavoidable snippets from well-known but disreputable figures in the community, who were quick to dismiss the series as being forced drama. As the prize for listening to the community I’m a part of and not giving any credence to the unsavoury people on social media, I come out with another solid experience.