Currently, there is something of a trend of save scumming stories in anime, with Re:Zero and ReLIFE, and now we have Erased to fill out the section.
Satoru has the ability to jump back in time slightly, in order to prevent some hideous thing happening. This usually shows itself as a premonition of a few minutes, but when his mother is killed he finds himself knocked back nearly twenty years to youth, becoming a schoolboy once again.
He has returned to a rather turbulent time, when a serial killer roams the streets, kidnapping and murdering school children, one of whom he knew before they went missing in the original timeline. He now has to stop the deaths of his classmates, catch the killer and hopefully avoid his mother's unfortunate end in the present day.
While most of the anime is set in the past, there is a certain amount of jumping back and forth, as Satoru observes the consequences of his actions in the past and whether he has achieved his aims.
The anime is positioned a little unusually, in that in the main it is a thriller/murder-mystery, with Satoru's attempts to discover the villain and protect his friends, but it is also something of an emotional piece. Satoru is reunited with people who were long since dead, and has to try and fit in to a world he has outgrown. The running joke of him accidentally revealing feelings that he intended to keep internal shows his lack of balance in an uncertain environment nicely.
And the thriller aspect is impressive. The majority of the cast are rounded, deep characters, giving real tension to the fear that they might be suddenly wiped out and keeping you guessing as to who is behind the various nefarious schemes.
Animation is lovely, being a subdued style in keeping with the serious mood and not dropping to any of the normal comic tweaks.
Overall, it's a very well put together series, and probably one of the better I've seen this year.
Highly recommended.
Tagged: Anime Thriller Schooldays Time travel Crunchyroll Subbed