Let's time-travel to 10 years ago and reenjoy creative and sweet youthful days.note
Kyouya Hashiba is a 28 year old game developer who just lost his job when the company went bankrupt. Forced to return home to his parents house, he finds himself regretting having never accepted the Daigedai arts college acceptance letter he was given ten years ago. The next day, he wakes up to find that he has gone back ten years, from 2016, to 2006, on the day he made his choice not to go to arts college. With the chance to undo his past mistake, he heads off to arts college, all while meeting people from the famous Platinum Generation of students that he admired.
Remake Our Life! (Bokutachi no Remake, or "Our Remake") is a Light Novel series written by Nachi Koi and illustrated by Erreto. The novels have two story lines: a "main version" that began in March 2017 and ended April 2023, and a Ver.β that began on August 2019, detailing what would have happened if Kyouya never traveled back in time. A manga adaptation began on November 2018, with an anime adaptation running in the Summer 2021 anime season.
Tropes in the main series
- Adaptation Deviation: Episode 1 adds the beginning of Ver.β to the prologue. Instead of a random game company, Kyouya works for a second game company, SucceedSoft, in 2016. He works under Eiko Kawasegawa for a time, but he gets laid off when his team's project gets canceled.
- Almost Kiss: Kyouya and Aki nearly kiss at the school festival's art exhibit in Episode 5 before being interrupted by a phone call from Tsurayuki. They manage to complete their kiss at the end of the episode.
- Bittersweet Ending: The conclusion of the first season of the anime. Kyouya returns to the past to try and undo his missteps and is able to get some some things back on track for his friends, but he sacrificed his happy future with Aki and their daughter. Plus, Keiko warns him there's no guarantee that he will be happy in the new timeline.
- Childhood Marriage Promise: Tsurayuki made one to a girl named Sayuri back in the day, and is horrified when Sayuri shows up in Episode 7 to collect on it.
- "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The anime's opening, "Koko kara Saki wa Uta ni Naranai", is sung by Nanako's voice actress Aimi Terakawa as the vocalist for Poppin'Party. And the ending is sung by Kyoya's voice actor Masahiro Itou as the vocalist for Argonavis.
- Extra-Long Episode: The first episode is actually two episodes long, the first half deals with Kyouya’s life before he travels back in time, while the second half features the beginning of his school life and introduces the other main characters.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: After their release party in Episode 8, Aki ominously asks Kyouya if this is really the way things ought to be, despite everything seemingly having gone well. Shortly afterward, Tsurayuki tells Kyouya that he's dropping out of the university.
- Hollywood Game Design: Kyouya's schedule-saving fix for Mystic Clockwork is simply moving the game to a different engine, depicted as dragging the game into the engine's folder and completely ignoring the hiccups that can happen from switching engines.
- Ironic Name: SucceedSoft. All the games we see from them fail to succeed.
- Love Triangle: Gradually both Aki and Nanako begin competing for Kyouya's affections. Aki wins.
- My Greatest Second Chance: This serves as the main premise of the story, as Kyouya takes his being brought ten years into the past to attend art school and dedicate himself to becoming a creator. In the end, he does get his second chance, and his modified future is much happier than his old one. However, only he comes out of it better than he started; almost everyone else left the VN scene and became mediocre workers.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Kyouya may have gone back to his original time with a respectable job and family with Shinoaki, but because of his meddling he burned out all of the Platinum year participants, and most of them went into a different profession (save Eiko, who is in the industry but went from boss to beleaguered worker; and Shiroaki, who Quit to Get Married). Their reasoning? They felt like they could never keep up with Kyouya and quite a few of them felt like they were relying too much on him, causing them to lose their passion for their craft and go into the normal working world.
- Not Quite the Right Thing: In his eagerness to help his dorm-mates overcome their issues, he forgets that in the original timeline, each member of the Platinum Generation overcame them and became renowned creators without his help. His taking too much control in leading them, instead of allowing them to grow as artists on their own, stifles their creativity and causes them to lose their passion, dropping out of their various fields and living obscure lives.
- Older Than She Looks: Keiko looks like a preteen girl, but is actually a graduate of Kyouya's university and leader of the doujin circle Hallucigenia Soft.
- Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle:
- The series' full English title, at least translated, is: Remake our Life!: Let's time-travel to 10 years ago and reenjoy creative and sweet youthful days.
- In-universe; the last game that the company that Kyouya Hachiba worked for released before it went belly up in 2016 was titled "Pretty Ass! ~The Story of the Pretty Girl’s Ass~".
- Shout-Out:
- The song Nanako sings in Episode 3 at the karaoke is "Sobakasu" by JUDY AND MARY, better known as the first opening theme tune of the Rurouni Kenshin anime.
- The first song Nanako sings in public is an in-universe cover of "God Knows", from the 2006 Light Novel Haruhi Suzumiya anime. The audience, in October, 2006, seems just as enthusiastic as it was in the original.
- Attraction Point's company logo is Amuro Ray's personal symbol on the Nu Gundam from Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Maki, Kyouya and Aki's daughter in the revised timeline, is a child-sized carbon copy of Aki.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Upon realizing he was now ten years in the past, Kyouya quickly assumes that his ten years of extra knowledge will allow him to stay ahead in class, since he has experience with many of the things being taught. By the end of his first day in class, he quickly finds out that his ten extra years don't amount to much, because he only ever worked in the industry instead of being educated on the field.
- One of the classes Kyouya is in has everyone group up to create short films that are viewed by the whole class. In both cases, the film that was the most liked wasn't the one that won first place. These films are being graded on all aspects of film making, and the crowd tends to get so focused on one aspect that they ignore everything else:
- In the first assignment, Kyouya's film got the best reception because of their creative use of photography shots. They get third place because the teacher could tell they had trouble with equipment. When requesting equipment to use, they ordered a photography camera instead of a video camera, and only realized their mistake when they were at their filming location. Were it not for Kyouya's quick thinking, they might not have had anything to turn in, and thus lost points for their technical mishap.
- In the second assignment, Kyouya's group gets first place, though Nanako considers it a hollow victory since the acting from the film after theirs stunned the whole class. When asking the teacher about it, she's told that while the other group had better acting, their group did better overall because of other aspects like production and writing.
- The main conflict of Episodes 6 through 8 is this. They are only able to get their first major visual novel done because Kyouya employs cost-cutting techniques to make the deadline, instead of letting everyone go all-out in their creative pursuits. This meant cutting unique CGs and reusing existing assets, skimping on original music in favor of lifting from already existing compositions and tweaking them to avoid copyright infringement, and cutting down on the writing. However, it comes at a cost: everyone involved got burned out and felt condescended to after working like this, just like how Kyouya felt in his own time in his own workplace, and eventually quit their artistic pursuits.
- Troubled Production: Because the series focuses on creators, there are a lot of in-universe examples:
- The share house's first film project almost failed when they saw they got a photography camera instead of a video camera. Kyouya manages to salvage the project by using still shots to film the project. They do end up with the best reception from the class, but still rank third because they still had a near-fatal mishap with the equipment.
- "Harusora", the visual novel the group creates, has a hard deadline because the plan is to use the profits for Tsurayuki's tuition. Thus, Kyouya has to make decisions that cut back on time and also discourage the creativity of his roommates. For example, Shinoaki wants to add a new CG that she feels fits an important scene better, but Kyouya rejects it because of time constraints. This backfires as it causes everyone to burn out and lose their passion for their crafts.
- In the revised timeline, Kyouya and Eiko are working at a company trying to release a gacha game called "Mystic Clockwork". Said gacha game is being made with the company's own house-made engine, rather than an industrial standard one. Thus, the game is full of bugs when it launches. A lot of artists working with the company have delayed the release of their character designs, which has caused characters to be cut from the story, and as a result, the story had to be rewritten several times to compensate for the lack of characters. One of the bugs has caused the gacha rates to vary from account to account, leading to accusations of the company lying about gacha rates, which only got worse when the main character's seiyuu tweeted about their insane luck, as well as the company's bad PR response to all of this.
- Young Future Famous People: All three of Kyouya's roommates are heavily implied to be members of the "Platinum Generation," various artists that he greatly admires. Shinoaki is revealed at the end of the first episode to be Akishima Shino, Kyouya figures out that Nanako is N@NA at the end of Episode 5, and Tsurayuki reveals that his planned pen-name was Kyouichi Kawagoe at the end of Episode 8, right as he tells Kyouya that he's dropping out of college.
