YMMV / Summer Time Rendering

• Awesome Music: Spooky bells and ominous chanting are used throughout many of the anime's soundtracks to complement the story's mysterious island setting. It's very reminiscent of Nier because both OSTs were composed by MONACA.
  • Sillhouette, a sinister track that often accompanies a situation that suddenly takes a turn for the worse, is first heard near the end of Episode 1 when Shadow Mio's murder spree sets the tone for the rest of the series.
  • Chaotic Battle is the energetic, eerie theme song that plays alongside some of Ryuunosuke's coolest skirmishes with the shadows.
  • Shura Fire is a daring but hopeful sounding theme for the action-packed chase scenes where Shinpei and Shadow Ushio tag-team up to kick ass and finally turn the tables on Haine and Shide.
• Catharsis Factor: Everything about Episode 15. After 14 straight episodes packed with loss after loss, it's immensely rewarding to see the heroes finally notch their first, unambiguous, unabashed win against Haine and Shide, and even then they had to work for it by matching their wits with Shide's and Haine's, and it works in the most awesome way.
• Complete Monster: Shide, the supposed right-hand of Haine, is the true mastermind behind his master's plan to envelope the world in shadow. Actually Masahito Karikiri, Shide first used Haine when she first arrived, taking advantage of her childlike mentality by impregnating her with his offspring, before using her power to swap bodies with them to make himself immortal until the end of the world. When he learned that Haine's power were limited, Shide planned the shadow invasion of the island, killing and replacing the many denizens with shadows before feeding them to Haine, to start a ritual that sacrifices the whole island to Haine before hijacking her to destroy spacetime to fulfill his curiosity of seeing the world end, all the while taking sadistic joy in torturing his opposition in the many time loops. When cornered by Ushio and Shinpei, Shide, in a desperate attempt, turned Haine into a battery before battling them in the timeless world in a final bid to destroy time itself.
• Moe: Haine is freaking adorable for an Eldritch Abomination, especially in the flashbacks to her human self and her friendship with Hizuru.
• Nightmare Fuel: The story having a "Groundhog Day" Loop lets it have liberty with the fact that Anyone Can Die, including the protagonist. Cue more than a fair number of Cruel And Unusual Deaths. And the anime trades off the manga's detail for the visceral nature and sounds of it.
• The Producer Thinks of Everything: Considering that Shinpei is the only one that remembers things between loops, it would be pretty boring and repetitive to see him trying to convince others about it and the threat of Shadows, luckily, characters are quick to accept whatever he tells them and often admit to already be suspicious of something. Furthermore, Shadow Ushio has the power to impart memories on others, and by the sixth loop, she uses this to quickly bring up the recurring cast to speed and on their side. As the loop starts later and later, the "catch everyone up to speed" part of the loop also gets shorter as there is often simply less information to impart.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To Higurashi: When They Cry, another story about a Japanese small Town with a Dark Secret, haunted by a deadly supernatural mystery involving a local deity, and a protagonist stuck in a time loop involved in it.
  • To Persona 4, as a story where small-town teenagers must combat malevolent Shadows that reveal traumatic truths with a deity as the major antagonist. Hiruko is even stated to be the child of Izanami, who's the Big Bad of P4.
• Squick: There's layers to how messed up Shide's method of making himself immortal is. Shidehiko, who is a man in his 40s, had to impregnate and have a son with Hiruko, who is in the body of a barely pubescent child. Once that son ages enough, it has to impregnate its own mother/wife to make a new clone, who is still in the body of a child, so the process can repeat.
• Tearjerker:
  • During the underwater rescue mission, Shadow Ushio is helpless to do anything about the real Ushio's death at Shadow Shiori's hands because she chooses to rescue Shiori instead. She's then reduced to an immobile shadow blob, and her final moments are spent being forced to watch Shiori drown and be replaced by Shadow Shiori, rendering Ushio's sacrifice worthless.
  • The flashback to Haine killing Ryunosuke in her maddened state. Haine's horror and guilt afterwards literally causes her to fragment.
  • Shadow Ushio's sudden death, which happens right in front of Shinpei during their confrontation with Shide at the shrine, is the moment that sends Shinpei flying into a rage that gets him killed too. Then the realization that she didn't materialize in the next loop like she usually does is what finally breaks Shinpei's spirit.
  • Hizumi Minakata's death as Shinpei arrives too late to save her and Shadow Mio has to stop him from trying to go back.
  • Hiruko's death is rather bittersweet with the broken god thanking Shinpei and Ushio as they are erased for good. Plus Haine and Ryunosuke both fade away as well.
• The Un-Twist: The fact that Masahito Karikiri, the local head priest is the Big Bad Shide's real identity can be seen from a mile away. There's a lot of suspicion immediately thrown on him for being the priest in a setting where the god being worshipped is a major villain. The festival in which the Shadows cause an apocalyptic event happens on the temple where he serves as the priest. One major conspicuous point about him is that while every character introduced is eventually given some focus or has something revealed about them that connects to the main story (even Alain, being attacked by a Shadow during Ushio's funeral), he is introduced and then suspiciously brushed away from the spotlight. He and Shide are also the two characters who drop the most video game references.

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