Okay, I didn’t see this one coming. I will however accept this conclusion for Renji and Chihiro’s arc since it’s believable enough given the characters in question. I’m guessing the ending in the game is going to be different because the shock value will be completely lost otherwise.
As a whole, I felt that the ending seemed pretty anticlimactic. Maybe the break-up should have happened in this episode and just have that wrap up the arc instead? The ending “messages” that the characters gave also didn’t seem very meaningful to me. And hey, we never got to found out what the deal was with Himuro and Yuko! All you see is the two meeting up at the church after the ending theme, come on! :(
Looking back at the twelve episodes of ef – a tale of memories., I think it really came through with a very strong script, visually imaginative renditions of scenes (this cannot possibly be emphasized enough), and excellent music. What it seemed to fall short of was the lack of a strong storyline to match its unique characters and its failure to develop all of the characters sufficiently. Himuro and Yuko, anyone? And what about our male leads? We know very little about them compared to what we know about our female leads. Perhaps the real problem here was that ef tried to do too many things at once by telling two stories in twelve episodes?
In essence, if you don’t care too much about the plot and am more interested in character dynamics and their relationships, you should definitely give this one a go. However, if you watch shows because you’d like to see a great story unfold, you might get a feeling of wanting more at the end of the ef.