Kagerou Daze gets SHAFTED

/* Warning: SPOILER ALERT!
There are mild spoilers about the flow of the story of Mekakucity Actors in this entry. If you have not read the manga, or watched the video series I suggest you stop reading beyond this point. Unless of course you'd like to get spoiled, I mean this is a free country..."free", depends on your interpretation. Just, read at your own risk.
*/

The long awaited premier of the anime adaptation of Shizen no Teki-P's Kagerou Daze finally aired yesterday evening.
Mekakucity Actors definitely has the Shaft magic as the first episode got me reminiscing about surreal landscapes, eerie afternoons with flying crows, the echoing tick of a pendulum clock and, of course, the infamous Shaft head tilt.

I got a bit out of placed in the opening scenes of Mekakucity Actors since it remained more faithful to the original video series than the manga adaptation. Either way, it's still the same introduction with the amusing conversation between Ene and Shintarou. The obvious changes are, first and foremost, Shintarou's persocom and Ene's manner of representation. While the video series and the manga has Shintarou with an ordinary sized flatscreen monitor and standard hiki-NEET room appearance, the Shaft effects were already exemplified with their Monogatari x PMMM style of representing and adapting what was in the source material.

The opening scene of Mekakucity Actors took place in what I believe to be the Heat Haze after the events of Outer Science. Shintarou and Ayano were the only characters present until it slowly moved to landscape stills of Kido, Seto, Kano, Momo, Ene, Konoha and Hibiya. Kozakura Marry appeared last. The story appeared to be told in Ayano's perspective since she offered to tell Shintarou the tale of "how [they] met", before the scene goes to the events of August 14th.

The episode titles are named as Acts and, I presume, are going to be taken from the titles of the original video series. Act 1 was titled Jinzou Enemy (Artifical Enemy) while Act 2 is titled Kisaragi Attention.
The first episode covered the events starting from Shintarou's keyboard getting soaked to the conclusion of the terrorist attack, told in his perspective. Next episode would most likely introduce more members of the Mekakushi Dan but would partially tell the same story as Act 1, only this time it's going to be told in Momo's perspective.

If the rumors of the anime having only 11 episodes are true then the story would either be linear or sequential. If it's linear, then the story would follow the flow of the manga telling a different story each time the time loops again. If it's sequential, the story would most probably tell the different sides of each characters first before giving them all a bad (Outer Science) end leading up to Route XX, before giving them the happy end in Summer Time Record.

Either way, one thing is certain - fans of the series, and even the newcomers will most definitely shed buckets of tears all the way. I do hope that, if the 11 episode length is true, they at least decided that because they've split the story into two seasons.
If that's the case, then this season would likely end in Outer Science before several other stories in the loop culminating to Summer Time Record.

It's pretty hard to contain all excitement that I feel right now. That's probably the reason for all these damn theories. One of them is bound to be true.

tune in next episode for KISARAGI ATTENTION!

(Disclaimer: I don't own any of the screen caps. The screen caps are taken from the first episode of Mekakucity Actors by Shaft, for blogging purposes)