Anonymous;Code is a visual novel many regard as outright impossible to adapt into an anime.
At the time of the game’s release, series creator Chiyomaru Shikura, series producer Tatsuya Matsubara, and series lead writer Naotaka Hayashi all stated that Anonymous;Code was conceptually a game that would be extremely difficult to adapt into an anime due to its meta elements. After all, the game considers the player and protagonist two separate, independent entities—and addressing that structure outside of a game would be extremely challenging. Even so, the staff all commented that if they could find a workaround for those meta elements somehow, it could make for a fantastic anime, and that they would like to try their hand at adapting it despite the challenges.
It’s now been three and a half years since launch, and nothing has officially been announced. But a few months back, Shikura stated on a TwitCasting livestream that there were developments concerning the Anonymous;Code IP taking place in the background. Furthermore, he added that if he absolutely needed to, he would self-fund the anime adaptations for both Anonymous;Code and the next mainline SciADV entry—effectively acting as a one-person production committee. That is indeed an interesting idea given Shikura has both the capital and experience to pull such an endeavor off, but it begs the question: how would Anonymous;Code even work as an anime to begin with? Feel free to go through either the embedded video or the following article.
On one hand, Anonymous;Code has several qualities that would work to its advantage for an anime adaptation: it’s short, fast-paced, and jam-packed with action, all of which are qualities especially well-suited for anime. As it stands, MAGES. is likely no longer in a position to secure the funding for two-cour anime adaptations of their works. Even in their heyday, they were unable to do so for most SciADV entries—and because they were adapting extremely lengthy visual novels, which would ideally need around three cours each, they were more or less doomed to fail from the start with just one cour.
But whereas both Chaos;Head NoAH and Chaos;Child were each over 40,000 lines long, Anonymous;Code was just 18,500 lines long or so—which is to say that it could work within the confines of a short anime much better than most other SciADV entries. In my opinion, one and a half cours would be ideal—somewhere between sixteen to eighteen episodes would be enough to do the story justice if they aren’t adding much new anime-original material. One approach the anime team could take is to adapt the story using one episode per quest chapter and two episodes for each of the first few and last few chapters. Yet even in just twelve or thirteen episodes, I think it could still work fine with the right adaptation decisions.
But on the other hand, Anonymous;Code also has several qualities that won’t work in its favor in anime form. For instance, even though it is shorter than previous mainline entries, much of the content that it does contain is so important, it’s harder to find parts of it to cut or trim down because of their connections to the wider series narrative. After all, Anonymous;Code is the grand culmination of the entire SciADV saga, designed to address the series’s long-standing mysteries and answer heaps of unanswered questions. And with that, while the majority of its major prerequisite stories have solid anime, Anonymous;Code still relies extensively upon material that either does not exist in anime form or does not have a solid anime adaptation. Thus, even with the most perfect anime adaptation of Anonymous;Code, an anime-only viewer would miss a lot of what makes it so special to begin with.
And as mentioned earlier, there’s the matter of dealing with the Save & Load system and other meta elements. Over the years, the series creators have commented on how they might approach a potential anime adaptation. Shikura’s first suggestion back in 2022 was a “meta within meta” approach, whereby anime viewers would watch the story play out between the player and Pollon. In late 2023, he further added to this point by stating that the best possible person to serve as the player or “taciturn protagonist” was the boy on the rooftop seen in the game’s prologue. In both approaches, however, an anime adaptation would effectively be like watching someone else play a video game. I suppose it could work—and if an anime adaptation does happen, I think this will probably be the approach they end up taking. But in practice, would that make for the most engaging experience? I wonder.
Other ideas I’ve seen floating around within the fandom have been to make it an interactive web anime, sort of like what Netflix used to do for a few TV series and movies back before they delisted and terminated all their interactive works last year. I think this would be pretty neat and cool to do. Creatively, at least, it would be very feasible. Community member ItsRigs, for instance, has highlighted Black Mirror: Bandersnatch as an example of a work whose approach could be of inspiration for Anonymous;Code. That particular work had a default route which was 90 minutes long—but it also had a whole myriad of choices for viewers to select, resulting in a total runtime of 312 minutes. Perhaps in an Anonymous;Code anime, they could have a “default route” airing on TV, but interactivity on streaming platforms to emulate the Save & Load system.
However, seeing as Netflix has completely abandoned their interactive media, I think it would be a real challenge to find any streaming platform willing to host that kind of project. And even if they did, I think media preservation would prove to be an even bigger challenge—as Netflix’s interactive titles no longer exist anywhere online now. From a business standpoint as well, I would imagine that the expected profitability from an interactive anime would be lower than that of a traditional TV anime. And there’s also the viewpoint of there being no point in interactivity when the original game exists for those reasons. Thus, I sincerely doubt Shikura would opt for this kind of approach. To my knowledge, he’s never once mentioned such an idea in an interview or stream before.
So what else could they do for an Anonymous;Code anime? They could perhaps make an anime that’s locked into Pollon’s perspective. This way, you would forgo needing to adapt any of the interactivity; here, the viewer and Pollon would be able to see the impacts of the player’s interference without us observing the player or taking on its role. But considering that Anonymous;Code is explicitly a “Meta Science Adventure,” I think this approach would ultimately destroy the story’s very identity and role within the series.
Or perhaps the staff could abandon the idea of trying to adapt it conventionally at all and instead make an anime complement like they did for Steins;Gate 0—one with a largely anime-original storyline.
Just a note: the remainder of this article will contain full series spoilers for the entirety of SciADV.
For as many questions as Anonymous;Code answers, it also raises plenty of more—not to the point that it’s an “incomplete game” the way that Steins;Gate 0 was, but one that leaves plenty of room for supplementary material and future entries to address. An anime complement might be able to address some of those points. Of course, this approach also raises a few challenges: the staff would need to find a different balance between making it OK enough for first-timers to watch and good for longtime fans as well.
Given Anonymous;Code itself is already a culmination title, that’s already an extremely challenging prospect—not to mention that they’d also need to find a way to make an anime complement make sense continuity-wise. In Steins;Gate 0, things made sense because of world line recursion, but in Anonymous;Code, that’s not a mechanic at play here. And if you’ve played the game, you already know that the events of Anonymous;Code as we have observed them are only possible in one particular world layer. So with an entirely different set of events playing out, some crazy workaround would be needed to make it happen.
I suppose this might also be a challenge with any Anonymous;Code anime adaptation no matter what approach the staff might take, since as the game and guidebook suggest, the series’s anime and visual novels—as we observe them—would seem to be on different world layers. And since Momo only exists in Anonymous;Code’s world layer, an anime adaptation, and especially one with a major number of differences from the visual novel, would effectively retcon this point. Nonetheless, Anonymous;Code matters so much to the series’s overarching storyline that for SciADV to continue in anime form, they’d need to cover its events somehow.
So what’s the right answer here? I don’t believe there is one. Anonymous;Code isn’t impossible to adapt—I just think that any feasible anime adaptation would betray what makes it Anonymous;Code in the first place. Even so, if SciADV series staff can figure out some way to approach an anime adaptation, I would absolutely love to see my favorite entry in the series come to life—even if that anime could never truly replicate the magic of the visual novel.
Special thanks to Fasty, Martin, Enorovan, and ItsRigs.
