The ADMS technobabble, then, seems poised to serve as the skeleton for an astonishing time-travel and parallel universe plot. However, in effect, the ADMS is no such thing.
Contrary to common claims, YU-NO is not really a time travel story. Only in the Epilogue, when the ADMS vanishes, is YU-NO a parallel world story. The ADMS is merely a context within which the player can see every woman’s route in a single story, rather than as mutually exclusive possibilities. Furthermore, Takuya retains no memory of each time loop, guaranteeing he can never learn anything and rendering the drama of each storyline narratively vacuous. For Takuya to loop through these three days and lose his memory each time suggests a true nightmare. Surely he is in the loop for centuries, ever clueless. The ability to move between universes raises many ethical and existential questions. Takuya witnesses Mitsuki’s tragic death, but is she really dead? Are there not an indefinite number of other, identical Mitsukis?
If the least probable timelines are annihilated as new timelines come into being, as Koudai, Ryuuzouji, and Imagawa’s research suggests, Takuya must be destroying whole universes. Presumably this more than cancels out whatever good there is Yu-no saving “his” universe (i.e. the universe of the Prologue). In the Epilogue, why does Takuya care that the Dela Grante dimension will collide with the one he came from? Why is this one’s destruction more significant than the unlikely universes that interdimensional travel apparently destroys in accordance with entropy? Why is it okay for Takuya to destroy universes flippantly and unintentionally? Or is he doing this at all? Is the theory wrong?
Apparently, each universe in the ADMS segment has its own Takuya. What happens to this Takuya when the player’s Takuya appears? At the end of the Kaori route, Ayumi speculates that, upon the restarting of the timeline, another, identical Takuya manifests to replace the player’s Takuya. In this case, using the Reflector to escape perilous situations dooms someone else, another interesting situation Kanno introduces to never address. Or is it dooming anyone? Isn’t the new Takuya who would appear also in the midst of his own adventure with the Reflector?
The end of the Mio route features a display of situational awareness so shocking it was touching. Takuya admits, “I don’t know what happens exactly.” After the Reflector returns Takuya to the start of the time loop, the perspective lingers on Mio. Her dialogue makes unambiguous that Takuya has vanished, no new Takuya replacing him. What is going on?
