Yumeria

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Teenager Tomokazu Mikuri is an Ordinary High School Student, an orphan, tortured by a Sadist Teacher, and, it seems, trapped in a perpetual malaise. He's something of a loser and more than a little lonely, having been raised all by himself in a large house by his older cousin Nanase.

However, everything changes for him on the night before his sixteenth birthday. When he falls asleep, he dreams he is in a bizarre landscape where he watches a flying purple-haired girl fight a strange warcraft. When she is shot down, he saves her from certain death.

And when he wakes up the next morning, she's in his bed, naked.

Tomokazu soon learns that the dream landscape that he was in is very real indeed -- Moera, the land of dreams. And the strange warcraft he saw was a Faedun -- a creature born of mankind's nightmares. The Faedun seek to conquer Moera so that they can use it to stage an attack on the waking world.

Before he knows it, other girls begin entering the dream world with him, starting with Mizuki, a childhood friend who has long had an unrequited crush on him. Joining them are Neneko, a street kid with a strange hat and stranger habits, and Kuyou, Nanase's little sister, whose unexpected return from America is not a coincidence. And then there is the mysterious Silk, oldest of the girls, who seems to exist only in the dream world and whose masked face is never revealed, even when she's in a bathing suit. In the dream world, each one has a distinctive costume and power, and together they fight the Faedun.

Tomokazu soon learns that he is the lynchpin of the group, with the ability to supercharge any them into a Wave Motion Gun. He also learns that he is critical to the defense of the waking world from the Faedun -- from one of the few survivors of their successful conquest in the future, who has reincarnated into the past in order to change the timeline. If Tomokazu and the girls fail, the Faedun will leave the Earth a wasteland of ruins and corpses.

Yumeria is a Namco game that later has a twelve-episode anime. The anime starts off looking like a screwball sentai harem comedy but reveals a darker underpinning the further in you get. It has crisp production values and an art style that looks at times like it might be verging on Thick Line Animation. Characterization is precise, and the voice performances in both Japanese and English (the latter courtesy of the fine folks at ADV Films) are exceptional. As might be gathered from that, it is licensed in North America and available on DVD.

Tropes used in Yumeria include: