This thing hits you like someone flipping through the manga at double speed and daring you to keep up. Twenty-something minutes, no onboarding, no context, just Yukiteru scribbling into his phone diary and Deus Ex Machina dropping the survival game on him before you've settled in. What it does nail is fidelity: the animation is clean, the panels come across word for word, and you get your first moving look at Yuno Gasai's face doing that switch between sweet and absolutely not. It functions as a proof of concept more than a story, a pitch reel for the TV series that followed, and honestly that's the correct way to watch it. Scenes cut before they land, which is infuriating if you came in cold and delicious if you already know what's coming. Read the manga first, then treat this as the trailer you get to say you saw early.

Yukiteru is a second-year middle schooler who struggles to make friends and sees himself as a mere bystander, recording everything he observes in his cell phone diary. His loneliness is so deep that he imagines a companion: Deus Ex Machina, who is apparently the Lord of Time and Space. Seeing how miserable the boy is, Deus grants him a new ability. His diary now records events from the near future, updated daily for the next 90 days. The gift pulls Yukiteru into a deadly game with other players, where the last one alive becomes Deus's successor, and losing the diary means death. This short supernatural action OVA was released as an extra with the limited edition of the manga's eleventh volume.