Is Bokura ga Ita (We Were There) Worth Watching? A 7.45 That Earns Its 26 Episodes on Theme and a Male Lead Who Refuses to Be Fixed

Artland's 2006 shoujo posts a modest 7.45 on the Codex because the rubric rewards a grief premise handled honestly and a love interest the show refuses to redeem — even as the production stays flat.

Most people just want to know: is Bokura ga Ita worth your time, and for whom? Yes, if you can accept a 2006 Artland production that never once tries to look expensive, and a male lead whose emotional cowardice the show pointedly declines to romanticize. No, if you need visual event, tidy resolution, or a rewatch value that survives past the closing episode.

The MyAnimeList 7.23 Is Underselling the Right Thing

The consensus figure is a MAL 7.23 across roughly 240,000 members — a number that reads like a polite mid-tier shoujo dismissal, filed next to a dozen high-school romances the crowd remembers less well than it thinks. That score is doing something specific: it is punishing Akitaro Daichi's adaptation for its production ceiling and its refusal to end. The Codex 7.45 pushes back on the first half of that verdict without disputing the second. What the crowd is under-weighting is theme (8.0) and character (8.0) — two criteria the rubric refuses to soft-pedal on a show that earns them. What the crowd is correctly flagging is animation (6.0) and a story (7.5) that circles its wounds.

The consensus reading treats Bokura ga Ita as a sad-girl romance with above-average sincerity. That undersells the specific argument the series is making about grief and about the impossibility of being fully known by another person, and it lets the show off the hook for a middle stretch that repeats itself. The rubric wants to do both — credit the argument, name the repetition.

Theme Is the 8.0 That Carries the Score

The premise is not a love triangle. It is a relationship conducted inside the shadow of a dead girl — Nana, killed in a car accident, whose infidelity at the moment of her death is left ambiguous and whose memory Yano cannot decommission. That is a genuinely thorny setup for a shoujo demographic, and the 8.0 on themes is the rubric acknowledging that the show sits with it rather than resolving it. Yano's inability to articulate his fear of loss is the emotional core, and Daichi's direction — for all its budgetary limits — lets that inarticulacy stay uncomfortable. Nanami is not written as the girl who fixes him. She is written as someone who tries, fails in specific ways, and has to decide what enduring disappointment is worth.

This is the axis on which Bokura ga Ita separates itself from the shoujo mid-tier. The comparison point that makes it clearest is Ao Haru Ride, a Production I.G reunion romance that scores the same 7.50 on story but never puts its male lead's damage in genuine tension with the heroine's happiness. Kou is brooding; Yano is off-putting. That distinction is what the themes score is buying.

Character at 8.0 — and Yano Is the Reason

Yano is a rare shoujo male lead whose damage is portrayed as genuinely repellent rather than romantically shaded. His emotional cowardice, his tendency to disappear rather than communicate, his self-sabotage in the second half — none of it is excused by the framing. The show does not cut to a soft-focus flashback that recontextualizes him as misunderstood. It lets him behave badly and lets Nanami absorb the cost.

Nanami herself is tracked with patience across the 26 episodes — her drift from naive optimism into someone who has learned what specific kinds of disappointment feel like is the throughline the animation cannot render but the writing does. Yuri is the load-bearing supporting character: her jealousy is quiet and festering rather than performative, and her connection to Nana gives the triangle a second axis most shoujo love-geometry lacks. Takeuchi functions as more than a rival slot. The 8.0 on character is earned by four people, not two.

The heroine-carries-the-show pattern here is worth setting against Skip Beat!'s Kyouko Mogami, which posts a comparable overall score on a completely different mechanism — one protagonist doing the work of an entire cast. Bokura ga Ita distributes the weight.

Animation at 6.0 Is Not an Insult, It Is a Ceiling

Artland's 2006 production is modest, and the rubric records that flatly. Limited animation, off-model faces in the middle stretch, a muted palette that reads as dated rather than deliberately restrained. Daichi leans on the standard shoujo visual grammar — soft focus, held reaction shots, sparse piano — and executes it competently without ever producing the kind of directorial sequence that fixes a moment in memory. There is no episode-14 balcony shot here, no sakuga cut that a highlight reel would isolate. The visual style suits the intimate register, which is why the score is 6.0 rather than lower, but it is a ceiling on how far the show can travel outside its existing audience.

The world score of 6.5 is doing similar work — a generic Hokkaido high school rendered believably but without specificity of place. The premise carries the world criterion because the setting cannot. If you require your romance to look as considered as it reads, this is where Bokura ga Ita fails you, and the failure is real.

The Ending Is Not an Ending

The 7.5 on story is where the rubric agrees with the crowd. The 26 episodes circle Yano's withdrawal and the Nana shadow more times than the material can sustain, and the show closes on a deliberately unresolved note that respects the manga's slow-burn structure — Obata was still serializing until 2012 — without producing an anime-original resolution. Whether that reads as integrity or as abdication depends on your tolerance. The rubric grades it as honest incompletion rather than failure, which is why the story score is a 7.5 rather than a 6.5, but it is the reason a rewatch is harder to justify than a first watch.

The Steelman: The Crowd Says Watch the Live-Action Instead

The strongest opposing case is that the 2012 Toma Ikuta and Yuriko Yoshitaka film duology, directed by Takahiro Miki, compresses the material into a form that trades the anime's pacing problems for a resolution the manga eventually delivers. That is a real argument. What it misses is what the 26-episode format specifically enables — the slow accumulation of small evasions from Yano, the way Nanami's optimism erodes in half-episode increments, the space Yuri needs to become a character rather than a function. The films cannot do that arithmetic. The anime is worth watching because it takes the time the story requires, and pays for that time in animation quality and in an ending that refuses to arrive.

Watch Bokura ga Ita if you want a shoujo that treats grief as a structural problem rather than a plot beat, and if you can accept a production that is competent rather than beautiful. Skip it if you need closure or craft you can screenshot. The 7.45 is what an honest argument looks like when the studio cannot afford to make it pretty.