Hm.

Lots and lots of symbolism, even by this series’ standards.

The latter part was presented as if Yuki was flashing back to her experiences in the games, preparatory to the final showdown with Kyara, but an awful lot of that was from later games - we saw them earlier, but that’s only because the timeline of the series wasn’t linear.

And on that note, I actually planned to read the LNs starting a few weeks ago, but then discovered that Candle Woods is the latter half of the first volume. I suspect that the producers wanted to end this adaptation with the end of Candle Woods, probably much like the presumed ending of the first volume of the LN, but that didn’t provide enough material, so they padded it out with games that actually appear in later volumes of the LN series and rearranged the timeline to accommodate it. And presumably just hoped that people wouldn’t notice that Yuki seemed to be flashing back to things that technically hadn’t happened yet.

The last scene was certainly a surprise, and I would assume that was straight out of the LN, and is addressed in later volumes.

In any event, now I’m going to read the LNs and hopefully learn some more. It’s likely that a lot of what was just symbolism in the adaptation is actually just background to Yuki’s thoughts in the LNs, and her thoughts provide the context that seemed to be too often missing in the adaptation.

Then when I catch up with the LNs, I’ll undoubtedly watch the series again. It was certainly different and intriguing, but I’m not sure how well it actually worked.