YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World[a] is a visual novel adventure game developed and published by ELF Corporation.

It was originally released in 1996 as an eroge for the NEC PC-98 Japanese home computer and later ported to the Sega Saturn and Microsoft Windows platforms without the sexual content.

A connection to Harlan Ellison's short story The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World has been noted by Robert Allen of Tech-Gaming.

Players travel between parallel worlds using a reflector device that uses stones to mark positions as returning locations so they can retrace their steps and enter an alternative universe.

Geo Technics, the company Ayumi works for, is occupying the beach as a construction survey site, but the workers are constantly injured by inexplicable lightning strikes.

One evening Takuya receives a package containing an incomplete letter from Koudai and a small otherworldly device with several slots, some fitted with round jewels.

Originally named Kaytia, she was the oldest living Sakaimachi inhabitant at the time but youthful in appearance with blonde hair, blind yet with an uncanny sense of her surroundings.

Takuya can't cross the desert, but eventually his frustration and homesickness give way to love towards Sayless, and the two begin a happy life in Illia's house.

One day a dying member of nogards, a species of winged humanoids, arrives and entrusts them with her lizard-form infant, named Kun-kun by Yu-no.

Takuya ends up working for months in a quarry where enslaved prisoners mine Hypersense Stones for a casket required for the priestess ritual.

Takuya befriends another prisoner, Amanda, who resembles Kanna's mother; she is the leader of a rebel faction believing that the apocalypse and ritual are a lie by the God Emperor to keep the people in control.

They head for the Capital, and along the way Kun-kun becomes exhausted from carrying the other two across the desert and is eaten by them, Amanda is saddened upon learning of her sister Illia's death and has sex with Takuya, and they find a Reflector Device at a temple.

Several reveals follow: The God Emperor is actually the Ayumi from the prologue, and was transported alongside Ryuuzouji to Dela Grante by the spacetime distortion; her intentions are good as the ritual is genuine; Dela Grante was constructed 8000 years earlier by a scientifically advanced race as a place to escape an impending apocalypse on Earth; Dela Grante is in an unstable interdimensional orbit around Earth and the ritual is needed every 400 years to avoid a catastrophic collision between the worlds - the computerised mind of ancient head scientist Grantia inhabits a priestess' body to steer Dela Grante, after which the priestess is ejected from the dimension and likely dies; each 400 years the worlds were also so close that some people crossed them, including previous priestess Keiko, explaining the Celestials; the race genetically modified people to have short childhoods and long lifespans but they became dependent on Hypersense Stones; they made other species to survive Dela Grante and discarded failed specimens beyond the Border; later generations couldn't understand the technology and interpreted it religiously; Eriko, who is an interdimensional investigator named Äichli:kkwádroú from yet another world, appears (later explaining smoking was foreign to her world and that she slept on the floor as a remedy for interdimensional travel); Ryuuzouji's body has been possessed the whole time by an entity, which is pursued by Eriko for effectively killing her lover by possessing him and had then arrived at Ryuuzouji's using the interdimensional vehicle.

The entity attempts to prevent the ritual because it'd survive the annihilation of the worlds and so escape Eriko, but is defeated - after expelling Amanda into another dimension (said to possibly end up on Earth) with a 50 year maximum time difference, and mortally wounding Ayumi.

[47][10] Digitally Downloaded was captivated by the plot once it moved onto more intellectual topics after what the reviewer saw as a deceptively mundane intro involving a panty shot, proclaiming: "Yu-No is smart, you come to quickly realise, and then you'll start paying very close attention to every line of dialogue.

[45][50][46] RPG Site compared him unfavourably to Chaos;Child's Takuru Miyashiro, whose flaws he thought were better taken advantage of thematically in the respective narrative, and found the other characters weak as well.

Digitally Downloaded defended Takuya's fixation with females as "appropriate characterisation for building the protagonist up as something of a mix of teenage hormones and delinquency in coming from a broken home".

[46] Pelit embraced the challenge brought by the gameplay and described it as not only as nostalgically cruel for its item management but also immersive, "as if it was the player themself who was learning the logic of time-jumping and not only Takuya".

[49] RPGFan was grateful for a hint system introduced in the remake remedying the need of "wild goose chases" to find the next trigger to advance the plot.

[48] Other than the cursor at all times locking onto interactable areas and the tedium of skipping text in familiar parts, RPG Site had little to complain about the gameplay.

[50] The English translation received complaints of stiltedness and awkwardness from RPG Site[50] and RPGFan,[47] the former at times being baffled by incomprehensible passages.

[45] However, Digitally Downloaded called the visuals "gorgeous" and admired how "every scene, character, and environment drips with carefully constructed atmosphere", especially in a lengthy 30-hour game requiring a lot of art and design.

[48][50] At Hardcore Gaming 101, Audun Sorlie wrote that YU-NO helped revolutionize the visual novel genre, particularly with the A.D.M.S., which was touted as "revolutionary" at the time.

[4] At Gamasutra, Sorlie wrote that eroge audiences soon began demanding large-scope plotlines and musical scores of similar quality and ambition to that of YU-NO's, and that companies responded by hiring talent: "The genre became an all-new arena for young artists and musicians once again, with companies willing to take chances on fresh blood; the market thrived with the excitement and the risks that were being taken, and became a hotbed of creativity".

[27] Per Anime News Network, YU-NO is "considered one of the most beloved narrative games in Japan, and its system of parallel storylines had a profound influence on storytelling in visual novels in the years since its original release.

Anime News Network said it "was incredibly popular for its time and likely inspired a lot of media after its release" and they noted its premise is "adjacent to Steins;Gate.

"[57] According to Nintendo World Report, visual novels such as Ace Attorney, Fate/stay night and Steins;Gate owe their success to YU-NO.

[46] The branching timeline system was influential, opening "the door for visual novels to become more elaborate and have a greater range of narrative arcs, without requiring the player to replay the game over and over again.

He views that since YU-NO has a dual story structure – with on one hand the separate narratives per girl ("level of the simulacra") assembled onscreen by the game "system", and movement between story branches to collect items ("level of the database") on the other – the timeline map makes the system behind the drama and hence such dual consumption, in part, visible.

[59] Announced in 2016, it was produced by Feel in collaboration with MAGES and Genco[60] and was broadcast on AT-X, Tokyo MX, ABC, and BS Fuji,[16][61] with Crunchyroll and Funimation streaming outside Japan with an additional English dub.