Honestly, Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi was not a good show. It had no idea where it was heading, the pacing was all over the place, and the characters were poorly used. The latter arcs were especially dumb.
However, the one thing the show did do exceptionally well at was delivering powerful emotional climaxes. I’ll admit it, I cried. The most powerful was at the end of the first arc.
Humphrey, a man cursed by immortality, has wandered the face of the Earth after his wife and daughter disappeared, searching for them and fearing he will be the last one alive in a doomed world. He’s trapped by some robbers, and thinks no one will bother searching for him. He will just let them torture him until they get bored.
Then Ai appears in the doorway. They dispatch of the brigrands, and have a tearful reconciliation as they realize they are father and daughter.
Then Humphrey dies. I have no idea how or why. But it didn’t really matter.
Ai buries him.
Cries.
And then she leaves.
It would have been nice if they had used some visual cue to let us know when characters were supposed to be alive or undead, like those ubiquitous “dead eyes” they have in other anime. The end of this first arc was especially confusing, since there was no discernible difference between Ai’s father “coming back to life” and the rest of the undead; besides the other characters saying there was. This made suspension of disbelief be stretched out too thin.
You have a point. I couldn’t tell who was dead or alive aside from someone flat out telling me. But the entire first arc, with the villagers all turning out to have been dead, wouldn’t have worked without this. It relies on the fact that Ai and the audience believe they are all alive.