Clannad: The ending half.

Well I suppose it’s not all the way to the end since I’m not going to cover Clannad – After Story. At least not yet.

The anime keeps flowing exactly like it did before. With equal portions of drama and epic comedy. Even the little flashback sequence thing gets explained and was what I’d thought it was ever since Nagisa was introduced as a character. It’s her play, just done in a ‘real’ way and not like her little theater performance.

I’d had a few ideas about where the play came from. I thought it was related to that ‘thing from her past’ they talk about a whole bunch and my sister thought sort of the same thing but she was thinking Nagisa was adopted. In the end we were both wrong, which isn’t a surprise because I’m wrong about things all the time.

Looking forward to After Story but I have no idea when I’ll be sitting down to watch it.

Clannad – The first half, give or take an episode.

On the off chance that someone reading this has been here moe than once you’ve odds are noticed I prefer to have watched a few episodes of something before I go and start saying what I think about it. so it should be no surprise that I’m around episode ten of Clannad at the moment. It just recently finsihed airing, at least I think it did, maybe that was Kanon, either way both done by KEY so close enough. >.> (Yeah I know, heresy)

I tried playing the game a while back but it didn’t quite work out as the copy I have uses an english translation that is either screwed up or incomplete. I get to… the morning after Sunohara tries to convince the main character to help him carry a VCR and TV back to his room, then my game freezes. Music keeps going and everything but no text, no advancement options, no menus, I have to either alt-tab or alt f4 my way out. Sad, but hey, what can you do besides wait for a complete translation? I’ll admit though I was kind of ignoring him so I must have missed the part with his constant challenging of Tomoyo. I actually I was pretty much ignoring everyone but Nagisa, I can’t help it, it’s training from older ‘visual novels’ you wouldn’t get 100% if you did it any other way.

The anime solves this issue by giving us chunks from pretty much every path int he game so good job. I have only a couple complaints and they’re all ‘that shouldn’t have happened yet.’ Such as that fortune telling scene with Ryou which in the anime is right away but technically doesn’t happen for a while in the game. Just little things like that. The story seems to enjoy straddling this fine line between comedy and drama, and I think it does a very good job. Several parts have had me laughing outright, which is a rare occurrence. I’ll snicker a bit usually, but I mean actual factual laughter here. Between that and the Fu-chan arc, the ending of which had me tearing up all by itself we’ve kind of hit two opposite extremes on the emotion scale. Don’t look at me like that.

And it’s cute too, really cute. Fu-chan and Nagisa’s argument about the superiority of Dango Daikazoku and starfish, Kotomi’s absurd shyness, added into her obliviousness and her violin skills. And Tomoyo, in all her badass glory is cute, at least to someone with my taste. I don’t much care for Ryou and Kyou, but that’s half personal taste and half the fact they bear an uncanny resemblance to Sakura Matou from Fate Stay Night, whom I also disliked to a certain degree. Not that I hate them they’re just not up my alley. And I’ll clarify Nagisa too I just think she’s cute, in the same way puppies and kittens are cute. I don’t mean the other kind of cute like I do with say, Tomoyo. Weird I know taking a non-loli over Fu-chan… but I can’t help it she’s got more elemental alignments that I’m weak against, if you know what I mean. ;p