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Originally Posted by cyth
The supernatural + effective foreshadowing, exactly! That's what makes these series work and why I love them. CLANNAD I feel is a very good show for other reasons.
So you think Little Busters has that quality to it too? Better put it on my to-watch list, couldn't get past the gags the first time.
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IMHO the first season of Little Busters is pretty much a miss. There are some good episodes but most of the show is quite badly paced and particularly the first couple of arcs hardly feel like they are trying to hide the fact that it's a VN that resets at the end of each girls arc. In hindsight I can see why the show feels as it does during the first season but I still feel like KyoAni had a better handle on that translation during the first season of Clannad than JC Staff managed there.
Luckly all that's a moot point when Refrain walked in. That second season was excellently executed and it kept me mostly guessing at what the hell was going on right till the end. But most importantly it actually took the time to explain what the hell was going on unlike what KyoAni did for Clannad. It's really not an easy story to translate to the small screen since it uses so well the reset mechanic inherent to Visual Novels but I think they managed to nail the ending even if the beginning didn't really hint at what was happening enough until the latter end of the season. If they had managed to slip in some extra foreshadowing to the first two arcs of the first season it would probably get top marks.
It doesn't help that the Komari arc hits so damn hard with the melodrama at times that it stops being endearing and starts being just laughable. That was mostly what made me stall the show for a while. Also, with all due respect to the voice acting by Horie Yui, I don't think I can hear the word Narcolepsy again without punching something. The word is so incredibly overused that it really becomes grating. I also feel that Riki's voice didn't really start to work into way latter in the series and I still feel like casting Horie Yui-san wasn't the best of choices (despite the fact that I'm a massive fan of her work most of the time).
So yeah, the Little Busters anime won't factor into my top 10 list anytime soon because it's still JC Staff with their muted colours and mostly "meh" presentation but it's still a much more solid effort than it looked like it would turn out to be at first glance. I would say that it's a solid watch for those who liked Maeda's stories before if you can trudge through a weak opening act.