[amoirsp]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

Spoiler for Comparison to the game story structure, no future spoilers:

I think this actually makes sense because, unlike many visual novels, this is a story that revolves around a single central event, that being the election. Most visual novels start with a common premise, but then veer widely into different territory in each route, so it's actually impossible to merge all the different routes together without massive rewrites or compromises. Of course, assuming they do pick a romantic ending, at that point they will veer on one path or another, but until then all that matters is just trying to keep juggling as many balls in the air at once. To do that they had to resequence a bunch of things, and they did make a number of alterations from the game, but it is trying to retain the maximum amount of plot elements as possible. This is one of the reasons I was cautiously optimistic about this anime's storytelling potential in the first place; it always seemed rather well-suited to anime, to me.

Honestly, their main enemy is just time, but that's always going to be the case with one-cour adaptations of ~40 hour games.

Spoiler:

Exactly this. I still think this is the only opportunity to do so. I honestly don't think this situation will ever happen again in this fashion.

My concern is indeed the time issue. Overall I think every other aspect they have been pretty creative with what has been available, and it's synonymous to their goal of procuring interest for the PSP game or the series itself. So I'm rather impressed in this regard.

It's also amusing how the anime has made it's direction/ending un-spoilable too. I don't know about you game players but I've found the deviation or adjustments or juggling balls in the air that they've done so far to be entirely acceptable, particularly for linear anime viewing. (VNs suffered often from this, and even if there may have been screw ups I find this particular case more tolerable by far). It also helps that the base game was better (some VNs like Mashiro were adaptable, but due to the content of the game was also hard to deal with, having weaknesses like being subject to being boring).

My guesses for anime speculation will remain the same unless a future episode totally kills the possibility. The show is obviously putting hints here and there, but that's about it, all possibilities mentioned still remain.