when the boys say their farewell and riki wakes up in the hospital. True ending is when he goes to save them

him in the hospital with Rin.

Mio's shadow. I feel like it would be really difficult and too obviously weird-looking to animate her without one, so maybe they'll abandon that detail?

It was too much of a deus ex machina and ruined the whole Rin + Riki growing so they can stand alone part of the story.

Her and her cat

Mio is always wearing that umbrella to hide this very fact, right? That alone can do wonders to mask the problem even in animation, methinks.

She seems to be casting a shadow.

In the game, the fulcrum of the route, the important transition, if you will, was in the baseball game. Whether one won or lost, the reader would be pushed towards their specific character route.

Now how would the animation handle the match specifically? When will the game be? Early on, and it loses its luster compared to the game, as the baseball match was the highest point of the characters' camaraderie and fellowship. Too late, and taking into consideration the format of presentation, one has the situation wherein the character routes may have to come before the game.

Secondly, what would be the intended impact of the match? Will it cement the Little Busters as the group they are? I suppose, to rephrase the question, would it be a big, one- or two- episode match or half an episode? There's never been much interaction in the game, as that portion was given over to odds, player positioning and planning on the player's part with little story interaction. This portion would have to be "original".

One might argue that this and many other elements in the common route are unimportant as long as the routes are reached. But I disagree. In Key games, the common is crafted so that it is the foundation of the game. Sadness and despair, emotions evoked during the chara-routes, is defined by joy and good-natured cheer (sometimes to the point of blatant idiocy, though of the good kind). This, I feel, is more important in Little Busters! because the other higher point of the game in my opinion is Refrain. The character routes were average to lacking at most. Of course, the characters themselves are memorable, but in visual novels, great characters are sometimes saddled with bad routes - but I digress.

So I come back to the baseball match, which also dovetails with the discussion on the "Endless Semester". How the animators will handle the baseball match might also reflect how the repeats are established. In the game, one has no idea until the very end of the existence of a reset, or a secret reality, only that there is a "secret to this world", a place where bizarre things occur, which are further reinforced by Kud's, Kurugaya's or Mio's routes.

So I restate, the baseball match is the key. What comes before and after it will be an indication as to their direction (which is already quite obvious plotwise to game veterans). It's plausible for several baseball matches, letting the audience believe that there are several matches, though that means more animation time for the matches which again would be a burden for their assigned budgets.

In the end, I could be wrong and the animators decide that the anime can stand on its own without the match. The question now would be, what would your thoughts be if this were so?