[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by Skyfall

Still, the pacing was definitely fast - not quite so much as to say rushed, but the episode certainly covered a lot of different events all over the place, enough to make them feel somewhat "flat". I guess they wanted to get the setup out of the way from the get go while ending the episode on that specific cliffhanger (totally expected it ), so they had to find a way to fit all of the mandatory events and character introductions up to that point.

Yeah, I made this comment elsewhere, but it reminds me of an "on-rail shooter" or something -- everything was so conveniently connected that it feels like the story itself is pushing you from one location to the next just so they can touch on all the major points they had to cover. There was literally no "breathing room" in the story at all; it just went from point A to point B to point C as efficiently as possible. Just consider the sequence from the cafeteria scene on as an example:

Spoiler for Episode 1:

- Meet with Shiro
- Shiro meets with Sister Amaike
- Kouhei repeats the one and only thing he was told about her before, which gets her mad, so he has to leave
- Shiro asks where he's going, and conveniently it's the Student Council building (that Shiro happens to know a lot about...)
- Shiro takes Kouhei to Student Council
- Shiro meets her brother Sei, who happens to show up just then, and Sei asks Shiro to leave...
- ... so that Iori can conveniently appear
- Go into the student council room to meet with Erika
- Who promptly leaves so Iori can tell Kouhei the secret
- Cut to the bath for the misunderstanding with Erika
- Cut to Iori & Sei for the explanation
- ...where Tsukasa happened to be
- Cut to the conversation with Tsukasa and Kouhei about the accident
- Where Kanade and Haruna happen to appear to ask him why
- And Tsukasa can provide the explanation he happened to have overheard
- And Erika just happens to walk by to over hear them talking
- And Kouhei just so happens to go suddenly stoic about the whole thing so that Erika can hear him and realize he's not a bad guy
- And his stuff conveniently arrives
- And Erika conveniently just happens to walk past them again for the promise
- Tsukasa is conveniently there to explain the tree
- Then cut to Kouhei going finish the orientation errand
- He so happens to walk by the church and get startled, and decides to check it out
- Where a vampire just so happens to be in the middle of a feeding...
- ...and so he misses the date with Erika.

I think that when they planned the episode, they must have used a map with waypoints. (It's good on the one hand that they're trying to be true to the game's events, but sometimes cutting a few things may not be so bad...)