For me, the way they're doing the Komari route makes a lot of sense. Her friendship with Rin is being played up and ultimately, in the game, Rin's development was often side stepped because of the perspective issues.
It's not really about the romance as much as it is about strengthening Riki and, yes, Rin, as characters. So this route, at least, makes a lot of sense from that perspective.
The concern I have is that I don't think this works nearly as well with any other route. Are there ways of stripping out the remaining romances? For some of the arcs I could see it, but it's a very tricky line they're treading if they want to remain true to the spirit of the original work.
The second episode, where Riki had his flashback to the routes, made me think they're doing this like Clannad, wherein we're basically watching the last non-Refrain playthrough. Which implied to me they're going to try and eliminate the romances. And for a non-game player, it might work well enough.
That said, all six routes, including Komari's, focused very heavily on the one-to-one relationship between Riki and the girl in question. A lot of them ultimately boiled down to Riki being the only person with a strong enough relationship to bring the girl out of the depths of despair. They would need to do major writing changes to affect that dynamic.
Which brings me to the loops. I have a theory on how they could reasonably do this without making it very obvious to the viewer. At first you need to make them pretty much invisible to the viewer. Make it seem like it's a completely linear story, by making it transition back to the common route and just not mention any fallout from the Komari route. The way her route ends; indeed, the way most of the routes end, lend themselves to this. It would be increasingly jarring, but that's part of the point.
They could do this with or without the romances, but if you do it with the romances from the very beginning it becomes too jarring too quickly. I'd get the ones you can feasibly strip the love aspect from out of the way, like Komari's and maybe Haruka's (Kud is where you start getting really iffy) before you get into the really out there Mio and Yuiko routes where the romance is damn near inextricable. I'd also probably try to get Rin I in after the second route, but they might not have time for that and may just have to settle for Riki getting an ominous feeling when they do Rin II.
That way, as the stories get weirder, a sense of "something is wrong here" builds for the uninitiated viewer. You start off with a normal Key thing of mostly ignoring the plot elements of the previous arc, to outright "forgetting" budding relationships as the show becomes increasingly weirder and supernatural in nature. There's no real way to keep the viewer from guessing at least part of the secret of the world if you do it this way, but that in my mind is okay if the alternative is keeping the loops out of the story until the very end.
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