Boy, do I ever hate Visual Novel adaptations.
They’re everything that’s wrong with videogame adaptations, but with added problems of:
- Having emulate the visuals of a medium that has some of the most moribund visuals in the videogame market.
- Adapting something inherently heavy with dialogue and exposition.
The episode with an avant title sequence that exhibits a whole bunch of elements I hate in modern Japanese cartoons:
- Sad doe-eyed girls.
- Excessive use of a colour filter. In this case red.
- Glaringly obvious 3D modelling work.
Then we get an opening sequence full of girls that I can’t tell apart. The discount CLAMP, Peach Pit, did the design work for the game, so that’s another negative against it.
Then we discover that the opening was a flashforward, and we meet the lead and his family (dad and wheelchair bound little sister) driving to their new home in their dreadful-looking 3D model of a car. Then the lead meets the sad, doe-eyed girl of the opening, except here she’s aggressively upbeat. I should also mention, the wheelchair is also a 3D model much of the time, and it’s possible the sister wears an excessively large hat when going out in it to hide the model of her that’s riding it, rather than shade from the sun.
There’s then a ton of exposition from various people. As it’s based on a visual novel after all and as you can’t read all this in a cartoon we get characters clunkily telling you the information in boring scenes. Then around 10 minutes in I decided this whole exercise was a waste of my time and gave up. Yes, it is worse than Chu Bra, Ladies versus Butlers and Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu. While they might have been either offensive, poorly directed or overly ambitious, none of them ever induced the feelings of utter boredom that the small portion I managed to watch of this show did. Nothing in the story, characters or visuals held my interest at all.
Visual novel adaptations are the dirt worst thing to happen to anime in the last 15 years.