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So, after more than one month without posting anything new (for various reasons I’m not going to rant about right now), I’ve decided to restart things with something I’ve been planning to do for a while – write about an anime at the same time it airs, and give my personal impressions regarding each episode. Well, what anime would be perfect for this? Little Busters!, of course~

It was with a great sense of trepidation that I, on the evening of Saturday, October 6th 2012, sat at my computer waiting for the first episode of the new Little Busters! anime to finish downloading. The feeling is the same as when, for example, your favourite book gets a movie adaptation – you can’t wait to see the characters actually moving around and speaking, instead of being stuck in the pages of the book and in your imagination. You can surmise, then, the immense feeling of joy I felt when an anime adaptation announcement was ‘unofficially’ (mistakenly? xD) leaked by Dengeki Magazine, and then promptly ‘officialized’ it on April 1st.

However, months later came some not-so-good news, which made me (and pretty much everyone who played the LB! Visual Novel) start to have a slight feeling of apprehension, because unlike all the other Key VNs that received anime adaptations, this one isn’t being made by Kyoto Animation. Following several rumours in late June/early July that KyoAni didn’t have any plans to produce Little Busters!, came the announcement that shocked quite a lot of fans – the production studio chosen by Key was J.C. Staff.

Now, I usually don’t worry too much about which studios produces which animes – I’m more interested in the stories of those yet-to-be animes, where they come from (Light Novels, Mangas, Visual Novels, original works, etc.) and how faithfully the studio transposes the stories to animation. The announcement that it would be J.C. Staff animating Little Busters! made pretty much everyone (including me, I’ll admit) moan in displeasure, because there’s this unwritten rule that says every Key Visual Novel that gets adapted to anime, must be adapted by Kyoto Animation. Unfortunately, I have yet to watch any of the three animes they made based on Key’s VNs – Clannad, Air and Kanon (I know, shame on me!). And while I do agree that KyoAni is one of the best, if not the best animation studio around, I don’t like assigning these labels to things. ‘Key VN adaptation must be made by KyoAni, otherwise => crap’. I say, let’s see what J.C. Staff can do, and then we’ll judge. I do want a perfect Little Busters! anime, mind you. I’m moments away from finishing the Visual Novel, and I absolutely loved it so far. It’s a story that has everything, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you stop and think about yourself, and crucially, it touches you deep in your heart when you’re least expecting it. I love it. And because of that, I’m secretly praying that J.C. Staff doesn’t mess everything up. There’s lots of stuff that can go wrong – they might compress and shorten the story so much to fit in 26 episodes, and it’ll lose much of its impact, they might focus less on certain characters, when I think everyone is equally important, the animation might suck… it could be a disaster. Or… it could be J.C. Staff’s greatest anime to date. Here’s hoping it’s the latter option!

So, after this rather long intro, let’s get down to business, shall we?

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