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Key adaptations are always a bit of a gamble with me. I've never played any of the visual novels, so for me each anime is a brand new and unspoiled experience, and I can only imagine what the original source plays like plot-wise. There are some Key works that I've enjoyed quite a bit, such as Clannad After Story, and there are others I've not been as interested in (the first half of Clannad and the Angel Beats project come to mind). When I first picked up Little Busters!, there was a lot of criticism toward the studio, J.C.Staff, because of the manner in which the popular visual novel was adapted; there were many people who wanted Kyoto Animation, who were behind Clannad, to work on LB, and others who simply found the anime to be boring or unsatisfying in some way. Having no background on what the VN is supposed to look like, I saw a perfectly good anime, though not the most innovative or interesting I've ever seen.
Regardless, there's a paradoxical relationship between this series and the bizarre fact that you can simultaneously have nothing and plenty to say about it. One moment it's a plain school-life comedy, and the next we have drama and magic acting as the dominant plot devices, which, of course, is what makes Key works so recognizable. I'm constantly looking for a middle ground with Little Busters!, and one just doesn't exist, making this one of the most bipolar series I've seen in a while.
The story of Little Busters! centers on Riki Naoe (Yui Horie) an orphan who suffers from narcolepsy and whose traumatic childhood was dramatically overturned when he met Kyousuke Natsume (Hikaru Midorikawa), the leader of a group of children who called themselves the Little Busters. Finally finding himself with friends, Riki attributes his happiness and positive outlook to the group, and when Kyousuke is on the verge of graduating from high school, the Little Busters are reformed, only this time, they've decided to start a baseball team. Lacking the correct number of team members is the plot device used to integrate the various heroines, each of which Riki finds and convinces to join the team. So far, the anime has covered two heroine arcs, Komari Kamikita (Natsumi Yanase) and Mio Nishizono (Yuiko Tatsumi), both of which have had memory-loss motifs and allusions to death (Komari's older brother died, and Mio tries to disappear in a suicidal manner). The drama is most apparent in such arcs, but that doesn't make the inter-arc episodes useless either.
Little Busters! is a series which likes to take its time, and perhaps that's what throws some people off; it's not a pace for everyone. When there isn't drama, however, there's plenty of character building going on, and even when the comedy is repetitive or simply not very amusing, there's something compelling about the series that keeps me coming back. Perhaps there's a J.C.Staff-esque magic here for me in the depiction of the group of friends that makes up for the flaws (which would normally make me drop this type of series pretty quickly), but I've enjoyed this series just fine so far and I'm interested in seeing where it goes enough that I've belatedly added it to my blogging schedule starting next week.
Episode 15 Screencaps: "Wow, That Rocks!"
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