Actually kind of surprised at myself that I hadn’t posted here yet.
Anyways, for backstory I wasn’t really super huge into anime until after I had graduated high school in 2014. I was aware of it since I would watch stuff with my brother when I was really little, and I had even watched some of my own volition while I was in high school, but not nearly enough to really call it a serious hobby. My senior year I enlisted in the military, and then went to basic training after I graduated. I ended up meeting quite a few people who were pretty into anime while I was there, which sort of gave me the idea to start exploring it more seriously once I got back home.
So like a lot of people here my first Key work was Angel Beats. I was just casually browsing for something to watch, saw a qt girl with a gun, decided that was apparently enough to substantiate a watch, and at the time I thought it was pretty amazing. I looked up the OP on youtube since I liked it a lot, and saw comments talking about Clannad. So I went and watched that, and long story short After Story became and still is my favorite anime ever. This jumpstarted an endless descent into eternal weebdom as I began consuming anime at a much more rapid pace. I also started dabbling in visual novels in the form of Katawa Shoujo at some point, but I’ll get back to that later.
Anyways, some time later I was speaking with a close friend who had also just recently gotten into anime as a result of being recommended to watch Little Busters by one of his buddies. At this point I STILL wasn’t aware Key was a thing, but he recommends Little Busters to me so I decide to google it and see what it’s all about before I jump in.
Lo and behold, I discover that not only were Angel Beats, Little Busters, and Clannad all works by this company called Key, but that Little Busters and Clannad were actually adaptations of visual novels. Now, at this point I had recently finished Katawa Shoujo (which was my first VN), so I had begun to develop an interest in visual novels as a whole. So I quickly burned through the Little Busters anime, acquired the VN, read it over the course of a month or two, and…
The deal was completely fucking sealed. Holy shit the Little Busters VN was so good it made me shit pure rainbows of emotion, and I promptly proceeded to read Planetarian, then Clannad, then Rewrite in relatively rapid (for me, since I take things pretty slowly…) succession.
And, uh…here we are.