General discussion for the Little Busters! visual novel and itās adaptations. Please tag late-game spoilers with the [spoiler] tag.
Little Busters saw Key return to the standard formula of students in high school, but featured a much more positive and comical common route than any other Key game since. But the character routes and Refrain still stand as pinnacles of Keyās dramatic storytelling.
What do you think of Little Busters? Where does it rank compared to other Key series for you? Have you understood the true essence of muscle?
Well I just finished the first season of the anime after struggling with it for months!
The animation is hit and miss. Sometimes it looks beautiful, and sometimes it is irritating or uglyā¦
The BGM tracks are lazily juxtaposed for the first half of the season. Some times it felt like they just threw in a random track for no reason.
The characters make so many random soundsā¦ and it becomes reeeaaally obvious. Sure a character laughs or grunts a little in anime, but to have ~20 seconds of characters just making wordless utterances is aggravating!!
Buuuuut, I think it did a good job of being āKeyā styled. My only issue with the Visual Novel was that the individual character routes were rather weak. Rinās, Yuikoās and Harukaās were all good, but Kudās route somehow failed to make me emotional (even though it had all the makings of an emotional story,) and I ended up skipping Komariās route just because I wasnāt enjoying it at all. While I never liked Nishizono all that much, I canāt deny that her story was well written.
In the anime, all of the romantic aspects were pretty much all removedā¦ which is what was bad about the anime adaptions of Kanon, Air, and Clannad. Little Busters! however, had something else to focus on. The anime switches the focus onto the friendships within LB!
As a whole, I felt more emotionally attached to each character in the anime. Futaki got a bunch more screen-time than I would have predicted sheād get. A-Chan showed up a lot too! I was NOT expecting all of the feels that came with episode 23 (end of Kudās route.) The final episode let each character have a moment to shine! Even Miyuki and Sasasegawa were joining in~ I also appreciate the way that the underlying plot has been handled so far.
Sure, thereās a bunch of problems with the anime, but thereās also some improvements upon the VN. If I compared it to the first season of the Clannad anime adaption Iād say that the Clannad anime butchered up a lot more important scenes than LB! did.
Oh, by the way, I forgot how adorable the friendship between Riki, Kyousuke, Masato and Kengo was! Makes me want to relive similar memories~~ T w T Speaking of adorable, that scene between Riki and Yuiko at the end of episode 15 is just the cutest! They are shoooo cute together~ =3=
The character routes can be hit or miss, depending on whether you can actually follow and be engaged in them. I think that knowing the Secret of the World in advance would make people enjoy routes like Kudās and Kurugayaās much more, as it worked out that way for me, and others put off the character-driven magic as contrived, deus-ex, forced shit, etc., when I can explain all of that pretty easily. Itās an experience improved with the benefit of hindsight, I think.
After finishing all the primary Key works, I think Refrain is the strongest piece Maeda has written, and it tied in with the rest of the story pretty well. In essence, it was like After Story went several steps further than Maeda went in Kanon and Airās stories, but in Refrain, he turned his original ideas inside out, flip flopped them, reversed character roles and expectations, worked on improving the believability of the route structure and story premise, and other stuff. I still kind of have issues with the ending. It still doesnāt make literal sense, while the other Key endings feel better defined. I think clearly keeping the character development (from each route in the dream world) in the true ending makes it more satisfying.
Overall, I actively related with the LB characters more than most other Key characters in both the anime and adaptations. The routes felt more tense and conflict-driven, while Key has had a lot of routes that are sort of likeā¦ everything goes well for the first 50-80% of the route -> muh tragic backstory -> heroine gets the Key dickings/fixing/resolution -> happy ending, which is how I think Kappei, Misae, Yukine, Kotomi, Fukoās routes felt in Clannad, and I think Komariās was the only route in LB that really fell into that structure, and maybe somewhat Kudās because of how late the drama comes, but not completely. Thereās Mioās conflict with Midori, Haruka with Futaki, Kurugayaās whole world collapsing and all the twists and changes in the characters that follow that, and Rinās is nothing like most Key routes Iāve seen, and neither was Refrain. I think they did a good job of being engaging without just dumping thousands of lines of comedy and then a backstory on my face like most Key routes have done.
If itās any fun to speculate, the dub was announced right after the anime had been out for a year, and Refrain started. So Iād say a fair guess would be to expect it this fall~
Good because Iām hoping that by the time Sentai releases Refrain, the first season will be available in one compiled pack. Thatās what Iām waiting for before I buy the DVDs.
Just thought that people might be interested in a custom icon I quickly made for the Memorial version when I got it. http://puu.sh/bj1HD/5a4b323058.ico
Since I have every version installed I wanted ME to have a unique icon in the same style.
Since Iām not too confident and motivated to clone the LB minigames anymore due to an immense amount of voice lines needed to be understood, Iām thinking of making a fangame of some kind instead. I want the main character to be Dorj and Iām ideally wanting to make it a similar game to Cave Story (an action platformer), although I donāt see Dorj running and jumping that often.
Iād appreciate ideas for different genres and types of games I could delve into instead that would make more sense. Probably wouldnāt want to make a game with a complex RPG system or something like that though.
It must be 2D because I donāt really want to use existing 3d game engines and I havenāt learned how to make them yet since Iām going to be taught them properly in university sometime.
Ideas for everything really including story would be great. Itād be hilarious to get some Raiden Dorj with Rules of Nature in there somewhere.
Progress will probably be slow because Iām lazy and stuff but hopefully Iāll find some motivation.
Iāve been dealing with some personal instability lately, and thinking upon Little Busters, I released how relevant it is to my current state of mind. This might be considered spoilers to some, so Iāll tag it.
I think thereās a very important theme of Little Busters that most people seem to forget. It isnāt just a story about friendship. Itās a story about coping with mortality. Rikiās role as the main character is extremely important in portraying this. The story is all about his struggle against the cruel fact of mortality that heās confronted with over and over again. Directly, and indirectly. His fear of mortality and loss is so extreme that it paralyses him (often literally). It often reaches the point where he wishes that he never existed, just so that he wouldnāt have to experience that pain again. āIād forgotten that living means losing.ā
Little Busters is all about how, through the warmth of the people he loves, he learns to accept, and be thankful for the fact that he is alive. Itās about people learning the value of life. Friendship is merely the means the story uses to accomplish that.
This is a sentiment that resonates very deeply with me right now.
My mind has been in a bit of a dark place lately. But Iāve just thought about this message in Little Busters, and how helpful it is to me right now. I guess itās a story thatās always given me comfort in the sad times.
What I still got out of the VN the most is definitely to never become jaded or fit into social standards, but I agree that this is certainly a message within it- Primarily within Rikiās character. Itās part of what makes him such a good MC. His speeches about the Little Busters giving him purpose arenāt meaningless.
Also we all know this is just a big segue into Maedaās Angel Beats! monster www
As that person, the biggest meaning in Litbus for me was that eventually people are gonna leave you or die or something, and you should learn to either move on with life, or refuse to accept the truth. Refusal to accept regrets. Refusal to accept the rules of the dream world. Refusal to accept death. The dream world was born whenever someone couldnāt accept something, and broke down once people turned their refusal towards something else. They denied things so much that we donāt even know if they are actually still alive or not. You know what happens when you finally decide to accept everything? Kinniku happens.
Reading through discussion threads as I watch Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru and the topic of misreading Japanese names came up, someone had an example from LB that I found funny and interesting:
[earlier in the comment] However, the reading for the meaning valley happens to be āTaniā.
More mistaken readings with the kanji for valley (č°·)! In Little Busters, Kurugayaās name is written as ę„ć¶č°·. The middle character, ć¶ simply means a repetition of the kanji before. ę„ is pronounced as ku when used in the verb āto comeā (physical movement). The verb is written as ę„ć (kuru). This is where the first two syllables of her name comes from, and then we have the āGayaā from above. However in the VN, thereās a segment where itās revealed that when Masato first read the name, he read it as āRairaidaniā. When used in a compound with other kanji, ę„ is read as 'rai". And we have the āTaniā for the last character like above. It just gets turned into ādaniā because Japanese is Japanese and what the hell is consistency.
I think thereās definitely some other jokes from names in LB that people might miss the meaning of too.
So i was doing some research and i saw that lilbus was playable on android using xclannad. Has anyone had any success with this? or is there is a better way to get it on mobile or is that an impossible wish?
Just a quick update on the mobile thing ^^
Using XClannad the battle mini-games donāt work and the game freezes at the first baseball match so you canāt do anything from that point on
But if you use rlvm the interface is a lot better and the battle systems work and the baseball match is the only thing that doesnāt but the program just skips right over it so the entire thing is playable (minus the baseball matches) ^^
But this may be indirectly related to the ratio. If there was just one boy, that didnāt really have a big role in the story, wouldnāt you think they wouldāve invested more in the routes, since the girls were the focus?
I suggest you donāt play Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate. The main heroineās route is a copy-paste of Komariās but one hundred times worse.
And:
*You are contradicting yourself.
My conception of ratings are biased because in my country, 6 is a bad grade and it can make you reprove. You donāt know how much I cried because of a 6.
His complaint was that there wasnāt a standard 1 guy bunch of girls cast.
My complaint is that the characters who were given routes werenāt developed very well. Luckily they had some Maeda magic to bring it all together, but the work of the other writers was unimpressive, and I expect better.
Little Busters brought in a fresh idea, and executed that idea well, but then failed at all of the old stuff that the writers should be used to.
First, that wouldnāt be Litbus. Also, reducing the cast down to one male would instantly remove everything that makes Little Busters worthwhile. It doesnāt matter how much they invest in the heroines, and how much āfocusā they put on the girls (ignoring that the girls are the focus of their routes anyway) if they have bad stories and lacklustre characters.
Wow. So they even copied the fact that Komariās route was a bad copy? Dedication.
Incorrect. I believe the start of Litbus was really good. I donāt enjoy some aspects of the VN as a whole because I wasnāt at the point in life where I could appreciate it. I didnāt give a damn about the youth theme, or about the Little Busters group, but that doesnāt instantly make me hate the common route - In fact, my distaste of the themes Litbus explores isnāt something that is common route-centric. If anything, that is more a complaint about refrain, and the connection between the bros and Riki, or the connection between Rin andā¦ whoever she was friends with.
The common route was fine. It had comedy, it had some interesting gameplay, it had world building, and it introduced the characters in a typical Key fashion, going day-by-day with the introductions. I can enjoy that stuff without needing to appreciate the container it is all wrapped in. People should like individual things, irrespective of what the whole comes to be.
You get numbered grades? o.o Weird~
6 is definitely positive; it comes after 5
5 is in the middle of 1 and 10, the two extreme judgements, so naturally that is the neutral point.
If 5 is the neutral point, it is an āok.ā
6 would then be a āgood.ā
7 a āvery good.ā
8 a āgreat.ā
9 would be āamazing.ā
and 10 would be fangirl material nod nod
1-4 would be similar, but negative.
So yeah, Litbus is a solid 6/10 for me. Itās not as good as things like ef, or Higurashi, Sharin no Kuni or Steins;Gate, but it stands equal to things like Ever17, Comyu, F/SN and Family Project.
The 6s to me are either the VNs that I didnāt enjoy much, but canāt deny that they are good objectively (F/SN and Ever17) or VNs that probably donāt deserve high positivity in most peopleās books, but were really enjoyable when I read them (Comyu and Family Project.)
