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 couldn’t accept something, and broke down once people turned their refusal towards something else. They denied things so much that we don’t 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 “Tani”.
More mistaken readings with the kanji for valley (谷)! In Little Busters, Kurugaya’s name is written as 来ヶ谷. The middle character, ヶ simply means a repetition of the kanji before. 来 is pronounced as ku when used in the verb “to come” (physical movement). The verb is written as 来る (kuru). This is where the first two syllables of her name comes from, and then we have the “Gaya” from above. However in the VN, there’s a segment where it’s revealed that when Masato first read the name, he read it as “Rairaidani”. When used in a compound with other kanji, 来 is read as 'rai". And we have the “Tani” for the last character like above. It just gets turned into “dani” because Japanese is Japanese and what the hell is consistency.
I think there’s 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?
I believe that’s the reallive engine simulator? I wonder how they’d manage the baseball and battle minigames lol
Just a quick update on the mobile thing ^^
Using XClannad the battle mini-games don’t work and the game freezes at the first baseball match so you can’t 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 doesn’t but the program just skips right over it so the entire thing is playable (minus the baseball matches) ^^
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But this may be indirectly related to the ratio. If there was just one boy, that didn’t really have a big role in the story, wouldn’t you think they would’ve invested more in the routes, since the girls were the focus?
I suggest you don’t play Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate. The main heroine’s route is a copy-paste of Komari’s 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 don’t know how much I cried because of a 6.
His complaint was that there wasn’t a standard 1 guy bunch of girls cast.
My complaint is that the characters who were given routes weren’t 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 wouldn’t be Litbus. Also, reducing the cast down to one male would instantly remove everything that makes Little Busters worthwhile. It doesn’t matter how much they invest in the heroines, and how much “focus” 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 Komari’s route was a bad copy? Dedication.
Incorrect. I believe the start of Litbus was really good. I don’t enjoy some aspects of the VN as a whole because I wasn’t at the point in life where I could appreciate it. I didn’t give a damn about the youth theme, or about the Little Busters group, but that doesn’t instantly make me hate the common route - In fact, my distaste of the themes Litbus explores isn’t 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 and… 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 “ok.”
6 would then be a “good.”
7 a “very good.”
8 a “great.”
9 would be “amazing.”
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. It’s 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 didn’t enjoy much, but can’t deny that they are good objectively (F/SN and Ever17) or VNs that probably don’t deserve high positivity in most people’s books, but were really enjoyable when I read them (Comyu and Family Project.)
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Well, here you are explicitly talking about the common route:
Yes, I get. And it’s not like this.
10 is perfect.
9 is very good.
8 is good.
7 is average.
6 is bad, (if you get a final average of 6.9 you are reproved unless the Class Council decides you can pass the next year)
5 is really bad
4 is terrible
…
So, I can’t help but have those biased conceptions. Every time I see a 6/10 my mind says it’s bad.
No… I’m not… Randomness is throughout the whole VN, crazy plans take up laaarge portions of a couple routes, and the disruptions are… eeeeverywhere.
Besides, I said that “The story rushed at a boring ‘I wish it could stay like this’ goal.” This is the story of the VN as a whole.
When is that the goal of the common route? The goal of the common route is the baseball thing. I don’t see my words point to the common route. Wishing things could stay the same begins to become a larger thought as the VN goes on.
That just doesn’t make sense. The half-way point between perfect and outright failure (the point between the 10 and the 1) isn’t “really bad.” Average is the mid-way point.
The whole common route is basically just randomness and crazy plans, so if you don’t like those, how could you like the common route?
Try to convince our directors. I’d be immensely glad if you did that.
As I said before…
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I myself enjoyed the common route for different reasons.
First, the choices. There weren’t few of them, and this made the romantic progression more believable. You got closer to the girl by showing interest on them and getting closer to them.
Second, the length. It wasn’t too long like Rewrite’s common route nor was it too short. While it was still pretty routine-ish, which I liked.
And most characters were enjoyable.
Hm… I thought you disliked XY creatures and didn’t feel well near them… Have you already tried an otomege, then? Because it seems like you’d like those games.
(In a world full of sweets, sour tastes good)
I… don’t think that’s a common route thing. The choices to get in and through routes were pretty convoluted too. Deciding if you want Riki to go down a hallway or up a staircase, or choosing if Riki gets to go eat inside with his friends. There were some weird ones.
I barely even remember a romantic aspect to the VN. The romance was just added on top of a story, and in some routes, such as Kud’s, I felt it actually detracted from the experience.
Litbus romance was weak.
A good character is good, despite what prejudices I may hold. Masato and Kengo especially were great friends to Riki, and I respect them.
I read The Second Reproduction some years ago, but it was pretty trashy. I don’t know of any well written otomege.
I’ve been meaning to read Hakuouki for a few years, but I don’t read VNs very often (maybe like… once or twice a year?) and I’d rather play something cute. There’s like… one cute guy out of the hundreds of anime and VNs I’ve sat through, so you can bet that otomege aren’t the place to find cuteness.
But, those choices led him to places where the girl would be, thus showing her that Riki appreciated her company. Much better than choosing which girl’s bikini is more beautiful.
Well, I do agree that LitBus romance was weak, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The routes didn’t lose their focus or went too far from the story to give place to pointless ichaicha, which is the most common form japanese writers do romance. There was ichaicha, and there was romance sometimes, but nothing that got in the middle of the story, like some VNs do.
The outcomes may be good, but the actual decisions given to the reader were lazy and bad at times.
I don’t remember Key doing that before.
I didn’t say it was a bad thing. I just disagree with you saying the romantic progression was believable.
Never said Key.
It was believable, because you followed each step of the romance, and you can actually understand why the two became a couple. But you don’t go expecting two 16-year-old teenagers going full romance just two weeks or a little more after meeting, do you?
@Kotarou, you just need to consider that Rin plays a far bigger role in the VN than Komari. Sure, Komari can be more focused than some other girls, but think about it: Who had a special connection to LB’s themes? Who was involved in the main plot and really had to get stronger? Who was the one who Riki ended up with in the end of the VN?
Besides, there would be no reason to put the heroine that’s not the main one in the group that was even closer to the story as a whole and to Riki (the original Little Busters)…
I’m sorry for asking this late, but can someone explain why Little Busters! was considered “hard” to adapt into an anime ? I heard someone say repetition, and over-branching story lines. And I don’t fully understand what that means.
For it to be a good adaptation, it would need to be split up into separate arcs in a repeating fashion. Riki gets to the end of a route, and the story resets back to the start. It would preferably show the changes Riki goes through across the common routes, refer to failed examples, and somehow transfer the ending of Litbus to the anime format, due to 4th wall breaking. It would also need to explain the mechanics of Riki’s narcolespy (something that anime-only viewers are very confused about) and there’s a lot of other things.
Unfortunately few anime bother to do that style. They just pick a “true” route and shoehorn everything else in to create a single timeline.
Of course, a lot of the stuff you gain and lose from different adaptation styles are things you may or may not care about. For example, I fault Kanon '06 because it waters down each character’s relationship with Yuuichi. Other people think it was a really good adaptation. Preferences shrug
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Its hard to explain without playing the VN, really, which I would certainly suggest you do if you ever get the chance. But the repetitive nature of a VN most certainly plays a huge role in it. One part of that is how you actually watch the characters grow and change each time you read through the common route, but the other part has to do with (Refrain)the secret of the world, and the deep meaning and emotions that are realized through witnessing the the toil of the repetition yourself, versus just being told about it in the anime.
Story-branching is something that all visual novel adaptations have to deal with, and honestly is why so many of them fall below par. Its not something that can be easily dealt with if the adaptation is going to include close to everything.
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