I guess that is feasible. I honestly thought that it could work with just having alternate routes and labeling them as such (a la Amagami anime), then tying them all together in a (probably second season) Moon route episode, before proceeding to Terra.
Basically I just want them to animate a VN the way you would play it 
I’ve thought the same thing. It’s very easy to tell all the stories independently without combining them into one continuity, as long as you establish the world tree. You don’t even have to show Kagari, just show an image of the world tree reaching a dead end at the end of each route, and seeing a finger trace a new line through the tree, entering into the next route. Maybe reveal a bit more of what’s going on after each route.
When you think about it, alternate worlds that intersect with the main story in Key games is a very common pattern. In Kanon it was the dream sequences, in Air we had the Summer story, in Clannad the illusionary world. Little Busters was a little different, but it’s still there. Rewrite kinda springs the Moon world on us at the very end. I actually think it’d feel a lot nicer if they foreshadowed the events of Moon throughout the entire story, that would feel a lot more natural to me. It would totally make the Anime more easy to understand, and probably improve the flow of the story overall. Once again, just think back to how Kanon and Clannad handled it.
Man, your thoughts pretty much mimic mine word for word. Guess I don’t need to write this stuff down after all. Especially about Akane’s route. Sure, Akane is more off to the side, but seeing Kotarou go about his business in a cold and calculated manner was refreshing, especially in contrast to Chihaya’s route where he refuses to take a life. Of course, Terra pushes this ahead several levels in terms of scale, and ends up being simply fantastic.
Still, the route opinions for this game really have a lot of variance. It’s great to see everybody’s reasoning behind their preferences.
Rewrite was amazing. Actually, amazing doesn’t cut it.
In order, my opinion of routes are Lucia > Shizuru > Akane > Moon > Kotori > Terra > Chihaya. Not to hate on any Chihaya fans, hers was good, but the others outclass her imo
Kotori: I played this route first. And it was DARK. Like, holy shit, you see Kotori acting all goofy and having fun all the time and then you find out it’s all an act. And bam, it smacks you right in the face. You’re forced to help her out of sympathy and still end up getting rejected. Also, her route ending was terrible. They could’ve had Kotarou walk up to Kotori and there’d be another version of her 8th grade CG with her waiting for him, and it ends off with her accepting him.
But I guess that’s why we have Harvest Festa.
Chihaya: More like Sakuya. Honestly, the romance came out of nowhere. Chihaya’s a great character, but she had better development in other routes than her own.
Her route kicked ass though. Literally. Applause for the ending.
Lucia: Ryukishi at work again. Loved the first half with the Asahi Haruka horror story, Ryu was really getting into it but Key was probably like “YOU CAN’T END IT LIKE THAT”. So he brought in Guardian and Gaia and the weird bitch lady that tricked Lucia yet again. Also, Kotarou near the end pissed me off by being so dense.
The Shizuru fight was the best scene in the game imo. Chihaya and Shizuru were amazing in this one.
Shizuru: Best girl. Didn’t like how Kotarou was so weak in this one compared to the others, but Shizuru made up for it.
The ending caught me off guard, and I cried a bit too. But still, not a great way to end that after all that work. And the problem with her parents were never resolved too. What a shame.
Akane: And to finish it off, I played Akane last. Her route was pure novel material, but it didn’t have much of an impact on me as the others. Having Kotarou grow into a murderer was exciting though. When the MC goes bloodthirsty for the girl., that’s where shit gets interesting.
When Shimako cried out at the end I bawled. I loved the ending song.
Moon and Terra get nothing due to me not caring much about them and it’d take another hour for me to type. They were still good though.
Ah I’m so late to the discussion, I’ll probably just say stuff that everyone else already wrote
But hmm, I just finished Rewrite myself and wrote some thoughts on my blog. I like that they tried something new, and they definitely went in an interesting direction, but I don’t feel they pulled it off that well. It had it’s great points (the humour in the common route was amazing), and it had points where the writing just seemed to fall through to me.
Moon and Terra were interesting, but especially Terra felt so disconnected from the rest, like it was a completely different novel. I feel they could have connected those stories much better.
I liked Shizuru’s ending, I liked the connection with what you learned in Chihaya’s route, and it was so sweet (sad >_<). Lucia’s route was awesome up until a certain point.
I loved Akane as a char, but as mentioned her route didn’t really work for me. I liked the development Kotarou got, and how his life’s story turned out so differently, but the rest was a bit… eh.
Looking forward to Harvest Festa though.
Most of the routes hold up on their own, so even though there is a large disconnect across the whole VN, it works well as a bunch of individual stories set in the same overall universe.
I think so too, I mean, I DO like the VN quite a lot and all the diversity you get with it. But as a whole it’s kinda sloppy outside of the Tanaka bits, which can be difficult to grasp.
Something that came up in the chat today:
If there was a Rewrite anime, how do you think would the routes be connected? Obviously they can’t just connect them like in other Key adaptations, the storylines go in completely different directions.
Some of us talked about this some time ago, in this thread actually~ and in the Individual routes having bearing thread.
I agree with the idea of using the Moon route to link it all together. Foreshadow stuff~
Oops, I didn’t even notice.
I’m not particularly fond of the idea though. It sounds like it would become Higurashi-esque what with everything resetting after every arc. Some of the routes just kinda end without there being much reason for them to end, and if then everything just begins anew that would just leave viewers confused. It’s not like in the visual novel where you yourself click New Game.
I mean, could you imagine it if an anime you didn’t know did that? Just cut out after the main character and one of the heroines got happy together? It’d be weird and frustrating, wouldn’t it?
That’s how I hope most route-reliant VNs end up adapted >> Litbus why? ;A;
I don’t think that’s true. Every Rewrite route ends when the conflict ends, and it’s implied that the planet is left to die.
My favorite thing about an anime is starting out confused, and then realizing what’s going on as the anime progresses. I feel that’s what Rewrite was trying to do anyway.
I just can’t really see it working. While you can make an argument that the Rewrite arcs do end at logical points, it’s still very different from Higurashi where at the end of pretty much every arc most of the main characters are dead.
I guess the best way to illustate my problem with it is… imagine if in Higurashi, the second arc, Watanagashi-hen, ended with ‘Mion’ accepting her guilt and turning herself in. And then Keiichi and Rena lived “happily ever after” in the village. To me that is similar to how Rewrite’s arcs end. And IMO, that just would not fit.
Most of the routes would work perfectly if you rolled some credits. The only one I can think of that wouldn’t really work well is Chihaya’s. They could probably settle it with Kotarou narrating how the world will still end, but they’ll live happily, or something. Actually, didn’t he do that in the VN anyway? I can see that being quite a powerful scene if done right~
Okay, just finished Rewrite!
There was such an immense amount of humour that I loved so much about it. Definitely some extraordinarily funny moments. The oppai ending was fantastic.
Overall extremely enjoyable to me but a few things bothered me.
I’m actually surprised at how right everyone is with talking about how it’s badly written and inconsistent between routes. I thought that I wouldn’t be that bothered by it but it really did bother me sometimes.
As some other people have said, the Terra ending really felt like it was building up to something and then the ending was just eh. I really didn’t fully understand it and was expecting something far more dramatic.
How is humanity better off at the end of Terra rather than at the end of Akane’s? To me, they left humanity in pretty similar situations. I guess salvation was halted halfway through in Terra, so I guess that could be a good thing. Ultimately surely the world will still die shortly like it’s expected to? I don’t really understand how Terra is the perfect route that saves humanity.
That’s all the main things I can think of right now.
There isn’t a perfect route, just one that is ideal for the Kotarou of that route.
It’s the perfect route because it’s the only route which guaruntees humanity’s continued prosperity. It’s where they realised that saving the Earth was a mistake, and we can only continue as a species by leaving our home behind and travelling the vastness of space. It was something only possible once the technologies of the two factions was made public to the world, and ultimately pochi was the first one to display the ability to travel through space…
Man it’s Chihaya’s route. Idiots don’t need to care about the future.
Oh, and in Terra Guardian and Gaia finally stopped fighting! That’s pretty big.
Yeah, uh walking on a rainbow (was it a rainbow?) to the moon is just pretty farfetched if you ask me. I always thought that ending was some abstract representation of something
But, yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Another point is that Kotarou left the seed of hope to humanity. I don’t remember how exactly that worked, but I remember it being a central point in his last conversation with Kagari
I dunno if the CG is an abstract representation, but the point remains that Pochi clearly has the ability to travel through space. He makes a point of how, using the life force of the 5 girls he can take them as far as the moon, but reaching the other side of the (galaxy?) would require a much larger quantity of life force. So yeah, it’s definitely a real technology, even if that CG doesn’t make much sense scientifically You can ignore the CG if you want, I guess.
