At last, the most anticipated visual novel adaptation, Little Busters has finally landed, but does it meet expectations? Well, it sort of.
Several months ago, the whole fandom raged over the decision that JC Staff will animate this adaptation. After watching the first episode, I’m pretty satisfied despite the animation not having the polish compared to the other adaptations. For instance, they used a lot of stills for the flashback scene, which looked kind of disappointing. Still, I gave JC Staff the benefit of the doubt as the animation looks good enough and isn’t washed out compared to the movie adaptations Toei Animation done in the past.
As for the first episode, not much happened besides introducing a group named “Little Busters,” which existed since childhood. It consists of four males and one girl. Besides Riki, whom is the main character and looks somewhat girly, we have three other members: Masato, Kengo and Kyousuke, who is the leader with Rin being the only girl. From the look of their childhood memories, it seems that they were living on the edge with bees chasing after them. While I’m afraid of bees, it looks like they were having fun.
Aside from that, the comedy as you would expect is funny. Aside from Masato trying to use a cat as a weapon, there is that purple hair girl who is apparently the captain of a woman’s softball team. The misunderstandings from Rin were so hilarious that she ends up getting beaten up by her. After that, I heard that laugh, which I haven’t heard from a long time and it sounds awesome. Still, there will be drama later on in the show when they focus more on the characters’ arcs.
So far, I’m not disappointed by anything shown in this episode. While I haven’t played the game yet (which I should because I know some Japanese and can technically just buy it off the Playstation Network), I think the adaptation will try to follow the original source material closely. Besides the Baseball (which Key seemingly likes), I wonder how the recruitment will play out considering that there are more males than females at the moment. From the look of the last scene, I think we might have one.
Rin’s secret mission was hilarious! Don’t play the game and speculate like me!!
The secret missions will continue in the future as well! Rin is an agent! 😀
I haven’t played the game, so I don’t know what she is up to… but it’s definitely exciting.
With exceptions set low, it’s going to be easy to impress, unless the studio manages to mess up really badly, which I don’t see happening.