Anime Discussion Thread - Page 296

Personally I'm only really familiar with LB (having played it) and Clannad (having watched it), but here goes.

Little Busters! actually revolves mostly around a little group of friends, who dub themselves the "Little Busters," consisting of Natsume Kyousuke, his little sister Rin, Inohara Masato, Miyazawa Kengo, and the protagonist, Naoe Riki. In a way this is where a lot of the distancing of LB from other similar VNs begins; there's only one girl, and unfortunately it's this specific setup that leads to LB's "minor routes" being watered down and is what, in previous posts, I alluded to with regards to "poor individual routes" etc. I'll expound on that later.

Kyousuke is essentially the first character you're introduced to, but you're introduced to him via third-person, as the game opens with "Kyousuke is coming home!" from his inhuman walk from one city to another for a job interview (and back). And Kyousuke is such a strong "character" that I've actually come to associate his voice actor, Midorikawa Hikaru, with Kyousuke, above all the hundreds of other roles (many memorable) that he's done. He's like the quintessential high school leader; he's incredibly charismatic, cunning, can seemingly do everything, aggressively takes initiative, and doesn't mind being the butt of jokes.

Masato is the prototypical muscle freak, which is played out in the extreme in the game as he routinely chants "muscle! muscle! careful muscle is coming through!" etc. Kengo's more of the smart kendo guy who butts heads with Masato every second of the day, and tends to look down on the Little Busters' lack of growth. Rin is like a cat (quiet, shy, but self-confident; she just dislikes being with people). Main character is a narcoleptic whose parents died in an accident years ago, and he was the last person to round out the Little Busters during elementary school. He looks up to Kyousuke, considering him his "savior."

The story is extremely light-hearted at this point, although there's the very visible specter of the imminent departure of Kyousuke (he's going to graduate, and being a year older than the rest of them, will be gone). As previously pointed out, this is more-or-less necessary for "slice-of-life-turned drama" stories, ie. Honey and Clover.

The weakness of LB comes in the form of the individual stories for the girls whom are added to the Little Busters! as Kyousuke spontaneously decides to make a baseball team, and wants the "group" to be "livelier." The stories are all contrived, tend to jump the shark, and have the same problem as Angel Beats - whilst you find many of the characters fun, the overly dramatic stories just make you want to ram your head through a wall.

But there's a point to it. Which is that the world is not actually real. In the real world everyone's actually in critical condition - they were all on a bus trip, but the bus had a collision and careened down a cliff. Masato and Kengo had made instinctive decisions to shield Rin and Riki, which leads to the two of them being "survivors." But they're not out of the dark, because whilst they're "dreaming" in this fictional world, they're all still lying in the smoking bus, which will imminently burst to flames.

Thus, the VN takes advantage of the repetitive action of VNs to loop Riki through the same world, over and over again. So that he, and Rin, become stronger. Strong enough to be independent of the rest of the Little Busters. The game actually subtly hints at this as their baseball and combat stats actually incrementally rise with every playthrough, and every playthrough gradually adds more random play scenes. This is because the other characters have grown slowly bored of repeating the same lines and actions over and over again, etc.

But wait, what about the five (or six? I forget) girls that were added?

Yeah, exactly. They don't matter. Unfortunately the plot device for LB required repetitive looping, in the form of routes, but the girls were rather obviously added afterwards, and their individual stories were pulled out of someone's (MJ's) ass.

Edit: Although if you want to look at it from a really far distance, and give MJ the benefit of the doubt, the girls are mostly classmates of Riki and Rin, and the fact that they have no idea who these people are at the start of the game is indicative of how utterly and feebly dependant Riki and Rin are to Kyousuke and the band.

CHOPCHOPCHOPCHOP

What the hell? It's like something out of Megaman.

Except I didn't get Nagisa/Tamao T_T