Clannad Kyou OVA – Just another half an hour…

Tomoya, you damn lucky bastard. Kyou in 30 minutes? A new record.

A delicious montage of Kyou and Ryou goodness:

Impressions:

Well, it’s the episode that everyone’s been waiting for. Clannad ~After Story~ OVA: Kyou Arc. Let me start with the good points first: the ending was nicely done. Now, about the rest…sharing the same opinion as everyone else, it was too rushed. I’ll pay 10$, no, 50$ or even more just to make the episode a bit longer. All of a sudden you have Ryou confessing to Tomoya with Kyou watching from the sidelines for who knows what reason. The relationship with Ryou turns out to be a slideshow montage lasting around…30 seconds? After Kyou practices a kissing session and gets all sad under the rain, Tomoya starts to like Kyou instead. In the end, Ryou decides to give up and you get a happy ending with Kyou.

I THINK NOT!

Those who didn’t have a glimpse into the visual novel will definitely be in some sort of loss after watching this. They left out and compressed a lot of the essential parts in the anime, including the deeper aspect of Ryou’s relationship with Tomoya. They also left out Kyou’s part of the story, and we are just left with one emotional scene and suddenly they’re all lovey-dovey. One of the major complaints I have with the episode was the part where Tomoya hugs Kyou under the rain: if there’s something deep I’m missing here, sorry. But why leave it off-centered and out of focus? Compared with the visual novel, I like the way the novel portrays it rather than the OVA’s portrayal.

In the end? Too little too late. Although I admit shoving two relationships into one episode might have been a little hard, but they should at least spend a little more effort expanding on the plot rather than mixing and matching different scenes together, even though Kyou/Ryou’s route in the visual novel is rather short itself. Even if you have played the visual novel, you might still be in a bit of a daze. If you didn’t get the reason why Ryou suddenly became a lot more assertive, Tomoya became a lot more undecisive, Kyou suddenly cut her hair and became a lot more deredere towards the end, and Sunohara became a lot more brother/true friend like (bros before hos, as someone once said; normally you’d expect him to be desperate), then I don’t blame you.

Everyone’s saying that the Tomoyo OVA is a lot better storywise; well, it is. However, one thing that the Kyou OVA makes up for it is the ending; unchanged from the visual novel and what I wanted to see. And did anyone notice that suddenly Kyou became more dere rather than the tsun part compared to the visual novel? A short haired Kyou is fine too. The positive thing out of all of this is: at least it was animated.