I’ve been thinking about this series, and how to exactly review it, since Clannad’s after story contained some of the biggest highlights but also some of the biggest lowlights of the season. In the end, though, I decided to be positive about this series. Sure, the ending was terrible, I’m not going to sugarcoat that, but the episodes prior to that were utterly incredible.

Clannad already was a very good series, and its after story pretty much starts out similar, with a number of different arcs that are meant to flesh out the different members of the Clannad cast. Since Clannad already did the main characters, the first half of the After Story focuses more on the side-characters. while nothing amazing, the stories are consistently charming and interesting.

The goodness only really starts with the arrival of the second half, though. It’s here where most of the characters graduate high school and all go their own way, and this is where this series evolves into something completely unique. It’s a bit hard to describe this without any major spoilers, but the result is absolutely heart-wrenching, and yet incredibly realistic. Nearly every side character disappears from the screen in order to follow his or her dream, and we’re just left with the main couple of the series. It’s going to be very hard to find someone who wasn’t extremely positive about the turns that the series took at that point.

But yeah, it unfortunately ends in one of the biggest and most blatant Deus ex Machina endings out there, on the same level as Mai Hime. Whie the game this series is based on contains the explanation of what went on, anyone unfamiliar with the games will feel completely cheated. The series had been quite faithful to the original Visual Novel, but it did try to add in enough extra vits in order to spice up the story and make it more realistic and believable, but those two really did clash in that final episodes. And in the end the biggest flaws of this series is that it’s a bit too keen on pleasing the fans of original visual Novel. The ending just feels out of place, and Tomoyo’s After Story and Kyou’s story (which both got only one special episode) just feel like a big waste of potential. If the creators wanted to include those stories, they should have gone with a Higurashi-styled series: have different arcs focusing on all the important characters, which reset to the beginning at the end, and having each of these arcs deal with various of the side stories seen so far.

So no, I really wasn’t happy with that ending. Still in the end, Clannad has been a fantastic series, just like its predecessor Air. Both have taken the biggest heap of clichés imaginable, and went with such a harem setting to something completely daring and original with excellent and bittersweet results. Unlike Kanon, these two really helped the harem genre evolve, and with a genre that originally lived on seeing who could make the most generic heap of stereotypes, it really needed that.

Short Synopsis: Genji gets involved in a pretty nasty scandal.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Another difficult to understand chapter, so it took me a while to understand what’s going on, but nevertheless it was another excellent one. Genji continues his string of seductions, but this time he gets caught by his latest victim: Roku no Kimi, who seems to be one of the new emperor’s concubines. At the moment, I know nothing of how the family ties worked back then, but does Roku no Kimi have the same last name as Genji, meaning that she’s some sort of family of his?

In any case, he gets found out and this creates a very big scandal, and especially Roku no Kimi is very upset because of it basically putting him under house arrest by the new emperor (apparently, I was wrong when I claimed Genji’s son to be the future emperor, since the Emperor already had a crown prince selected, it seems).

So at this point there’s just one episode left. It obviously doesn’t look like the series will reach the end of the novels, but I can’t think of any logical situation in which this series could lead to a disappointing ending. If the creators just animate the next chapter, I’ll be happy enough, because unlike shows as Tytania, this isn’t really a story that needs a conclusion. This series is more like, we’re given a glimpse at Genji’s life, and at some point it stops, and it’s not like most series out there, which are really building up to their climaxes.

Short Synopsis: Zalish moves in to destroy Fan and his allies.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
While I want to call this series a flop, I just have to admit that I was touched by the ship crashing down. That mechanic has been a very strange character, but seeing all of his work and pride destroyed like that definitely made impact.

But yeah, there is no way that the creators are going to come up with a satisfying conclusion. As things are looking now, the finale is only going to focus on Zalisch vs. Fan, but there are so many other threads that are still hanging open. what’s the whole point of having Ajman, Ariabart and Lydia in the series? Is Jouslain’s plan going to work? How about Idris and his scheming? There’s no bloody way that you can fit all of that into just two episodes.

Even taking into consideration that the big climax of this show has yet to happen, the middle part of this series was so much more interesting. The best parts about this show definitely were seeing the Alsas storyline, and seeing what a big mess the Tytania family has turned into through the centuries. Fan pretty much stopped being interesting after Lyra died. I kept hoping that he’d become more interesting, but in the end he just hogged up too much of the airtime. I understand how he’s vital to the plot, but his development just came to a grinding halt after he got revenge on his girlfriend in the end. It’s definitely original, but also gets too much in the way of what’s really important in this series.

It’s a shame, but yeah, I think that Artlant overestimated themselves in the past season by producing too many shows. Both Earl and Fairy and Tytania had lots of potential, but both in the end just turned half-hearted. It’s a shame, because in earlier years Artland established itself as a company that really took its time to get the best out of its series: Legend of Galactic Heroes was released over the span of seven years, with Mushishi ad Bokura ga Ita you could also see that a lot of time went into producing it, and making them as good as possible (and especially the huge amount of different EDs, up to the point where every single episode seemed to have a different one). It seems like they want to do a bit too much at the moment, which is a pretty darn shame, because the production department has already shown that they like to take a risk to try out something new every once in a while. But yeah, this risk turned out to be not such a good one. My hope right now is that they can at least make something interesting out of that climax, and that their next experiment will fare better.

Short Synopsis: Fan is nearly captured by Tytania again, and is helped by a few new allies.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
I’m not too sure about this series right now. Here it is about to hit it major climax, and it first wastes an episode on character background that could have been done ages ago, and right now yet another episode is completely wasted when Fan goes out to flirt with a character completely unrelated to the story.

I mean, at this point I have no idea what the major climax of this series is going to be about, but in this case it’s a bad thing, since there has hardly been any build-up for it, other than Fan being on the run completely. There wouldn’t be some sort of second season announcement or something that I missed, would there?

So yeah, at the moment I’m disappointed in this series. With all the build-up, it promised to be something epic for its finale, but so far it hasn’t surpassed itself at all. The episodes centred around the different members of Tytania have been good, but Fan is really getting more and more useless with every passing episode.