when Ritsuko times out

I managed to finish CLANNAD surreptitiously under the watchful (but not watchful enough) eyes of my parents, and managed to finish downloading the episodes so that I’d have an uninterrupted watching spree, too. IRC is much faster than BT now that Streamyx is cockblocking my uTorrent again.

CLANNAD was more touching than I expected. Finally, I get what everybody means when they say that they’re in visual novels for the story. I mean, Kanon was nice, but seriously the only girl I cared about was Makoto (with Makoto’s ending, I really had to fight back the tears). I probably cared about everyone in CLANNAD except Ryou. It also doesn’t hurt that KyoAni knows when to insert a joke to lighten up the mood – all gender related jokes by Tomoya were very welcome and not overbearing at all. Especially the scene with Kyou in the gym storage room – I had to constantly remind myself ‘remember you downloaded CLANNAD way back when it first came out precisely because it had no ero scenes in it? I know you really want to see Kyou, uh, at least semi-naked, but the original didn’t have it, and the anime will most likely cut it anyway’. What I was actually saying was ‘no, please… no’.

Frankly I don’t understand why Nagisa was so upset and why she just had to cry that many times in Episode 22 (that really annoyed me), but hey what the fuck, she turned out all right in the end. I guess the ’slow girl’ stereotype still has life in it if it can hook even me in (Nagisa was just right, I have to admit). Kyou… I wonder, did the game originally have separate routes for everyone? It seems that it’s just a one track story, just like Utawarerumono (except with no ero scenes and a much better plot), and that’s really disappointing. Ryou… reminds me of Chihiro from ef – a tale of memories and thus scores an automatic 0 out of whatever non-zero scale I may be using. Kotomi – yes, when she received the teddy bear, it was really touching. What a masterpiece that branch was. Unfortunately, she failed to contribute anything worthwhile outside of her own storyline. Fuuko’s storyline also made the tears well up in my eyes (although I must say no anime has made said tears actually overflow, and Kanon’s Makoto route wins because of the sheer volume of tears it generated… although I could swear none of them actually escaped). What an improvement over Kanon. It was worth not having more Haruhi so CLANNAD the anime could be made.

Let’s talk about Tomoyo in a different paragraph, shall we? Tomoyo, like Kyou, is hot. Her voice, especially. But we never really get enough screen time from her after the student elections (which seemed to be where most of the mojo happened with Okazaki and Nagisa) plus she seemed to have seen through Okazaki during the tennis match. The proper amount of steam was delivered in the 24th episode, though, which really made Tomoyo stand out. And… again… I felt the tears welling up again… but not as much as Kotomi’s story. But still, it was very nice. And Tomoyo is right up there with Kyou in hotness after all. Since we’re talking about the two of them, the end of Episode 18 deserves a mention. Suddenly my favourite song from Sorarad takes on a whole new meaning, and I feel quite disturbed seeing my Kyou cry in the middle of the tennis court. In front of Tomoyo.

According to rollchan, there’s gonna be a second season. I was hoping to see more routes and more of Tomoyo (not just one OVA) and Kyou but it looks like there won’t be anything of the sort. It’ll be a tragedy, apparently. It’ll be interesting, at the very least. I’ll probably choose CLANNAD season 2 over Gundam 00, just like Code Geass over Macross F. What an anime. And why the hell did I delete that CLANNAD ISO?

EDIT: CLANNAD 24 is being encoded for my PSP right now. With extreme high quality settings in MeGUI. Automated 2-pass non-Turbo, Multi Hex motion estimation with level 5 subpixel refinement. Basically, the settings that I usually encode Code Geass with (everything else just gets level 1 motion estimation and single pass, with 200-300 kbps), except that I increased the bitrate from 400kbps to 650kbps. Schneizel didn’t look regal at all with 400kbps, so it seems high detail scenes still look bad on the PSP’s screen at 400kbps. And of course, I want my Tomoyo to look her best.