Shuffle! Prologue

This 8 minute episode may be funny, but it's not that great. The original series is much better. I think some of these clips are apparently visual novel exclusive, but they are not necessary scenes. Everything here was kind of just randomly thrown together like a slide show.

It's possible that you can easily enjoy this like I did, but don't expect much. A 5/10 is reasonable here. If you're a shuffle fan, give this a shot and just have some quick fun. If you're not a fan of shuffle, you probably wouldn't be looking at this anyway. I have said all I can say. It's time for you to just take about 6 minutes and enjoy the same good cast from the series again.

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Shuffle! , it's an anime-based of the well acclaimed visual novel of the same name. Although the anime scenes can be seen as directly recycled but the animation is not in this case.

Now here we go with me giving you my honest opinion about the 'story' footage shown in the Shuffle! Prologue. To be quite frank, the short 8 minute OVA actually do have a deeper meaning than it looks and feels to a person who has played the original visual novel. This is because the scenes and footage seen may be what the typical viewer grasp as what is seen in the anime but truth to be told the OVA is more of an actual retelling not of the anime but of the visual novels point of view. As a fan of the visual novel, I can tell straight of the bat that the dialogue, the speech and the actions done by the character is very thoroughly backed up by the descriptions said and done in the visual novel. To me everything in this Prologue, is nothing exciting for anyone but rather give a more impactful feeling of those who had played the visual novel a year prior to the anime adaptation.

The art for the era of the anime it is released in is considered to be really well animated already and not to mention the animation for the prologue has a more fluent flow to it than to the anime counterpart (in my opinion). Though there is one significance that I must mention is that the animations and static animated pictures at the credit scene of this anime is scenes that would mostly not be shown in the anime at all because those scenes were the animated versions of the scenes from the visual novels and also static animated pictures of each of the heroines are redrawings of the artwork/scenes from the visual novel. I have to hand it to the reanimation of the visual novel scenes, as it brings back much nostalgic feelings as though we are reliving those visual novels memory once more.

Though I really can't say much for the soundtrack or sounds of the Prologue simply because there's really nothing to shout out, very standard and very normal. Though one thing that stood out and something the visual novel audience would recognise is the ending song by YURIA. It was nice addition for them to use back the same song as the visual novel and played exactly with the visual novel scenes, thus creating back the visual novel vibe. It was a brilliant idea to play back the visual novel opening theme.

I can't help to stress it enough that this whole Prologue was meant to be a promotional teaser for it's animated adaptation. Thus this Prologue itself was meant to attract back the attention from the visual novel audience as well, to get hyped in the anime adaptation. So once again my score is just something I'd give out of my own personal opinions and you can't really ever compare this to the anime series because this is just a teaser targeting a certain set of audience. As a teaser I think this does an excellent job thus my given score to it.

Thank you all for taking your time to read this review, this Shuffle Prologue, really did hit my noggins' with the nostalgic feel and yes I do recommend talking a look at the anime adaptation as well!

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