Anyways, the moment I watched a character cry over her favorite park bench being destroyed, I finally gave up after struggling through 15 episodes of this anime. No matter how much I wanted to love this, I couldn't. And since this anime has 8 and 9 reviews as its top reviews, I'm going to shed some light on this anime so people won't waste their time with this.
Right off the bat, I have not played the VN. If this was seriously true to the VN, then that's great for all you VN fans who have been waiting for this. If I have a nostalgic feeling for something, I also can be subjective to favoritism and like things more than I should. However, in this review, I will be treating the anime and VN as different entities and therefore make this an anime only review.
Before I start off, this is my personal opinion and only my personal opinion, so I'm not trying to say that I've watched every great masterpiece out there and know what "true" masterpieces are. I honesty have a high enjoyment factor with most things, so low ratings are rare for me.
Little Busters! desperately tries to combine sports, slice of life, melodrama, comedy, and a whole array of concepts, and to be quite frank, it doesn't work at all. Our main character Riki is your "I had a terrible past as a child" type of deal but quickly made friends with a group known as the "Little Busters" that helped him through his tragic times. Riki is essentially as bland as you can get. He's weak, indecisive, but when girls are in trouble, he'll magically gains confidence and become a legendary savior. Yeah, one of those guys. Anyway, the group has some pretty interesting characters that weren't all that bad, however, things pretty much go downhill from there.
Fast forwarding to high school, The group all decide to recruit baseball players to form some baseball team that later on becomes almost non-important, but that's beside the point. So this "baseball" team basically gives our MC Riki an excuse to walk around campus and talk to random girls, because obviously a manly baseball team would suck. And you guessed it! He definitely picks up quite the amount of females. Your female cast that is slowly introduced is your typical bland, generic, "I've seen this stuff too many times to care" type of deal. We have the perfect cool beauty, the short little adorable girl who shouts "wafu!", your silent, unemotional bookworm, blahblabhalbh
And sure enough, each of these females has some terrible awful past that totally seems out of place. Now we suddenly shift from recruiting baseball members into a full blown melodramatic case involving unbelievable sob stories complete with cheesy Key production supernatural twists. Riki, being our main character, is obviously devoted to helping all these females out with the best of his abilities, and of course, he always manages to fix everything. And in the end, they all go back to playing baseball and happy story all over again.
Oh right, and there's also some major important "secret of the world" plot while all of this goes on, but after 15 episodes, all we know is these secrets are notes tied to cats. Yeah. cats. And the slips say your generic ambiguous "what the hell does this even mean" quotes that in the end, you honestly don't care about this secret of the world.
The comedy is at best, mediocre. Gags get repetitive and used over and over. Most of the comedy is focused on the muscles freak Masato, who is always losing in fights due to his stupidity and getting himself in silly situations. Our little adorable character Kud offers some Engrish and adorableness that isn't exactly innovative, but still provided a few bright spots here and there. Riki gets himself involved in all sorts of situations with the ladies, and Rin becomes catlike and scared of people who try to befriend her. Besides the fact, these happy carefree episodes in between the serious dramatic episodes feel really awkward and out of place. I admit that one cooking episode was fun to watch, and was probably my favorite episode out of the whole series.
So what did we get in the end? Generic characters, generic and cheesy melodrama, decent and overused comedy, and some random ass baseball theme behind all of it. What am I suppose to like? The dramatic scene of a student council president breaking a school bench? The slice of life elements, even though they don't associate with anything SLIGHTLY related to school besides their baseball team?
I wanted to like this so much, which is why I watched up until half of episode 16. But I really can't take this anymore. The execution is terrible and I'm just going to play the VN and not waste my time. Thanks for reading, and please comment on my profile so I can improve my future reviews.
