clannad wasn't total dreck, but i regret the time invested. my overarching impression: manipulative fakery. i felt slightly dirty after watching it. i don't enjoy my heart strings so blatantly pulled with such dishonest intentions; i resent it.
what i liked: okazaki tomoya is not quite as spine- and featureless as main male characters in harem anime often are. he has a sarcastic streak, and he likes to play pranks on his friends. his little, internal quips kept me from overdosing from moe. one of the female characters, sakagami tomoyo also happens to be competent all on her own, and is not in desperate need to be saved by okazaki. the mysterious insert bits with the girl and the mechanical doll were intriguing, and beautiful. honestly -- THAT was the anime i would have loved to see. i also enjoyed the deceptively simple, childish ending song, and overall the sound wasn't bad. nakamura yuuichi did a decent job as okazaki.
what i didn't like: the character designs of the girls. in their efforts to maximize the moe, kyoani actually managed to create an uncanny valley effect for me here; the eyes are just too large and deformed, the face is too flat, and the tiny mouth sit so high on the face that the chin seem huge. i found this anything but cute, and it was difficult to watch for a while, until i got desensitized to it. the male characters (except for sunohara) are easier to look at, but they're generic anime guys, nothing special, nothing memorable. speaking of sunohara, the comic relief guy, he wasn't funny. he was mostly disgusting, and i wondered why the heck okazaki hung around with him. the voice talent was also nothing to write home about; okiayu ryoutaro voiced furukawa akio, but i was less enthralled with him here than usual; akio felt overacted even in his few serious moments. the different arcs were in themselves well developed, but when one finished and the next one started, the emotional events had no echoes beyond that arc; the previously featured girl went out of sight and out of mind. that's not how real life works, that's not how good fiction works, and if you create an anime from a dating sim or similar medium, you need to adjust for that. oh, and "slice of life"? not even close. in no life i know do complete newbs win ball games against trained amateurs.
what frustrated me: okazaki's backstory looked promising, and felt realistic, but it was neglected to the point where it no longer mattered to me when it got dragged out for an episode to insert some drama. fuuko's arc started interestingly, but then dragged on for much too long, and didn't really make enough sense. and in the end fuuko is used just for comic relief, which is profoundly dishonest to the supposedly serious situation in which fuuko finds herself. this could be a much stronger anime if it used its serious aspects more wisely, instead of sweeping them under the carpet as if oops, we didn't mean that.
i am not looking forward to watching the afterbirth, uh, after story for this, which is even more highly rated. really, guys, is an excess of moe all you need? i don't even hate moe per se, though i don't find it particularly attractive either; cute and helpless just isn't my thing. but here it gets pushed at the expense of everything else, with supreme calculation.
