Anime Review: Little Busters

Little Busters

Airing Season: Fall 2012
Length: 26 Episodes
Genre, as perceived by Dogy: Slice of Life
Dogy Overall Score: 65/100
Would I Recommend It?: No

Little Busters...... no matter how much of a distaste I have for the genre, I can unbiasedly say there's only one fault to the series. The problem is, the entire series is built around one concept and it doesn't work too well, imo. Well I take that back, 'cause I'm pretty sure it works in any other format except as a raw anime.

What I mean by that is, if you have a slight understanding on how anime comes to be, you can easily tell this came from something like a visual novel without doing any research. That's not a bad thing since that's a norm, but Little Busters is the kind of series that hinges on one thing and one thing only.

The plot. And that is what fell on it's face, imo.

The premise of the series is about a group of high schoolers that get to form a baseball team. Most of the members have some random hidden struggle that the main character helps them overcome. That's a good-enough way to describe what's going on without spoiling anything.

But with that and how they present the series, everything is literally built around the characters and their development. That's literally the ONLY plot line. So out the gate, if you don't like the characters, this anime has nothing else to interest you. What'll make you mad is if you actually like a few characters but you eventually realize they have no special arc (nor any huge role to the series).

(edited out 2 paragraphs)

... That's literally it without talking in circles. I could go into more details on how this works, but you liking this series is directly proportional to how many and how much you like the characters.

I think this comes from watching this series blind as an anime. As I watched it, I literally didn't care with the format of the flow, but I imagined how it would fair in other formats (as a visual novel, which is it, a manga, etc). I don't see how it wouldn't work any other way. Heck, it'd be a lot better if they made the series long enough to include EVERY character (which, I think is possible?). But for what it is now, it's really pot luck if you'll say it's ok.

Beyond the plot, everything else is solid. (Insert the generic "everything else is not bad but won't blow your mind" paragraph)

In the end, I feel like I wasted my time watching this series. I didn't care about 90% of it and I don't really care to watch any more if they make another series/OVA. Again, not because it did anything horribly wrong, but it's sadly set up in a hit-or-miss format.

And it friggin' missed me by a mile.