Clannad

Length: 23 Episodes (+1 OVA episode)
Episode Length: 25 mins
Genre: Drama, Romance, Comedy

Tomoya Okizaki is a Senior in high school, he is also known as a no-good troublemaker. When he was young his Mother died, and his father started drinking and gambling. After a short while they started getting into fights. One day his father and he get into a serious fight and Tomoya's right shoulder is injured. Since then he has become the trouble maker he is.

Current day, Tomoya is on his way to school, when he sees a girl standing on the side of the walkway up to the school. Her name is Nagisa Furukowa. This series is a story of Tomoya's and Nagisa's time during senior year in high school, and their fun times (and sad times) with friends they make throughout the year.

Grading Scale: 1 to 10

Visual: 10
Plot: 8
Sound: 10
Follow Through: 8

Visually, Clannad was perfect, characters had diferent faces, different styles and they even made cities, and buildings look unique. It is difficult to come up wiht much to say here as all I can do is praise the effort put into this series.

Plot is one of its downfalls, if you can call it that. The main plat is there throughout most of the series, the only times when it isn't present is when you learn things about each characters past. The biggest flaw in this is that how they represent this story is by revolving the stories around secondary characters, and how the Main characters deal with them.

Sound, like its visual quality was incredible. Each character had a voice that sounded like their own character, and no one person tried to make themselves stand out by overdoing their voice-acting. All the sounds in this series follow along with what is going on and I must say that they cover all aspects very well.

Follow Through is where you could say the biggest downfall is, but it is still worth an 8 not only for effort but for getting so close to making a series which could fit three different genres in almost all of the time. Clannad is a romantic comedy, but with a lot of drama in it. The problem is comparison from the aspects of drama. All romantic comedies have some drama in them that is how romantic comedies keep people interested in the romance. However, Clannad comes more than the romantic side of Drama. They cover despair, loneliness, and even fear. This series does a great job of incorporating it into the series. One of the reasons this series lost a point in this aspect was because of the OVA. The OVA episode is completely different from the main storyline and even goes against what has just happened in the series. It was a good idea in itself, and does cover an aspect of the story people would like to have learned about. But it does not fit in with the rest of the story line.

Clannad got a bump down because of episode 24 (also known as an OVA episode), since it did not follow with the original story line, and added no useful effect to the story (in my personal opinion).

Clannad gets an A-.