Kaginado

"My child, please listen carefully..." There´s a forgotten girl. A girl in the sky. A girl with a strange disease. A shy girl playing baseball. A girl in the moon. And a girl who wants to see the stars. These 6 make me who i am today. Without KEY, we may have not have had the impact on drama/romance visual novels or anime we have today. The fantastic character designs and personality; the comedy genious laying around in every episode making me laugh my ass off and the climax scenes turning every man into a crybaby; all of this adds up for unforgetable experiences within our hearts. Yet one question remains. Whatif they ALL got togheter? Strap yourself in because you've just gotten into something special. ‌Before you do that you must have READ or WATCHED: Kanon/Kanon 2002,Kanon 2006; AIR/AIR TV,AIR:The Motion Picture,AIR: In Summer;CLANNAD/CLANNAD, CLANNAD:After Story; Little Busters!/Little Busters!,Little Busters!:Refrain, Little Busters!: EX; Kud Wafter Rewrite,Rewrite:Harvest Festa!/Rewrite,Rewrite Second Season; Planetarian/Planetarian(anime)/ Tomoyo After(this one you must play as there is no anime.) Don't let the chibi style or 4 minute episode runtime fool you; it's a masterpiece! The classic jokes such as "Toilet Seat Cover" or Kyousuke being a lolicon are very much present with the addition of lots of references to specific scenes or character traits but with a few wholesome moments that bring water to our eyes. Sadly(and this might be a huge drawback to you)character attention might vary a lot. Because it's a limited cast, some characters might show up in 4 episodes while others show up with 3 lines of dialogue with 10 seconds. Personally, i didn't feel loss with that because they really can make every episode feel unique with the same set of characters specially when you can feel that they've enjoyed working on this project; i really loved the voice acting. One major example of this is Misuzu's voice actress. Her past VA is no longer with us so she had big shoes to fill in the girl in the sky. Let me tell you, she was perfect; it was just barely a 1:1 to the original. Finally, KEY also brought the audience their favourite tunes back; i'm talking about the BGM playing in each one of the games(not all of course) and one special singer returned to melt our hearts once again: Lia. After watching Kaginado, all i could feel was that this anime was a "Thank you for being there." A Thank you to all of us fans who have witnessed these wonderful and powerful stories that will forever have marked history and our lives. So from me and all of the fans; Thank you for inspiring millions of people to pursue their dreams and to give us more meanings of important words such as family or friendship.

Warning: If you don't watch or read/play Kanon, AIR, Clannad (including Tomoyo After VN), Little Busters, Planetarian and Rewrite beforehand or still halfway through them, please do finish them before watching. You'll getting on very heavy spoiler as early as episode 1. You have been warned. This is a gift to all loyal Key fans that has been staying and crying for whatever all those series throughout their 21 years of existing. Having many of these series make a comeback with half of them last having an appearance a decade ago, truly they brought much nostalgia to everyone who had known this either via the VNor the anime. The series are short, but the content is very much good if you love Key. You'll be exposed to not only interaction between all the character series, but also constant breaking of the fourth wall, some commentary of each series, subtle references and easter eggs from the anime and VNs and also some character has their own revenge moment as well. The 12 5-minutes episode sure might be not enough for some, but indeed, it relive our nostalgia so much. And yes, they are not ending yet! Now lets look forward to the next season, with Angel Beats joins the gang!

Isekai Quartet and Carnival Phantasm move over, there's a new player in town in the genre of: "Anime That Someone in the Comments Section is Going to Invariably Call the Avengers: Endgame of Anime Despite the Fact That Anime Has Been Doing This Far Longer Than Disney Has Owned Marvel." Yes that is the full title of the genre. Was it worth watching about half a dozen visual novel adaptations of varying lengths to get here? Well let me answer that question with a question: Would you rather have played all of the original visual novels instead, totally around 300 hours worth of content? The answerto both is no, it's not worth it. Only a masochist like me would watch both versions of Kanon in the same month to prepare for watching this. In all seriousness, intimate knowledge of EVERY visual novel by Key is pretty much a hard requirement for any of this show to make sense. Humor is derived directly from referencing important moments in whatever franchise and subverting them in some way. Watching this without prior knowledge is sort of like watching those How It Should Have Ended videos on youtube without having seen the movie it's about. Maybe you'll find some humor, but if you are laughing it's not because you get the joke it's because you want to pretend you do. Maybe it sounds like gatekeeping that this show requires you to watching hours and hours of content before coming here. Yes. Anyway if you have done your homework the show is actually very funny, because of how easily it's able to use simple phrases or imagery to evoke emotions and then jerk those away with a quick punchline. So I want to hate this show for making me watch Air, but it's funny enough that it gets away with it. 8/10

Story: The story for this anime is pretty simple. It is basically answering the question of "What would happen if you clump all of Key's visual novel characters together in one setting?" where I am sure some of you have seen a similar anime to this. (Another anime is Isekai Quartet where it wants to show what would happen if you clump a bunch of isekai genre story characters into the mix). Therefore, the anime will highlight all the moments and/or similarities that all the characters experience in their respective stories whilst comedically contrasting their different reactions/behaviours to the situation (one example is where allthe main characters, of their respective stories, have a conference meeting discussing their own experiences and judging each other about said experiences). It is very simple and short and direct to the point so if you know the references then it makes the jokes all the funnier. Characters: There is nothing much to say about the characters since they are portrayed exactly the same from their own games (visual novels and anime). Therefore, the interaction between each character makes the anime all the more fun to watch since the whole point was to see which characters will befriend each other and who will antagonise each other. In addition, to seeing the difference/ similarities between characters that have similar dispositions. Art and Sound: Art is fine considering they are all in Chibi-format (though in one episode they take advantage between Chibi forms and normal human proportions to illustrate a particular point). Whereas the sound is pretty much the music you can find in all the previous visual novels/ animes. In other words, faithful to the original material makes the whole series nostalgic and fun to watch. Overall: In the end, this anime is basically a tribute to all the people that have been following Key's Visual novel (or anime) series from the beginning. Strictly speaking, you can watch this without any foreknowledge of the other series, but then (in my humble opinion) the jokes become less impactful and make watching it feel redundant. I would recommend people (that have no ideas about Key visual novel series) who will watch this (or did watch it) to go through the other Key visual novel (or anime adaptations of the visual novels) first to get a good idea of why the jokes were inserted there in the first place. However, it is not (strictly) necessary since the anime does not really delve too much into their own storylines so you can argue that if you understand why the joke is there you can just enjoy it that way. This recommendation is mainly for those who are genuinely curious about the characters presented in the story and want to know why and how they are necessary for their own respective storylines.