7 October 2007, 8:52 AM
I believe it is possible to have a visual novel game make a perfect transition to anime in terms of keeping the original storyline and characters intact.
Having watched Kanon (2006 version), I was touched with each arc and was quite surprised how strong each one was in keeping me interested. It managed to incorporate all 5 stories from the original game into the series and flowed quite well with each story intermixing with each other.
There are some badly produced ones of course. Lunar Legend Tsukihime takes the cake for that as many character background details were sacrificed in order for it to focus on the true ending of the Tsukihime game. The best example is the lack of focus into Kohaku and Hisui's characters as they had a more prominent role to the main story in the game but were presented as one-dimensional characters in the anime.
I think the problem when it comes to visual-novel games making a transition to anime is that the game has multiple routes where different characters and stories are focused in detail while the anime tends to stick to one route. This would probably result in changes to storyline where the anime tries to incorporate a few, if not all, of the routes into one seamless plot thus character background information and major plot points would be sacrificed. I do still believe it is possible to make a perfect transition of a visual-novel game to anime though.
Having watched Kanon (2006 version), I was touched with each arc and was quite surprised how strong each one was in keeping me interested. It managed to incorporate all 5 stories from the original game into the series and flowed quite well with each story intermixing with each other.
There are some badly produced ones of course. Lunar Legend Tsukihime takes the cake for that as many character background details were sacrificed in order for it to focus on the true ending of the Tsukihime game. The best example is the lack of focus into Kohaku and Hisui's characters as they had a more prominent role to the main story in the game but were presented as one-dimensional characters in the anime.
I think the problem when it comes to visual-novel games making a transition to anime is that the game has multiple routes where different characters and stories are focused in detail while the anime tends to stick to one route. This would probably result in changes to storyline where the anime tries to incorporate a few, if not all, of the routes into one seamless plot thus character background information and major plot points would be sacrificed. I do still believe it is possible to make a perfect transition of a visual-novel game to anime though.