Little Busters!

review major rewrite - march 26 2022
This review avoids important spoilers

16 year old me loved Little Busters. I was just getting into this whole 'anime' thing at the time, and Little Busters was my first 'real' visual novel. Back then, all you needed to win me over were cute characters and a small amount of lighthearted humor, which Little Busters has endless amounts of. Fast forward seven years later, I decided to revisit this visual novel via its new official English translation. This ended up taking me 66 hours to complete and uncover every secret because it never ends. That's a truly impressive amount of content, for better or worse. Nine full character routes are featured within this version of the game. Of which, you'll need to finish six of them in order to get to the 'true ending'.

In addition to the endless text, Little Busters sports a handful of cute extra minigames. One of those is a battle ranking system where random characters from the baseball club fight each other with random weapons (e.g. a chalkboard eraser or balloons). This battle system is amusing at first, though mostly pointless outside of discovering a couple small secrets. The baseball practice minigame, on the other hand, is tons of fun. Rin, the main female character, throws baseballs while you mindlessly swing and launch them into cats and other characters.

Considering that the main storyline revolves around one big baseball game, I found that the actual game simulation was a huge disappointment. Unlike the top-down minigame styling of the baseball practice, the game simulation is purely focused on strategy and luck. You pick and choose who's in what position and what they do. No physics as seen during baseball practice are used here. Instead, you have to look at the sprites of each character as the game, through RNG, tells you how many bases they've ran (or how many strikes they've gotten). The experience is made even worse upon realizing that you have to play through the visual novel multiple times before you can realistically win this baseball game in the first place. Meaning you'll have no choice but to watch your team fail over and over again before you're allowed to win.

One of the Ecstasy routes introduces some shooting segments, along with maze traversing. These mechanics tend to get repetitive and annoying, especially when you're trying to view all the extra content, which requires multiple playthroughs.

The English Version here is based on the 2009 Converted version of the game, which includes all the extra content from Little Busters Ecstasy, minus the h-scenes and nudity. You can look up the lewd CGs for yourself, though trust me when I say you're not missing out on anything worth seeing. This is not a stereotypical 'Sony light beams' censoring situation, seeing as these changes date well before the official English translation. And no, there is no patch to add the h-scenes back in, because nobody ever bothered to translate them. If you're looking for a 'purist', complete experience of Little Busters, this English version is the best you're going to get.

It's unfortunate that anyone would end up turning this down purely on the notion that it's 'censored', considering that the original release had no nudity to begin with. But wait, if the original release had no nudity in it, how the hell did it get censored in the first place? To summarize, Little Busters was originally released in 2007 with six full character routes. The very next year, an updated installment called 'Little Busters Ecstasy' was released, featuring three new character routes. Though, seeing as this was probably not enough content to justify buying the same expensive VN two years in a row, the team decided to pull out the classic sucker magnet. Our main character Riki gets to fuck now!

It's important to remember that while Little Busters appears to be a 'dating simulator', very few of these routes actually contain anything resembling romance. Sure, Riki goes on at least one actual date in one of the routes, though I'm pretty sure that Riki doesn't even kiss anybody in the original game. So you could understand why sticking full on sex scenes into the story would come off as contrived and unfitting. It's a bit self-defeating, seeing as the focal point of the story revolves around the concept of 'friendship'. But my point is that yes, this Little Busters version is worth playing in its PG-13 form, arguably more so than the actual 18+ Ecstasy version.

So is it good? When I revisited and completed this in 2020, my perception of its writing was completely altered. A lot of the hacky emotional writing completely bounced off of me. Many times, something surrealistic and unnatural needs to happen to resolve a problem, though I can't exactly blame Jun Maeda for his writing decisions considering the holes he ends up writing himself into. Many of the conflicts are ridiculous to begin with, which causes the greater picture of the story to become a blurry mess of melodrama and the supernatural.
On the contrary, Jun deserves credit for being an amazing SONGwriter. Most of the music associated with this series is worth hearing.

The best example of Jun's 'surreal', supernatural writing comes out in Mio's route. Mio is a good character when she's interacting with others. She's comparatively serious, and she plays as the straightman to their silly humor. Once the spotlight is on her alone, however, the story turns into ambiguous philosophical wankery.
Komari is more of an optimistic airhead, which is fine if all you're looking for is fluffy cuteness. Her route is less abstract as well, though it's laughably melodramatic, with a touch of goofy tragedy. The same can be said for Haruka's route. As fun as her character might be, her genki antics don't line up with her bizarre upbringing and insane family conflicts.
Rin is yet another airhead, though she's more aggressive and childlike than the other characters. Her route is more interesting than the others, though you don't get to experience it in its full glory until you play through it a second time at the tail end of the game. In it, her and Riki lead on a small adventure that exits the usual school scenery of Little Busters and takes on a life of its own.
Kud was my favorite character when I was 16, though there's not much more that can be said about her now other than 'she's cute'. Indeed, she is also an airhead, though much less so than the other female members of Riki's baseball team. Her route still ended up one of the more interesting ones. It's a hell of a lot more serious compared to the others, though the ending devolves into enigmatic spectacle, anyway.
Kurugaya is one of the few non-airheads in this cast. Her wit and straightforward personality lets her stand out as one of the better characters. Her route is far more digestible compared to the others.

All the routes I listed above are standard for the original release of the game, though with the newly translated Ecstacy content comes three more character routes. This includes Kanata (Haruka's sister), Sasami (the purple haired baseball girl), and Saya (a wild card bonus character).
While I don't hate Kanata's unflinching personality, her route ends up being a retread of Haruka's flimsy route. It follows similar points from a different perspective, and the same problems remain.
Sasami, on the other hand, ended up becoming my favorite character, with my favorite route nonetheless. Her character is a basic archetype (ojou), but she fits into the story even more so than some of the main characters. Her short route is simple, goofy, and bittersweet. It highlights all the strong points of Little Busters in a concise way.
Saya's route is an entirely new game within itself. It's fitting, since Saya is the only entirely new character in this version of Little Busters. Her personality is far more cartoonish than the others, making her route unquestionably the funniest one.

By the time you pass through all the build-up and get to the True Real Actual ending, you'll be so tired out by the previous melo-trauma and silliness that you might not be able to fully take in The Big Twist at the very end. Yet, while I find a lot of the story and gameplay mechanics annoying, I do still like this game a lot. Mainly because besides all the writing oddities, this is easily my favorite character roster of all the Jun Maeda casts. Put the nonsense routes aside, and each character is worth remembering. All the innocent lighthearted comedy make this an overwhelmingly sweet experience. But no matter what way I look at it, it's unique, and its experience is special. It's worth playing.