Friday 10 October 2008

Clannad ~After Story~ - Episode 2

Clannad ~After Story~ continues with a startling revelation about the imaginary world - It has sheep! Several sheep! I'm not sure I can contain myself after such vast plot developments.


Anyway, never mind all that (and to be honest I've never found the imaginary world side of Clannad to be anything more than a distraction), episode two of After Story was a normal dose of the series simple blend of hilarity. Sunohara's sister, Mei, is worried about her brothers progress and inability to choose what he wants to do with his future, and is threatening to stick around until he proves himself capable of planning ahead. Of course, this is just the kind of thing Youhei doesn't want to happen, and so Tomoya comes up with a cunning plan - To find Sunohara a fake girlfriend to prove to Mei that everything is just fine.

Cue the predictable hilarity of Sunohara racing around trying to persuade all the usual suspects to help him out, with varying responses, until his eventual willing victim comes from a rather surprising quarter...

Clannad has never really been a proponent of deep, complicated plots, and thus this particular story arc is both simple and predictable, but that doesn't stop it being frequently laugh out loud funny, playing on all of the characteristics of its various characters for maximum comic potential to carve out another little slice of genius, and certainly allowing it to top the baseball game story the first episode of After Story presented us with. If episode one reaffirmed my affection towards Clannad's array of characters, then this second episode reminded me just why I enjoy the series itself so much. As I've just mentioned, it's a pretty simple series, but when it gets the mix of ingredients right such as here it really is rather masterful.

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