The much anticipated Clannad After Story has started and reintroduces us to most of the main cast with a baseball match of epic proportions. Akio orders Okazaki and Nagisa to assemble the gang for an upcoming baseball match with the neighboring town’s team. Okazaki’s harem of superhuman females is then reassembled along with Sunohara and Yoshino to play some baseball.

Okazaki: Kotomi is so moe I’m gonna die~

Kyou is still as scary as ever.

Swing and a miss.

You won’t like me when I’m angry…

Memories are precious!

Now I’ll look at the sky and be badass. I’m just too cool.

The orbs of light are everyone’s happiness. This may or may not be a spoiler…

We’re already familiar with the athletic prowesses of Tomoyo and Kyou from the first season, but even Kotomi and Mei got in some good hits, while the men were lucky to get anything at the plate. Sunohara outright jobbed the entire episode with epic phailure and hilarity. He was decent at soccer and basketball, but the gods of baseball are not with our favorite ignoramus.

The Furukawa Bakery team storms out the gates and takes a commanding early lead, but Akio soon goes out with an injury. To everyone’s surprise he subs Nagisa in as the pitcher. Why not Kyou, who would have made a lot more sense? Kyou throws a mean dictionary which should translate well to baseball. Anyway fighto~da yo. The rival team catches up and everything comes down to Okazaki, who mans up and wins the game for Team Furukawa with a Home Run.

The highlight of this episode was Yoshino getting tagged while delivering a rousing monologue to the team after a hit. Then he took a time out while on base to deliver the monologue again in its entirety. He may be depressing but give the guy an A for effort, guts and GAR.

Oh yes, my eyes may be deceiving me but Fuko wasn’t “featured” in the new opening and ending (A brief shot of her back doesn’t count). Even if Fuko no longer has any bearing to the plot, she should still have her spot as a main heroine in the opening. Kotomi and Kyou still have their spots. Fuko’s spotlight stealing antics will eventually find their way into the new season though. And there will be much “dozo” to be had. Soon…

Now that my mini Fuko rant is over, I should talk about the aforementioned OP/ED. Lia sings the brand new OP (”Toki wo Kizamu Uta”) and ED (”TORCH”) for After Story. Both are beautiful and set the atmosphere perfectly. “Toki wo Kizamu Uta” is definitely on par with “Megumeru”, and “TORCH” has a nice upbeat feeling to it. I already like it better than “Dango Daikazoku”, though the dango had their charm too. You can’t go wrong with Lia, but I found it unusual that eufonious/Riya didn’t return to do the new songs.

All in all an entertaining episode and a great way to start the season with a bang. So if Clannad is going to be 24 episodes, I’m guessing the first 12 will finish up the school arc and then transition to the end of the story with Ushio and the other world. Very looking forward to it. Cheers to the second season of Clannad. I’ll be bawwwing before it’s all said and done.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Anime, Clannad.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.