I think a term commonly associated with romance/sol animanga and games is “wish fulfillment.” Now, from my experience, it's a term usually met with some level of disdain or condescension. “Wow what a loser, they need this thing to feel good about themselves.” And, sure, I can understand where that attitude comes from, in fact I'm like that sometimes too. But I feel it's not that simple. People come from different backgrounds, places, and circumstances. Sometimes what we need is comfort from something, even if it isn't real.
Clannad, among many, many other beloved visual novels is boiled down to the common “your friends and family are important, your life is worth living” morals, but is it a bad thing to be so commonly communicated? I would assume that Maeda and the many other writers at Key are trying to convey this, and even if they were or not, intention does not always align with found purpose. Tomoya Okazaki, our protagonist, is a great stand in for players like me to some degree. He's still his own character, but I think him being a loner to align with the usual “wish fulfillment” protagonist role really works to its benefit. No matter your background or role, there is worth in finding friends and family, whether it be genetic or found. It finally gives us purpose to those who feel so aimless in life. Clannad is not simply “wish fulfillment” at play. It's inspiring us to fulfill those wishes ourselves, and fulfill the wishes of others.
I’ve seen complaints about Clannad’s core structure before, as for some people the routes are “not interconnected enough”. But is that a problem? In my opinion, anyway, Clannad is an anthology of the multiple “what if” scenarios surrounding Okazaki’s journey in life. While Nagisa’s route is what leads to the true ending of the story, it doesn’t make the other routes pointless. Regardless of what is the “true” outcome of the story, your experiences and how you see these characters develop will always live on with the player. You get to see Okazaki give these people true happiness in life, and by the true ending, he is repaid for everything he’s done. While in gameplay the route system is a little rough around the edges with much needed polish, I think playing with a guide allows for a very smooth experience.
Playing this after my most prior Key visual novel experience, that being AIR, really opened my eyes to how well thought out and executed much of Clannad is. While AIR suffers from an overly ambitious but ultimately meaningless structure, Clannad takes a safer approach and cuts out any filler. Jun Maeda and his team really wanted to make up for the mistakes of AIR, and you can really tell from how much more polish is applied to this game. Despite this being one of the longest games I’ve ever played, Clannad rarely falls victim to artificial padding. The game gives you and makes proper use of the “skip already read text” feature, which makes hopping into your next route a very quick and easy experience. It helps that the game is split into 10+ routes that all vary in length, meaning I don’t think the game can ever burn you out from a scenario. Each route (with two exceptions, one being entirely optional) is very different overall so nothing is samey either. I’d also like to make note of the amount of content on offer, Clannad is not only long from the main game but has TONS of little secrets and extra blurbs of dialogue to discover, it really feels like the team wanted to put as much as they could onto the disc.
And that’s the overall thing I love about Clannad: it’s very polished. Not perfect, but very damn close. Clannad may seem safe or tropey, but it uses those aspects and pushes them to a wonderful and engaging extent. The current top review tries to make fun of fans of this game and I’d have to say that this person probably has never experienced joy in their life. None of the huge visual novels I’ve played so far have been flops, and Clannad is no exception either. In fact, out of the three (Higurashi, Tsukihime, Clannad) I would say this is my new favorite, and knowing that Key still has some fantastic games in their catalog for me to still try out (Kanon, Little Busters!, and Rewrite) has me so immensely excited. But none of those games, or any visual novels in the future will take away what a special experience Clannad was for me. I had taken a long break from reviews and I needed to get out of that slump, and this game was what inspired me to write a little something again, especially seeing how none of the longer reviews about this game on this site are in good faith. I wanted to fix that. Thank you for reading, and if this review manages to get even one person to fully play through this game, I’ll be happy.

Unfortunately, I don't think this VN has aged very gracefully, as a lot of fresh ideas now come off as stale. I think all the main routes are pretty well-written (Kyou best girl) but the side routes range from just okay to outright horrendous (looking at you, Kappei). While I understand the importance of establishing a sense of community, the lack of quality control on these other routes hurt the VN as a whole more than helps since this is already a huge story that bloated to epic proportions because of them.

I also gotta say, this really does feel like a shell of what the anime did. I've always hated Jun Maeda's anime-original works but liked the anime adaptations of his Key stuff, and reading the Clannad VN helped me understand why: the adaptation teams understood the stories better than Maeda ever did. The VN never quite successfully weaves all the routes together in a satisfactory way, and the anime more than makes up for what it loses by trading in the meta components and prose for strong visual direction. It also expands on themes present in the VN but aren't executed terribly well.

I tried not to let my feelings for the anime cloud my feelings too much, and my rating is moreso a reflection of what I think I'd feel if I hadn't seen it first: lukewarm, but still wondering what the big deal was about.

One of the classics of the VN scenes. I could understand that view that many get from this work. However, it is telling that this is mostly recommended for newcomers trying to get into Visual Novels. The prose is short, simple, and pleasant. Very thematically strong in its themes of coming of age and what it entails. To finding refuge in family, friends, and romantic partners and climbing the hill of life/existence as long as you can. However, it is pretty marred down by overly redundant slice of life scenes, and VERY slow pacing. Ironically, although most of the game is written by Jun Maeda, I like Suzumoto Yuuichi (Kotomi's story) style of writing and pacing better. It isn't to say I don't think this is a classic (because it deserves to be one and packs quite a devastating emotional punch) It's just not my thing. Probably especially since I've played better VNs than what most people would actually find in the western world.

This is a game for the impressionable. The story is filled with extremely contrived conflicts solved by deus ex machina. The majority of characters do not behave like human beings. A small logic poke into the tear-jerk scenes reveals a complete lack of reason. Art work is stuff from nightmares. Thankfully there're a few routes not written by Maeda Jun that offer a little bit of genuine drama and character development.

This game ultimately crushed my enthusiasm for Japanese visual novels. I had heard so much about its legendary status, and what I got was cheap drama and asinine writing. If you are out of high school and thinking about giving this game a try, I suggest you just pick up a real novel instead.

I never once thought too myself that a piece of media would have such a significant impact on me...
Until i played Clannad & Tomoyo After, it has such a beautiful story that teaches the importance of family and it shows & follows it's own philosophy of Hedonism. Clannad teaches us how no matter what hardships an individual is fated to face, life is still worth living despite that. Each route follows the main heroine of that route, you become so engrossed with that character, you'll slowly start learning their past and a deeper insight on who that character truly is from within thier heart. Each story route is so fascinating, the majority of it's characters have their own sets of real life problems and there is always one underlying theme and message that you can take away from each route.
I'm not sure if what i wrote here can justify on how much i love this game, but if you didn't get the memo, i frickin love this game from the bottom of my heart.

I liked what I played of it, but I don't want to play 60 hours of a dating sim with every woman in the cast to get to the actual story. The game was really fun to start, but even in just one route I did, it felt like it took too long without much of substance happening by the end. I lost interest in the second route I tried to do because the story structure or the pacing didn't change much.

The biggest positive for me was that the game was really funny. Didn't feel a lot towards the romance. I'm sure I wouldn't have finished even one route if it didn't have such hilariously stupid joke interactions. The music is also stellar. And I personally really love the artstyle.

Over a decade ago, I first experienced CLANNAD, my very first visual novel, and I recall having it land incredibly deeply for me. I don't remember the specifics, but I recall the feelings I felt. Since then, friends and family have come and gone, I've graduated, I've started to make a living and a life for myself. And I found myself back here, at the foot of the hill with Nagisa again. In another decade, I hope to carry with me another ten years' worth of memories, moments, triumphs, and the strength and serenity to push through the difficulties I face on the road to that next benchmark of my time on this earth. And maybe once again, in those ten years' time, we'll meet at the bottom of the hill again.

https://youtu.be/2UbOYG3_6wE?si=zNBxOWxWRoJFvurQ

Ignore the first reviews on this site which trash on this game, it rocks but it has its issues.

Pacing kinda sucks if you're not ready for a slow story, there's tons of alternate text which makes every route fairly unique with less skippable text than you'd probably expect.

Certain events expect you to have played other routes in order to unlock them. Sometimes they never play again and there's no way to track whether you've seen an event and it sucks replaying a route just to see nothing happen. Following a suggested route order is recommended.

Love this VN so much, but some of the design hasn't aged too well and I'd definitely recommend using a guide for route order and choices.

EIGHTY
FOUR
HOURS

Clannad for the longest time was considered sort of the de-facto Best Visual Novel. As in whenever discussing what the best VN is, even if no one would pick it, Clannad was the starting point of that conversation. I call it Ocarina of Time syndrome.

I completely understand why it had that reputation. This was maybe one of the first successful VNs with this much artistic ambition. (I am regretfully not well versed in 90s Japanese VNs, something I hope to change soon, but outside of YU-NO I don't know what else would be in contention.) Considering it in its time, it's a landmark achievement.

I also completely understand why that reputation has faded. What holds it back in my mind is, because it was an early 2000s bishojo VN, it was compelled to adhere to all of those tropes. Choices are often inane with no clear purpose for existing. The protagonist is an asshole who relies on women to save him from himself. The women are happy to oblige to absurd degrees. He is simultaneously constantly aroused and also eerily chaste? His first kiss with his wife happens about a week after their marriage. You figure that one out.

The story also often seems confused about where it's going. Without spoiling, the "point" of the narrative was apparently such a secret that I didn't realize what it was until it was happening. The main routes and the after story are essentially different games which isn't inherently bad, but they don't complement each other well. Too often callbacks fall flat in execution. (Credit where credit's due, there's plenty of clever foreshadowing. I recommend not skipping the Illusory World interludes when route-hunting.) I try not to be in the habit of offering specific changes to a work, but in all of the most emotional scenes I caught myself thinking "There is a version of this story where this scene makes me cry. I wish I could see that one."

I did enjoy it. It's just hard to say how much. Maybe someday I'll check out the anime adaptation. Perhaps the story is better suited to that medium?

This is already a really long entry so I'm gonna run up the score and rank all the main story routes from worst to best. I earned the right. Eighty four hours.

Sunohara - lol it's homosexual isn't that gross ha ha kill me
Kappei - What's the opposite of a deus ex machina? Where everything is going well and then out of nowhere there's a nonsense twist for the sake of drama?
Misae - The best part of this route is when it briefly intersects with two others.
Kotomi - "Contrived" is the word that comes to mind.
Kyou - Kyou and Ryou are twins, and knowing that you've already figured out how this route goes.
Koumura - A legitimately endearing story for a character who gets almost no screen time.
Mei - Mei exists in the other routes as an optional B-plot and her dedicated story doesn't really expand on it that much. Unfortunately. Mei rulez.
Ryou - Like Kyou's route except everything goes according to plan. I wish more stories would let that happen.
Nagisa - Even if you don't know the gist of the VN or looked at the cover art, this is pretty obviously the canon route.
Yukine - Structurally unique, and all of Tomoya's gross teenage boy energy is dumped on Sunohara instead. Almost makes me sad it's so short, but that would mess with its pace.
Baseball - The writing is at its best when it's goofy, and this is by far the goofiest ending.
Fuko - Now this is the kind of tragic existentialism I can get behind. Probably the closest the game got to making me cry. Which is saying a lot, considering, yknow. The rest of it.
* Tomoyo - Tomoyo is in my opinion the most individually compelling character in the game. Comparing and contrasting her with Tomoya is some of the best storytelling in here.

Follow me here on backloggd.com to catch my Steins Gate review when it drops in 2022.

Clannad is one of those stories where the experience overpowers any faults the game may have had. A game that made my stomach hurt from laughing and my eyes sting from crying. A journey I'll never forget.

Art - 6/10
Music - 7/10

Routes:
Misae - 3/10
Tomoyo - 9/10
Yukine - 7/10
Kotomi - 11/10
Kyou - 5/10
Kappei - 7/10
Mei - 7/10
Fuuko - 11/10
Nagisa - 9/10
After Story - 10/10