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.