Kanon

Click here to view a collection of my micro-posts about Kanon, from my playthrough.

A longer, post-completion summary of thoughts follows below.

Can you go home, after 20 years?

That's nearly three times as long as Yuuichi waited.

KyoAni's 2006 adaptation of Kanon is, probably more than any other anime, my Awakening Work.

Coming after years of shaping myself to Cardcaptor Sakura, and a toes dipped into Tokimeki Memorial ~only love~ and AIR,

Kanon was the work that gave me a cardinal direction for anime, a username, a years-long tendency to uguu~ whenever I bumped into things...

And like Cardcaptor Sakura, for many years I hesitated to go back.

What if I grew up too much?

What if LemonKey Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Girls was now stale and dated?

But after the phenomenal To Heart (PSE) hit home with both the gold standard for childhood friend banter, and the origin point of nakige, I put Kanon on the bingo board for 2025, alongside Tokimeki Memorial and White Album.

And here I am.

And my conclusion after two weeks, 120 saved vocabulary words, and 78 uguus?
(86, if you count Yuuichi's 7 plus Shiori asking 'what is uguu?')

Kanon the visual novel is nice -
but KyoAni's adaptation is absolutely phenomenal.

Of course, the benefit of the VN is that you can wander down some of the less-explored girls' paths (I played Nayuki's, then Shiori's route).

In particular, the extended runtime given to A Thing You Read accentuated Nayuki's charm by 100 times, with her easygoing, sleepy energy giving a warm glow to every school life scene.

As a Shiori and Mai fan originally, I found myself charmed by Nayuki this time around and found myself rooting for her - especially after both in the anime and game often sacrifices all of her own feelings for Yuuichi.

But cross-referencing KyoAni's Kanon as I read, I found that it was exceptionally good at rearranging and polishing both big events and gags from various routes to make sense in a Ayu route context.

Shiori's route feels like the poster child of this - her anime episodes take her game route, which is largely confined to one-on-one romantic eloping, and expand it to be more fitting of her struggle to live just like any other student.

Her birthday party - one of the emotional climaxes of her arc - was invented wholesale by KyoAni, a much more purposeful and meaningful reframing of 'Kaori and Nayuki accidentally meet Yuuichi and Shiori while on a date'!

The way other girls are brought in to support each other feels more reinforcing of Kanon's themes and it's really impressive to see how KyoAni ties everyone together in a way that feels natural.

KyoAni, by virtue of Kyon-ifying Yuuichi thanks to Tomokazu Sugita, also manages to save a lot of Yuuichi's character.

VN Yuuichi has a certain generic-protagonist playful meanness that bounces horribly off Nayuki, especially with his favorite bit of 'pretend to not understand what a girl is saying three times straight'.

The fact that a lot of these jokes in the anime, when not rewritten or ignored entirely, somehow transform from 'Hello, human resources?!' to 'Aww, you're funny' when given some comic expressions and Sugita voice, is nothing short of magic.

Overall, there are plenty of sweet moments in the Kanon VN, but I found KyoAni's adaptation (of which I have multiple scenes burned into my head) to be a fantastic and possibly preferable adaptation, trimming some fluff (not bad fluff! but decidedly the Less Important Stuff) and tying everything together in a gorgeous Now! That's What I Call Kanon bundle.

Still, I'm glad I read Kanon! As much as I always loved Shiori and will reaffirm those feelings today, I now realize - far too fittingly - that I'm 20 years late for Nayuki. And the toughest part? I'm sure she's the kind of girl who would still wait, in her own self-paced way, in her own little, warm slice of the world.

Click here to continue reading a collection of my micro-posts about Kanon, from my playthrough.

Writing by invelica | Built with zola 0.20.0 | Theme by ネe3 based on futu@main