Ask John: Will KyoAni Keep Making Key Adaptations?

Question:
Kyoto Animation has experienced wild success in adapting Key visual novels. Would you care to speculate whether this trend will continue?

Answer:
On this particular subject, speculate is all that I can do. Kyoto Animation has crafted quite popular anime adaptations of Key’s Kanon, Air, and Clannad visual novel games. But after producing the bishoujo Clannad After Story and K-On!!, KyoAni moved in a slightly different direction to produce the off-kilter slice-of-life gag comedy Nichijou. Apart from its upcoming K-On motion picture, Kyoto Animation hasn’t announced a new work yet.

No new Key game adaptations have been announced recently possibly due to the fact that few games remain viable for adaptation. Little Busters! and Rewrite are both original, conventional visual novel games. Both have been highly popular among Japanese consumers, so both have a relatively high probability of eventually getting anime adaptations. Key’s Planetarian: Chiisana Hoshi no Yume may not lend itself well to anime adaptation because the “game” is actually just an illustrated digital novel. It offers no branching paths or alternate endings, meaning that it may be simply not long enough or substantial enough to serve as the basis for a lengthy anime adaptation. Key’s other two remaining games, Tomoyo After: It’s a Wonderful Life & Kud Wafter are spin-offs from Clannad and Little Busters!, respectively. Now that Clannad has had two television series and a movie, I suspect that if the franchise was going to get another anime spin-off, such a production would have been already announced by now. An adaptation of Kud Wafter is unlikely without an anime adaptation of the Little Busters! game that Kud Wafter is based on.

The recent anime adaptations of Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi and Oretachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai demonstrate that anime TV series based on visual novel games are absolutely still viable. However, whether Kyoto Animation remains interested in producing more galge based anime remains to be seen. Personally, I’d like to see the studio challenge itself further. Productions like Munto and Nichijou that have diverged from the studio’s most characteristic genres and styles haven’t been as commercially successful, but I’d still like to see the studio address its talents to more unique and diverse productions than see KyoAni continue to galvanize a pigeonholed reputation as the bishoujo anime studio.