I never liked reading, ever since school I was overwhelmed by amount of text in whatever books the education tried to throw at me, I never had fun reading those either. Soon after, I found out about visual novels, "Everlasting Summer" was my first. The idea of giving a reader small portions of text to read, came into liking of mine, you'll never see how much you've left to read. The story was astonishing, characters were great, you'll probably never experience the same emotions watching movies or series. I was convinced that there's no good novels left, ones that make you question life and leave you pondering for quite a while after reading the entire thing. Turns out I was completely wrong.

CLANNAD is not what it looks like, the game's description fools you by giving a first impression of a typical dating simulator, where the main character falls in love with girls in the most stupid ways possible. The game tells you so much more about every character you encounter, there are no "throw in 'n' throw away" characters to begin with. CLANNAD not only tries but succeeds in opening up each character's story, which not only answers all your questions, but also manages to make you cry. The storytelling is so good it's a shame to describe the story with your own words to people who never read the novel, they can only experience the same emotions after playing the game themselves. Each time you play another route you will end up meeting other characters too, they pass you by to "advertise their routes", and each time you look at them doing something weird, you think to yourself: "I'll do this girl's route next". After you do it, you realise so much things you didn't know, the game tells you valid reasons why they're doing these weird things and you end up crying in the end. If something is there, it's there for a reason, there's no unimportant things you can just forget about. You see how the main character change throughout the story, he starts to think about people around him and each time you can see him think differently. The game just goes on even after you complete the "School Arc", the "After Story" has so much content to offer, it made me flabbergasted since game devs like to sell such things separately as DLCs, but it felt like a great expansion to the game for free. CLANNAD is not only the story about love but family, friendship and reaching hapiness in life. The novel even talks about teenage years and adulthood, how they compare to each other and how these two parts of our lives affect us. I never knew how such a story can make you cry that easily, these days we try to hold our tears in and after playing the game, you just won't be able to.

There's not much flaws to talk about, honestly. However, I still want to mention them. First of all, male routes are weaker than every other route. There's two mandatory male routes you have to experience: one in the School Arc and the second one in After Story. The School Arc route feels out of place, perhaps it's the only character "exclusive" to it's route, you'll never meet him again after the route. The After Story route just feels short and rushed, it's still not bad but they really had to take their time with it. Second of all, relationship between the main character and his father is unclear to me. Protagonist often talks about how abusive his father is, but we never see his dad act like this, really. It's nearly impossible to play this game without a guide, the choices you have to make are not straightforward and you're guaranteed to lose some important things from the story, just because you chose a wrong option from your previous route.

So, what about the anime adaptation? If you already watched the anime, I wouldn't really recommend this game to you. You already know most routes this game has to offer and you'll be extremely bored playing the game, if only you're ready to go through some parts of the story again, picking up on what was missing from the anime, then you may jump into the novel regardless. Both anime and VN have exclusive content, anime adaptation is still lacking so much things from the novel, though. If you haven't watched the anime, play the game first and then watch the anime if you feel like it, just to compare the two. In the end, the anime is a brief retelling of the original and it ruins the whole experience of CLANNAD.

To conclude, CLANNAD is a great story. To those who never played visual novels it's a great title to begin your journey in this genre. A whopping 100 hours of reading will not get you bored, it's absolutely worth the money and time. If you ever hesitated about getting this game, I hope my review helped making your decision.