Little Busters! Is Key’s 6th Visual Novel. With Scenarios written by Jun Maeda, Yūto Tonokawa, Chika Shirokiri, and Leo Kashida, it was Key’s longest work (up until Rewrite).
Recently, translation team Fluffy finished their translation of the game after three and a half years of work, and boy was it worth the wait. The final pieces of the game were definitely, without a doubt, the most emotionally heatwrenching of them all.
I’m going to skip talking about Rin’s second route (involving Riki and Rin running away, and some pretty awesome confrontational scenes) and skip straight to Refrain, which is Little Busters’ After Story (see CLANNAD).
In Refrain, Riki has taken the role of Kyousuke in what we eventually find out is a world that has, unknown to Riki and Rin, been created by Kyousuke, Kengo, and Masato (among other misc students) after a grisly and deadly field trip accident. Rin has had her mind broken when she regained memories of the real world (field trip disaster land) and comes out with a childlike mentality. Riki now spends his days taking care of Rin and still going to school. Eventually, he figures that Rin’s issues stem from the breakup of the Little Busters (in this world, they broke up long ago, because of Kyousuke problems). So, he strives to recreate the Little Busters, following in Kyousuke’s footsteps and doing everything he did.
Throughout this journey of rebuilding the team, we are treated to character episodes, which provide us with story and backstory from other character’s points of view. These episodes answer lingering questions and raise one big one: Do you know the secret of this world? The secret is quite a big one, and one that proves to be the reason behind why we’re seeing a repeat of the common route and other things.
Now I can comment on the climax of Refrain, the breaking down of the world.
This scene/these scenes, prove that Jun Maeda knows exactly how to tug on heartstrings. From Masato’s abrupt goodbye (“I had fun being your roommate”) to Kyousuke’s “I love each one of you,” Maeda excels at making us feel emotion. Of course, none of that emotion would have been there had he not written a great friendship between the 5 friends. The common route introduces us to these friends, and Refrain shows us how it would be had the friendship broken, only to be repaired, and then all at once torn apart by the end of the world. It’s this final tearing apart and Kyousuke’s revelation (“Masato and Kengo used their bodies to shield you from the crash”) that start the tearfest.
For me, the tears started flowing when Kyousuke tells us that they (masato, kengo) used their bodies to save Rin and Riki. That right there just tells you how strong their real friendship was and how much they cared. And then the tears just keep coming. Maeda clearly knows what he’s doing at this point, writing at his best, and probably way above it.
However, that is not to say that Refrain is without its fault. For example, Maeda shows his weakness by once again reverting to answering a major question with “It’s KEY magic, I ain’t gotta explain shit,” when Kyousuke tells of how he and the others created the World where nothing happens. And then, once again, when Riki and Rin go back in time and save everyone from the crash. Wait, what? How did they do that? That isn’t ever detailed, we are just supposed to go with it, which, at the time of reading you can do easily, but on reflecting you realize just how silly and stupid that excuse is.
But these faults aren’t that big, because in the bigger scheme of things, they don’t really matter. Little Busters! Isn’t a story about creating new worlds where nothing happens and are made soley to help the main characters grow so they can deal with the tragedy that awaits them in the real world, no. Little Busters!, at its core, is a story of friendship, just as CLANNAD was a story about family. And boy does it do that friendship. One might say, even, that at the end of it all, you feel as if you’ve lost some friends of your own, having been with them through it all. And that is what makes Little Busters! Special, its story of the power of friendship.
Final Score: 9.9/10
It’s been a great journey, and I am sad to see it end. I will forever cherish this wonderfully crafted story in my heart and I thank Jun Maeda and the other writers for doing such a wonderful job. I’d also like to extend a great big thanks to Team Fluffy for doing a wonderful job on the translation. Had they not done this, I probably would have had to resort to reading in Japanese (which is much too time consuming at my level. Blech). We still have Ecstasy to look forward to (Saya, Sasami, Kanata), but I’m not expecting anything to beat Refrain (I read Saya’s route from a friend’s save a while back and enjoyed it, took me quite a while though, and I’m sure I misread more than half of it).
