リトルバスターズ！(Little Busters!) is a franchise created by Key that started with a Visual Novel that later received an Anime adaptation.

It’s about a group of childhood friends who are convinced by their leader, Natsume Kyousuke, to form a baseball team. However, seeing as there are only four of them, they realize they don’t have enough people to actually play baseball. So one of them, Naoe Riki-kun, is tasked by Kyousuke with recruiting new members. Preferably female members. This task…goes extremely well. However, in parallel, Natsume Rin starts receiving strange messages that claim the world hides a secret and, if she wants to learn it, she should perform tasks.

While the series is great overall…the story is a bit compressed. I don’t think this is especially noticeable though. In fact, I didn’t realize that it felt this way until my most recent re-watch.^A) So after I learned way more about how stories are constructed. But if you don’t know this, the story is fairly complete, just that a few things do come off as rushed through.

I don’t think anything is really missing though. Everything fits together fairly well and it can still hit emotionally, just that they could have included a little more comedy and a few extra details.

Initially, I thought that it was really nice for re-watching, but I’ve changed my mind slightly. Once you know what’s up, the first season can feel a little tiring to get through…though that might just be me, since I personally find Mio’s route a little perplexing, Kud’s route to feel utterly disconnected from the rest of the story and Haruka’s to be overly dramatic. Coincidentally, those are all in the first season, while Refrain has Kurugaya’s, which I’ve gotten a newfound appreciation for, as well as Refrain. We’ll get to that though.

Basically, the entire first season feels like setup for Refrain.

That said, re-watching can be interesting since there is a lot of really good foreshadowing that goes unnoticed at first. Here are a few:

• Lennon’s messages are the most obvious hint that something is up.
• Kyousuke’s many lectures to Riki count, as they often come off as kinda oddly well-timed.
• After Kud recovers from her faint, she starts acting a little strangely, leading to a brief conversation with Kyousuke. Presumably, she remembered something that she wasn’t supposed to.
• The fact all of the future members of the Little Busters seemed to go out of their way to interact with Riki and Rin, or join up without much of a fuss. Even Mio agrees to become their manager, despite her general aversion to sports.
• Kengo’s reaction to Riki and Rin’s shenanigans during the love sickness task might also be a form of foreshadowing, with him asking Did Kyousuke put you up to this?.

Before doing Refrain, we should talk about this fan-service oddity. When I first watched it (back in 2021, apparently) I thought it was extremely weird and kinda bad, so I preferred to forget about it. Back then though, I hadn’t played much^B) of the Visual Novel…

…now that I have played it a bit more, multiple times in fact, and now that I’m a little more familiar with the game mechanics…plus the compressed story. I’ve concluded that this is, in fact, a masterpiece.

This may require elaboration. Saitou is probably the most comedic episode of the Little Busters anime, and the comedy here is excellent. It’s absurd in a very particular way: casual absurdity…which means that many of the ridiculous aspects of their world are treated as if they were completely normal. The battling, the trading and more.

This episode has two main running gags: the battling and Kurugaya’s consultations.

The battles are a pretty straight adaptation of the battles from the VN, except that we never see the battle play out^C) and instead see the beginning and ending.

Kurugaya’s consultations are different, where a girl will ask Kurugaya for some advice and Kurugya suggests completely absurd and nonsensical things…which the girls then follow without thinking about it. All of this seems to affect Komari in some way (which is hilarious). Each of these segments also ends with Rin repeating whatever just happened and usually to Komari.

Though the gag that really killed me is when Riki, Masato and Kud start to briefly discuss trading (also a thing in the VN), because of how dumb it is…yet nobody questions it. At least in the battles Riki is apologetic, but here he’s just like そうね⋯.

I actually started thinking that if the rest of Little Busters were like this, the anime would have been much better overall. Though I can’t be sure, of course.

Speaking of Saya: I noticed a lot of similarities between her route and Angel Beats!. So many similarities, that it kinda feels like an Angel Beats! pilot or demo.

Those similarities include:

• Gun.
• The Darkness Executives are very similar to the strange shadows we see in Angel Beats!
• The dark cavernous environments are similar to the guild.
• You could argue that the deaths and reset mechanics are Angel Beats-like.
• Saya herself is very similar to Yurippe, character and design-wise. They even share the same voice actress.

I’m now fully convinced that Saya’s route did end up inspiring Angel Beats!^D)

But putting that aside, Saya’s route is the most complete-feeling one out of those present in EX. Unlike most of the Refrain routes, this one doesn’t feel compressed…well, as compressed I should say…so there’s plenty of time for things to develop naturally.^E) I think that it may have benefited from an extra episode, but it’s honestly fine like this.

To my surprise, I found reading it to be a very enjoyable experience. And I even considered it to be semi-canon…back before I rethought my whole stance on canon anyway.

Despite being a series of gag comics, there is actually an overarching linear plot…which I found quite surprising. Though this is also why I enjoyed reading it more than other 4コマ.

Following this, Riki ends up in a traffic accident during which his parents die. He then presumably forgets about Aya. This is presumably due to the shock of the accident…and also because she was already dead by this point.^H)

It’s here that Riki is invited to join the Little Busters by Kyousuke. Though exactly how Kyousuke knew who Riki was is…never explained, at least not in the anime.

The Little Busters presumably had a fairly uneventful time until the bus trip. It’s possible that Kyousuke, Riki, Masato, Kengo and Rin all got to know (and interacted with) Komari, Kurugaya, Haruka, Kud, and Mio. But it’s unlikely that they were great friends before it.^I) And they definitely never played baseball. Also, Kyousuke is in the baggage area, hiding.

Then the bus crash happens. Exactly what happens here is frustratingly ambiguous, but I’m going to assume a timeline where time changes afterwards. Masato and Kengo manage to save Riki and Rin, but everyone else ends up dying in the crash. Riki and Rin, being pretty spiritually weak, end up falling to despair sometime afterwards.

It’s here that the restless soul of Kyousuke cries out, filled with regret. The other dead students answer. He then turns the clock back (somehow…) and creates an artificial world.^J;K) He then comes up with a plan to help Riki and Rin avoid falling to despair, by strengthening their spirits…via the artificial world.

First of all: Saya’s route. Aya’s soul was wandering around, filled with regrets. It then ended up inside of Kyousuke’s artificial world. Her soul merged her own concept of self with the main character of her favorite manga, who was named Tokido Saya. This also happened to be Kyousuke’s favorite manga, which is why he initially didn’t think much of Saya…he just kinda assumed he did something by accident. Eventually, he does realize that she’s a real person, and starts trying to make her leave. Shenanigans ensue and she agrees to leave.

Now, based on the ending of EX and the way her route ends, I assume that Aya (upon returning to the past) ended up surviving her original death. How? Who knows. The actual mechanics of how this all works are pretty ambiguous. But Aya was probably the first to alter the past. She was friends with Riki, entered the same highschool as him…and joined the Little Busters at some point. Happy ending!

The main problem in Little Busters! is that the mechanics of the world-building are not adequately explained. This means that you can interpret them in a number of different ways…which also means that how the timeline looks is pretty ambiguous.

The ambiguities in particular are:

• When was the artificial world created?
• What are the conditions behind its creation?
• How does time in the artificial world pass in relation to the real world?
• Did past events change?

The anime (and possibly the VN, but I can’t be sure) provides information that makes it very difficult to answer these questions, which results in the timeline being quite ambiguous.

When I started thinking about this recently, I was wondering if this ambiguity is a flaw or not and…now I’m leaning towards it probably being one. Being ambiguous about some things or not explicitly explaining things is fine. The problem is that Little Busters! isn’t that shy about sharing information that implies what those mechanics are…it’s just that that information is a bit contradictory, which means it’s difficult (or possibly impossible) to produce any internally-consistent mechanics.

However, online, there are a few other theories…which I read ages ago on TVTropes back when I still bothered. One of those is that they didn’t exit the world and, instead, simply strengthened it so it could continue. There’s only one thing in the whole franchise that might support that theory, which is that there’s a tiny implication that Riki, Rin and Kyousuke died in the explosion that occurred just after they started carrying him away. Kyousuke then experiencing an extended period of recovery, but then ending up fine, could also suggest this.

But with how the series is written (especially when we consider Sasanami’s and Futaki’s routes), the implication is that they didn’t die in the crash. It was just a brief bait-and-switch.

Oh right, I wanted to note one more thing: Saya.

I think there is enough evidence in the series to imply that Saya ended up surviving her death when she was younger. First is that despite the bad ending inside the artificial world, her route ends on an overall positive note (at least in the anime). Second is that she consistently appears in the background in cameos. Most of this is in the artificial world, though, there’s one that most definitely is in the real world (at the end of Futaki’s route in the anime), where she’s standing alongside the other Little Busters.