Why is it important to get a translated visual novel release of works that have already been adapted into anime? The answer is, not all of the visual novel was adapted into an anime. This is true even of Clannad, despite it receiving 48 episodes that seemingly cover all possible events. How much more so is this a problem when a visual novel adaption gets only 12 episodes? Anyone can see how rushed Grisaia felt. Little Busters was also simply far too short to cover everything in the Busters-verse, even with 50 episodes to work with. Majikoi's anime version lasted only 12 episodes. Even though the story felt tight and well told, it's obvious that a lot had to be left on the cutting board. Only playing the visual novel can discover what was left out. I myself have no idea what they left out, only that they must have left out something, to try and squeeze an entire visual novel into one cour of anime.
Fate/Stay Night is getting two separate tv series plus a movie in order to cover its various routes. This is what it takes to actually animate a visual novel. Unless it's some sort of short story visual novel, 48 episodes is pretty much the minimum necessary to cover everything. In order to cover the Tears to Tiara II visual novel, you would actually need 200+ episodes. So you see, visual novels are quite imposing projects. Twelve episodes trying to tell the tale of Tears to Tiara II? Hah.
An anime adaption of a visual novel generally is for the sake of alerting people to the presence of a good visual novel. It's extremely rare for the anime to simply replace the visual novel as a finished work. With Majikoi's translation, the highest ranking visual novel based anime have almost all gotten their core visual novel translated into English as well now. The missing remainder are:
68. Shukufuku no Campanella
86. To Heart
87. Akaneiro ni Somaru Saka
95. Amagami SS
137. Myself;Yourself
153. Happiness!
I feel like Amagami SS was covered satisfactorily by the anime, though, so we can just ignore that one. As you can see, anime is very good at alerting fans to which visual novels they need to be translating, with only five holes in the tapestry, and those mainly of the lower-ranking series. If at least Shukufuku no Campanella would get translated, the rest of these missing games would be relatively minor losses. . .
The spring anime season is only a couple weeks away. Durara and Idolmaster do not continue into the spring like I thought, though. Instead, they both skip the spring season and restart during the summer season. This means a lot of my anticipation for the spring season has been nixed and transferred over to the coming summer season too. Idolmaster and Durara are currently my 2nd and 3rd favorite series airing right now. Losing them is a hammer blow. Spring will no doubt have its own excellent series, but more and more I'm looking forward to the coming summer season instead.
This summer, we get Idolmaster and Durara back. In addition, we get Working Season 3 and Fate/Kaleid Liner Prism Ilya 2wei Herz. That's more content for my 9th, 22nd, 34th and 98th favorite series. I also suspect Naruto will be back from filler by then, my 2nd favorite series. There will also be One Piece, my favorite series, Precure, my 4th favorite, Fairy Tail, my 3rd favorite, Kyoukai no Rinne will still be airing, which is sure to be introduced to my rankings once the anime starts, and Dragon Ball Kai will still be airing, my 15th favorite. That's ten good shows already accounted for, 8 in my top 35.
It's never too soon to start looking forward to summer. Someday, it'll stop being cold.
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