Air TV - 01

(images added once I got capture working)

Key's games are mostly off-limits these days to people like me who only speak marginal Japanese and aren't willing to fool around with text-only fan-translated scripts. So I can tell you only a few things about them - one, that anyone who follows the dating-sim scene will tell you Key is the king of that hill, and two, that they try really hard.

I mean it. So do they, for that matter. Every frame, every screenshot I've seen positively drips with effort. This new TV adaptation of Air is wonderful visually; the dialogue scenes are meticulously planned, and full of little gestures that you almost never find animators willing to spend effort on.

If only it worked. Instead, I'm entirely disconnected. I'm impressed by the effort, but not by the result. Misuzu is adorable, and she plays very well in any given one of her scenes, but I don't have any grasp of her character, or any insight that I'm not supposed to have. Worse, I don't really believe that she's a person at all, any more than I believe in Yukito's puppet; I'm far too aware of the animator's hand.

But then, this is Key, and I never quite forgave them for releasing "adult" and "all-ages" versions of their games, as if sex was something you could just drop in or snip out of your life with no consequences. Yes, we can argue commercial reasons, but, frankly, if you're going to try to take a genre defined by pandering and raise it above its origins, I reserve the right to call you to task for such an egregious surrender. I don't even think the "player choice" argument holds water here; if you're really trying to simulate the experience of having a relationship (which I'll assume for the sake of argument is a worthy goal) then wouldn't it be much more interesting to offer the player the choice to have sex or not within the game, and then make him live with the decision?

Except that that wasn't really Key's goal in releasing the dual versions. The real goal was to declare to the world that they didn't need sex - that they had made a game that was about something grander.

It seems to me that the best way to make a worthwhile game (or anime) is to just go do it, rather than spend all that effort proclaiming your ability to make a worthwhile game.

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