Visual novel anime adaptations have been in a rough spot lately — so rough that barely any new ones get made. We had Aokana a while back, then only Wagamama High Spec, and that one turned out to be a short-form affair. The long-rumored Island adaptation is still MIA. But eventually we did get a new one: Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart (ノラと皇女と野良猫ハート)

In Search of the Lost Future (尋找失去的未來) is a visual novel developed by Trumple and released in 2010. Its biggest selling point was the gorgeous art, but the scenario and just about everything else had too many fatal flaws, and Trumple eventually stopped operating — shut down, in plain terms. Companies that put out one title and die aren’t rare, and Trumple is hardly the only one. The game later got a Chinese fan translation, and I’m sure plenty of people have played it — most of them drawn in by the art. Then In Search of the Lost Future got announced for an anime adaptation… and I was baffled. Why? The company’s already dead. You’re adapting its work — what for? Hoping a sequel sells well enough to summon the company’s ghost back? Or some other reason?

As source material, The Fruit of Grisaia is a goddamn monster of a work. Brutal backstories, psychological detail out the wazoo, and just enough military flavor without turning into a comedy act — it hit me hard the moment I finished the game. The setting has plenty of loose ends, but it’s still leagues better than most of its peers. The characters are well-drawn, and the protagonist is assertive instead of some soft pushover. So when I heard it was getting an anime, I was happy. More people learning about this thing is not a bad outcome. But The Fruit of Grisaia is, at its core, a visual novel, and VN adaptations run into two problems: reproducing the art, and arranging the story. The first one didn’t worry me once I saw the staff list. Akio Watanabe, the chief animation director, was one of the original artists on The Fruit of Grisaia and worked on the game’s OP animation. He’s drawing his own stuff. How bad can it get? The second is even harder to screw up, because the heroine routes in Grisaia have zero interlocking points and zero conflict — they’re barely related at all. You could just tell them one at a time: finish route one, move to route two, then route three. At most you need an order. Then iQiyi confirmed the anime would be 25 episodes, and I stopped worrying about the story arrangement. “Each heroine’s route is so long, 25 episodes is plenty to do them justice.” I was too naive.

First off, I’m not talking about the game — I already covered that here. This time it’s the anime. Looking at recent years, visual novel adaptations are pretty much drowning in the flood of light novel and manga adaptations when it comes to late-night anime. Not sure if it’s because most eroge studios don’t have much money, or because eroge sell on the 18+ content rather than the story alone, or maybe… making a good VN adaptation is just that hard. You can count the VN adaptations that really succeeded on one hand. Most of them end up wrapping up half-assedly, the audience watches casually, and by next season it’s forgotten. It’s not that studios can’t do it — it’s that VN adaptations are brutally hard on a limited budget. Anyone who’s played a visual novel knows the big difference from light novels and manga: branch routes into parallel worlds. And in one heroine’s route, the others basically don’t exist. Every VN has several heroines, each with her own fans, so which route to take and how to arrange them becomes a nightmare. Some games even have routes that conflict with each other. Just weaving every heroine’s story into something coherent is hard enough; making that blended mess logical on top of it is damn near impossible. Story is only part of a game or anime, sure, but it’s the core — no amount of pretty production saves a garbage script, and that’s exactly the wall VN adaptations hit right now. So to dodge the shipping wars, the writers go all out and stretch the common route in the anime longer, longer, and longer. You don’t find out who the protagonist ends up with until the final episode, even though in the game they’ve already been banging like rabbits. Some just say screw it and pull time-travel shenanigans, writing multiple world lines so the protagonist gets a turn with every heroine. Oh, and right — VN adaptations can’t actually show the deed. Ecchi teasing is the absolute limit. A nukige without the H is like a man without his dick: zero combat power. So season after season, VN adaptations drop dead at the finish line, staring up at all the tea-drinking moe shows ahead of them. So… when we heard Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai was getting an anime, a lot of people were wondering how it was going to die.