Little Busters!: Refrain Episode 5 Discussion

MasterMeNL said:
This suddenly turned into Kyousuke the wizard. He used to be Kyousuke the shadowy ninja.
So far this season has been durp durp?

HaXXspetten said:
Vladz0r I've always wanted to ask you; just how hyped are you about the entirety of Refrain, it feels like you're pouring your very soul into it lol :3

HaXXspetten said:
Vladz0r I've always wanted to ask you; just how hyped are you about the entirety of Refrain, it feels like you're pouring your very soul into it lol :3

Vladz0r said:


It's not that I'm pouring my soul into it. It's that the show has a lot of substance, and a lot of people are viewing some of the ideas more subjectively, which is fine, but they're also taking ideas at face value. Almost every scene can be pinpointed to a well-written overlying character motive, so I'm trying to get people who are visiting the forums to open their eyes a little bit, before everything's revealed. Some people don't seem to like to pay attention to mystery shows.

Episodes 4-5 look pretty crap compared to episodes 1-3, so I'm hoping they didn't blow their budget on the first 3 episodes to get people hooked on the anime for Kurugaya. I'd be majorly upset if episodes 6-13 aren't far better than anything in Kurugaya's route. My hopes in JC Staff lie in the next episode, and we'll get to see how they pull off one of my favorite scenes.

The season has been weird as hell, honestly. We returned to lower quality backgrounds, both inside and outside, for episodes 4-5, when a lot of the backgrounds were completely redrawn and redesigned, and character designs were better and more consistent for episodes 1-3. The episode 6 preview doesn't show a significant improvement yet, but I can't really tell. I want to be excited, but I can't if I'm still not sure whether they're conserving budget to make the rest of the show top Kurugaya's route, or if they actually just ran out of budget and directors.

I mean, at least 1000 posts are in the Little Busters forums. I have a lot of anticipation and anxiety for the show, especially once episodes 4-5 aired and didn't click with me as well at eps 1-3. If you asked me at episode 2, I would've told "I think Little Busters can easily reach the top 30 on MAL". If you asked me now, I'dm tell you that I'm worried if it'll make it far into the top 100, honestly.

It's just a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. I do a lot of speculation with the episode directors, things that Key has said, and looking at JC Staff/Warner Bros' business decisions with marketing EX along with Refrain. I also noticed that it seems like half of episodes 4-5 were literally animated 6 months ago, before better artists came in to redraw the backgrounds. It's like they've had most of Rin's route prepared in advance, which leads me to believe they're working on Refrain. An example is the locker designs changing, and the baseball field and changing art style throughout the episodes.

The coloring, the changes to the lockers, and the designs and outlining of the characters seems to change. The comedy in eps 1-3 compared to 4-5 is much more consistently drawn and better animated. Hell, even the alarm clock was redrawn.
I made an approximation of stuff that seemed done from s1 and s2.
Also, when they drew zoomed out pictures for people, it looked awful and badly drawn in s1. They made most of the far out scenes look good in eps 1-3, so I included some scenes to show that.
Just LOOK at the difference between the baseball field pictures. It also looks nicer in the Opening of the anime than it does in eps 4-5, especially the grass. The hair animation and body movement overall was several times better in ep 1-3 than eps 4-5. Just recall the scene with Riki and Kurugaya before she disappeared in episode 3 for an example of probably the best animated scene with Riki talking in the entire series.

Uploading the gallery now, will update in a few mins~

And @planetarian.
If they don't manage to capture me with episodes 6-13 like they did with 1-3, I'm not giving this a 10. It's on my favorites list for convenient access for me to click and get to the forums when I'm on a device where I don't have it bookmarked.
My level of concern for the show on a scale of 1-10 is a 10, but it's all my hype for it.

The gallery isn't completely accurate, but I think there were some scenes in eps 4-5 that were almost as good as the ones from Kurugaya's route. When the lighting changed, the designs, style, and backgrounds changed up a bit and were higher quality. Also some images got lost because imgur sucks.
The parts with Rin are pretty cherrypicked and could go in between both quality standards, I guess.
Higher Quality: http://imgur.com/a/kWASC
Lower Quality: http://imgur.com/a/xI8F7

Seano299 said:


Just want to point out something. In an earlier post, you tried to explain to someone that you didn't care solely about animation and that you care more about story execution over animation. This post completely contradicts that. You're talking as if animation and story exeution are directly connected. Just because the quality was slightly lower in terms of animation these episodes doesn't mean that they were worse. The quality difference wasn't too significant and was nothing compared to that of S1. With S1 I could notice all the odd little drawings and frames and bad shots. With this, even when you show me all of the low quality scenes with your imgur album, I find it hard to notice the issues any way. It's normal for episode quality to differ between different episodes of a show. But to the degree it appears with LB, does it really matter? You don't need spectacular animation to create a spectacular anime. Look at Steins;Gate for example. It's animation is nothing special at all. It's not 'bad' and it's not 'good' yet it's number 3 on the MAL list. Why can't LB Refrain be like that? I just feel this forum needs to stop rambling on about 'animation quality'. It's one factor. Not the decider in any way. It's like almost like the argument that one game is better than another because the graphics are better. It's silly to focus on only that part, and thus far, the execution in LB Refrain has been pretty decent overall.

unmemorable_hero said:
What is going on??!?!?

Aurorae said:
The amount of spoilers in these threads are too high. Excuse the anime-only viewers for only having watched the anime and not played the game - not knowing what's going to happen, oh no! It's especially weird when an anime-only viewer speculates something and gets laughed at by a VN-reader. MAL, never change. I'm avoiding these threads from now on.

xytech said:
How stupid can Riki possibly be? First he stated his honest opinion to Rin, which is that she should stay. She really didn't have any reason to leave, so that's the best answer regardless. Then Riki thinks he "forced" her into staying, because a "child" is too easily influenced. To counter that he says "you should go" instead of something like "you should decide for yourself". Instead of letting his opinion help influence her he basically gives her an order to leave. Bloody hypocrite.