[Luma]

Well, this is something that comes up when the likes of dating sims or eroge are adapted for anime. It seems like companies are taking the 'route' style more often these days(Could be wrong here, I'm not the most observant person). That is, you have the character going through the stories/endings for each character, then starting back at a previous plot point/fork, and then going with another character. Recent examples would include Yosuga no Sora, and I haven't watched it, but apparently Amagami?

The negative is that much of the anime becomes a bit disjointed, and you can lose that sense of continuity. On the positive side, your favorite girl gets attention, and you get a taste of each flavor so to speak.

Other options include having the anime follow and focus on one particular route(often the main girl), one route, but with little arcs with the other girls, or the dreaded non-committal "Nobody wins!" finale.

So my question is thus; you have random eroge #3 being adapted, how would you prefer this to go down? Would it depend on how many episodes you've got to work with? Can a route have that much impact when it's got about 3 episodes to cover what's probably hours in the original format? With the anime format do you think following one story produces and better and more fluid result? On the other hand, do the inevitable lip service episodes to the other characters drag it down anyways? Are there ways an anime has been adapted/handled that has impressed you in relation to this?

Obviously there's a large degree of subjectivity here and some games are better suited to one or the other than others, but I'm just curious to your general thoughts.

[Sonrange]

well, as long as its not Harem end, im usually fine with any route. Amagami SS had very good idea behind it. Everyone got thier favourite heroine's route to see. That'd be the best VN-adaptation idea for anime, imo. Tlr. No Harem ending, please.

[Parse Error]

I feel that in some ways it's creatively lazy because they can just go directly from the eroge without deciding or imagining anything for themselves. Despite that, it's not a bad thing to see things done differently once in a while, but it will probably become a problem since anything successful ends up getting overused to death and then some.

[getsandom]

As Parse said, good ideas can become bad if overused but is not like only sims/eroge get to be this way, actually the first "route like" anime I saw was Higurashi which is really good if you get the patience to watch 'till get to understand what is going on...

[chaotix37]

Hmmmmm. Like Amagami SS... Well this shows the "what ifs" when he was in love with that certain character. Somehow I have to agree with you. Ok about the nobody wins.... Of course the girls do understand the male's feeling, as I always say the male in the story treat them equally. So everybody's fair. TL;DR, this depends on what the story has to says.

[master_tonberry]

Originally Posted by Sonrange

Tl: Dr. No Harem ending, please.

but what about Seitokai no ichizon? In the harem ending everyones happy!

and personally I'd prefer for a series to pick a single route or mix and match from various routes.

[Spectre456]

I think the best adaptation of a VN was Clannad. They went through all the routes without getting Tomoya too in love with none of the girls and ended it with Nagisa. Afterwards making an alternative ending with Tomoyo and Kyou. It was a very good idea and very well done imo.

edit: I still liked Amagami very much though.

[alcaray]

It is very similar to something we've been doing in Western media for many years now. The film Ground Hog Day is the earliest that I can think of, but I wouldn't be surprised to find more. In these, the story progresses to a certain point and is then reset so that the star(s) can try a different path. I have often thought that the idea for these came from PC games where you can save the current state and then go back to it if you don't like what happens.

Other examples were in SGU where they had 2 episodes that were kind of like this. One where the iterations were part of a recurring dream that happened with knowledge of how it turned out (badly) on the last iteration. The other involved actual time travel.

A few years ago there was an entire live-action TV series based on it - Daybreak.

And don't get me started on Dr. Who.

The flavor is different, as I think that ours come more from gaming in general, while the Japanese shows come more from eroges. But I don't think this could be called anything new.

[DaftMink]

Amamgami SS routes I quite enjoyed do to how the whole show revoloved around 1 heroine at a time through out the plots timeline, you get to know each girl and also a little bit more of the plot every time the route changes also.

But as for Yosuga no Sora I found it quite annoying how they seemed to have random routes through out the plot's timeline, and I got really frustrated with episode previews telling me were going back 2 days and such that I dropped the series.

I guess I think routes work only if they happen close to the beginning of the story, and they don't try to confuse the person watching them.

[TheChaos0]

Pick one route and do it good.

Is my motto.