Hmmm, that is a rather interesting announcement, sounds like some early ass-covering for something that they intend to do (or not do) in the future.
Most people seem to be taking this as a confirmation of a second season set aside for Refrain (basically the Afterstory of LB), or as a confirmation of additional work to cover Saya, Kanata and Sasami routes (which are only in the EX! adult version of the game), but based on the wording this seems more like they intend to only animate some of the character routes for the TV run.
At this point, the only routes that they've laid out the groundwork for are Rin2 and Komari. Assuming they do the full common route, those routes and then Refrain I could easily see this being enough to take up all 26 episodes they have allotted for the series, which means they may be planning to pick up the Kud, Kuragaya, Haruka and Mio routes separately (Possibly as 'another world' type OVAs like they did with Clannad).
Not sure how I feel about that. Every route has something to offer in the grand scheme of things which all pool together at the end, so its kind of worrying what effect missing routes will have on the delivery of 'the point' in Refrain. That said, if this is the case then assuming that they give them the run-time the deserve (as in, not try to squash a whole route into 24 minutes like Clannad did), they can make the routes better than they could if they tried to put them all in together, because some of the routes really do require the girl and Riki to be more than 'friends' to be believable.
01-Nov-2012 09:37:32
