Before you start reading this article, I will tell you that this article does contain spoilers to Clannad After Story. I also reference other KEY Visual Novels and anime, but only touch on minor plot points without spoiling anything.

When I had finished watching Star Wars for the first time as a kid, I was nothing short of being flabbergasted. The lightsaber battles and space sequences were incredible. But the thing that I loved the most about the saga was the continuity. The prequels weren’t great films by any means, but the way Revenge of The Sith and the New Hope were tied together as one saga gave an entirely new perspective.

A continuity that ranges over a time period of several years is not a very common thing in anime and Visual Novels. But Clannad is a story which took the risk and ended up creating one of the most emotionally enriching final arcs in any story ever written. Most regular romantic anime end with the main characters finally going out together or having a kiss. However, Clannad chooses something completely different — it chooses to explore life through its continuity. Jun Maeda, one of the lead writers of KEY VNs often gets inspired by songs and bands while naming his games. The name Clannad is the same as an Irish Band which he mistakenly thought meant ‘Clan’ or ‘Family’. The theme of the game does heavily revolve around the concept of family and friends from the start to finish. We get to see the significance of the nomenclature of the game more and more as we finish more character routes or come across important plot points. Tomoya Okazaki’s life takes almost a dramatic turn as we progress through the story. We see his character grow as a friend, employee, a father, a husband, and a son over the course of the game. When we start the game, he is yet another high-school delinquent who is frustrated with the day to day monotonous life. But as we progress, we see him slowly mature as he helps several people out with their problems and tragedies. When we begin After Story, he is almost an entirely different character and he envisions life in a different way. However, he still had a lot of walls to climb.

Clannad is not KEY’s first work to introduce a family centric theme. We can see similar themes in both AIR and Kanon. AIR’s final route shares a lot of similarities with Clannad’s After Story route. Similarly, the Little Busters come closer to a family than a group of friends. I highly recommend everyone to ‘read’ AIR and Little Busters instead of watching the anime counterparts because the Visual Novel has much better writing and presentation and does not feel rushed or milked.

Clannad’s After Story route has a completely different tone in the writing compared to the rest of the routes. The Clannad After Story anime picks up the route a bit later when Tomoya decides to get an apartment and move in with Nagisa. We have lesser humour, casual moments and comic relief, and see that the story has a complete change of tide just as Tomoya faces the real world. He was just a high school student in Clannad, but he is a mature family man in After Story. The main character routes establish the foundation for Clannad’s main message, but After Story firmly re-establishes it in the end. Let us look at a small clip in the Clannad anime, which gives us information about Tomoyo Sakagami’s past.

This clip tries to tell the viewers that family plays a much more critical role in a person’s life than many other abstract and theoretical things. The joy of spending time with family is priceless. Family can mean anything. It doesn’t necessarily have to be someone who is related to you by blood. As long as someone is dear to you and cares about you and you care about the person as well, you can be a family. Human beings seek companionship and close friends or relatives are meant to help you out during the darkest of times. In this clip, Tomoyo asks Tomoya what keeps a person sane despite the dynamic nature of life. After that, Tomoya starts talking about finding a niche field one is talented in. Kinetic pleasures in Epicurean philosophy mean satisfying a desire. It can be anything, from eating at an expensive restaurant, getting promoted to a senior position at work, or even scratching an itch. Katastematic pleasures mean getting pleasure after realization or looking at the world differently. Happiness already exists around everyone. But we are so busy chasing our dreams and kinetic pleasures that we often fail to visualize the beauty of life. When Tomoya mentions relationships, after talking about talent, he comes closer to the ground in which Tomoyo’s state of mind resides in. Despite the issues Tomoyo’s parents had, they could come together again as a family as Takafumi made them realize that happiness was always in front of them. In the end, Tomoyo compares family with the ever-present Sakura trees in the town of Clannad. This can be compared to the nature of life. Life changes as we grow up. We might get new jobs, interests, lose jobs, lose interests, get in relationships, lose relationships, etc. We keep on moving forward. But happiness always stays in an encapsulated form which is readily available to us. We just do not always realize it. The final hour of the Tomoyo route tells us the same message as well.

Clannad also strongly emphasizes on the notion that life is worth it despite whatever hardships come in the way. When Nagisa dies of childbirth in Clannad After Story, Tomoya is completely shattered and broken down. He loses his ability to perceive both kinetic and katastematic pleasures and he drowns in a pool of addictions. What he does not realize is that there was something he was the only person in the world could do. He evades his responsibilities and lives his life in random spikes. In this phase after Nagisa’s death, Tomoya’s character is very similar to that of Apu in Satyajit Ray’s Apu’s Sansar(an old Indian movie which is a spiritual predecessor to Clannad). Akio Furukawa and Sanae Furukawa are much more mature and they did not lose sight of life despite their daughter’s demise. They took up the responsibility themselves to instill clarity of thought in Tomoya’s mind. After the trip with his daughter, Tomoya had finally metaphorically reached out to Nagisa and had found out that Ushio is someone only he can protect. Ushio was the purpose of his life and meaning been there in front of him for all these years and he failed to see it all along. During this trip, Tomoya also finally understands his dad’s suffering after talking to his grandmother. The title of the ending song of Clannad After Story (The Palm of a Tiny Hand) comes from the old trip his dad took him to.

Tomoya’s trip with his dad

We all have our comedies, tragedies, failures, bad luck spurts, panic attacks, break-ups, etc. But there’s always a meaning of everything. Quoting Jun Maeda, “Even if we forget the faces of our friends, we never forget the bonds that were carved into our souls”. Nagisa was the best thing that happened to Tomoya and it gave a three hundred and sixty degrees turn to Tomoya’s life. Clannad After Story has a happy true ending. If it had a sad true ending, Jun Maeda and KEY would be low-key telling us, “Life’s sad and depressing. Bad things can happen anytime and destroy us. Don’t get attached to anyone. Life does terrible things”. That’s what Mayday Parade’s song ‘Terrible Things’ tell us. But Jun Maeda wanted to tell us something along these lines, “Life’s worth it. There are hardships, but it’s a part of it. There are beauties in life right under your nose which you aren’t looking at. Money, power and growth does not equate to eternal happiness. You need to open your eyes and see how much your friends and family love you. You don’t need to build a company as big as Microsoft or do a PhD in a highly complex field to achieve happiness. A simple coffee date with a friend, or reading a good book can bring in happiness. There’s more to life than how society guides us. Always be happy and try to help people be happy.”

The feels train — literally.

Clannad also gives us a supernatural insight to karma. Most of KEY’s works take place in universes where everything doesn’t work by the simple laws of science, and so does Clannad. So let us lay out the definition of karma according to Wikipedia. “Karma means action, work or deed; it also refers to the spiritual principle of cause and effect where intent and actions of an individual influence the future of that individual”. In Clannad, at the end of each route, the player is awarded with an orb of light if the correct decisions are made throughout the course of the game. If the player manages to get all the orbs of lights, he/she gets to see the true ending of Clannad. An ending in which Nagisa and Ushio are saved and we are moved to a perfect timeline (Similar to the Steins;Gate timeline where nothing ill-fated happened).

A town where earnest wishes are answered

Quoting Jacob Chapman from AnimeNewsNetwork in his article ‘Why Clannad Made you Cry’, “Logically speaking, this could never happen, but Maeda wants us to believe in a world where it should happen. He wants us to believe that good karma can break the laws of time and space”. A more realistic portrayal of karma can be seen in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction where Jules and Vincent end up in completely different paths because Jules plans to quit his job and Vincent doesn’t share the same views as Jules.

Lastly, I want to discuss something which isn’t directly related to the nature of this article, but I always wanted to write about it. Here, I will talk about the music split-up of Clannad. The three main music composers: Jun Maeda, Shinji Orito, and Magome Togoshi had split up the work pretty smartly and efficiently making the end result a musical masterpiece. Jun Maeda primarily handled OSTs related to family and nostalgia. Most of the scores he had composed were variations of three particular pieces: ‘Nagisa’, ‘Toki Wo Kizaku Uta’ and ‘Distant Years’. Shinji Orito on the other had the job of giving the world of Clannad life to enrich the emotions in the character routes and compliment the writing. His OSTs were also the most tragic ones and would stick to your head long after you finish watching Clannad. Some of his best OSTs were ‘Shionari’, ‘Yuki Nohara’ and ‘Town, Flow of Time, People’. Magome Togoshi, on the other hand had composed almost all the major leitmotifs in the series. Leitmotifs are musical scores which can be associated with characters, places or even objects. The leitmotif that you hear the most in the anime and the Visual Novel is Ushio’s theme in the Illusionary World(Fantasy). Some of the other notable leitmotifs are those OSTs of Fuko, Kotomi and Tomoyo. Due to this brilliant split of the themes of the soundtracks, the score of Clannad really works out and is able to make the viewer/reader really immerse into the vast world of Clannad. Clannad wouldn’t be the same without the gorgeous score.

Finally, I would thank the entire team behind Clannad’s VN and the anime for creating this masterpiece. This VN which has impacted my life a lot and I doubt any anime/VN will ever come close. Also, if you enjoy Jun Maeda’s writing and composition style, I highly recommend you to check out the Flaming June songs and KEY’s other Visual Novels. A lot of them are available in English on Steam. Thank you for reading this article till the end.