mDuo13

Finally, after everything I've been through, I managed to finish playing CLANNAD. I installed the game on September 1, so that puts it at exactly 3 months to finishing the game, though realistically, I wasn't playing for most of those. And, the last few paths, I played in marathon sessions, roughly one night each. So it's not unrealistic to say that this game has been consuming my life for quite a while now. Yet, now that I'm finished, I don't feel relieved to be over it or anything. I just have this drained, anachronistic feeling: I feel like I lived my entire life last night, and the "after story" is what happens now.

I've realized I really love this game. To be honest, it made me cry, many times, in a way nothing else I've ever played, or read, or watched, has done. I cried for Kotomi's parents' "thesis", and for Akio's speech to Nagisa at the school festival, and I got teary-eyed over breaking up with Tomoyo. But After Story really took it out of me. There were so many parts, I can't even recall all of them. But suffice to say, I was in a trance for most of it. And this morning, I realized just how special CLANNAD ~AFTER STORY~ is. Because... it's so... complete. Spoiler-full explanation:

It's really the fact that After Story captures so much more of life than your average galge. I see it as the difference between After Story and Kyou's path. The latter is a touching story about a love between two high-schoolers, fraught with intrigue and mis-starts, beset with obstacles and separated, but so determined that they can't help but end up togther. It's nice, and I enjoyed it. But it's so limited. It's restricted to the few months they spend together in high school. We don't see the characters really facing the challenges of the sacrifices they make, the challenges of everyday life still to come. We don't see them grow and react to changes in the world around them, changing in return.

And that's what After Story is all about. After Story takes the typical high-school romance and looks beyond it, to find something even more complex and beautiful. It doesn't just leave us with a "happily ever after" ending when the lovers are united at long last. It takes us through the pains of working for a living, the joys of helping others around you find their happiness. We see Tomoya and Nagisa develop into a true married couple, enduring the hardships of her pregnancy and pushing the extent to which they can support each other. We see them grow stronger, and we see them fall apart. We see Tomoya become overwhelmed and lost, and we see him find not just forgiveness but gratitude for his father... and finally, we see him find redemption, long overdue, as a father himself. After Story isn't just a slice of life, or an episode: it's an entire cycle, from isolation and resentment to the discovery of family love, played out over and over in different perspectives. It tells the story of what should be an utterly ordinary series of events in such a way that they become so much more grand, and the story can't help but become extraordinary. In fact, I think that extraordinary power infects the story itself in order to bring about the so-called True Ending.

So it is that I'm so overwhelmed right now. Though it was just a few hours in reality, I loved a girl named Nagisa, and spent a lifetime with her. So don't say bad things about her, okay?