the staging zone^α

Over ten years after it was first released, hit Japanese visual novel CLANNAD is finally arriving at the English-speaking market.

The 2004 game was developed by the studio Key, whose previous works KANON and AIR reached 2^nd and 1^st in the national sales rankings respectively. Despite the successfulness of those games, CLANNAD managed to surpass both of those, and is still widely considered to be the best visual novel of all time.

CLANNAD was later adapted into an anime TV series by Kyoto Animation, which proved widely popular the world over. However, for many years there was no prospect of an English release, with many fans unfortunately unknowing of the story's origin.

Luckily Sekai Project, a Los Angeles based start-up who have previously released visual novels such as Narcissu and Key's very own planetarian ~the reverie of a little planet~ on Steam, have managed to gain the support of VisualArt's (Key's parent company) to publish the visual novel in English — a feat previously thought impossible. To raise funds for this, they have set up a Kickstarter crowdfunding project. With three days to go, the project's pledge funds have reached three times its original goal of US$140,000.

There is still time to pledge, so if you're a fan of the CLANNAD anime and want to experience it as was originally intended, head over to Kickstarter where you can snag all manner of backer rewards from the game itself to soundtracks, fanbooks and T-shirts!

A synopsis of CLANNAD's story from the Kickstarter page is as follows:

After losing his mother in a car accident and subsequently falling victim to an abusive, alcoholic father, Tomoya Okazaki is an emotionally-distant delinquent student at Hikarizaka Private High School. On his way to school, he meets a strange young girl, Nagisa Furukawa, who is repeating the year due to a severe illness. From their brief encounter, she decides that they are friends and enlists his help in order to revive their school’s drama club. With not much more to do, he cooperates with her, making friends with many of the students and learning about the different problems that they face…

I played Without Within, a freeware visual novel from Australia-based independent developer InvertMouse, earlier today. It's only 20~30 minutes long, but I absolutely loved the sweet story of an unsuccessful calligrapher's dreams to make it big. The illustrations are adorable too. It can be enjoyed in English or Chinese (both traditional and simplified).

The story is essentially linear, although there are a number of binary choices in which one option will result in a short bad ending. The 'correct' choice is fairly obvious in each case, however, so a walkthrough is unnecessary.

There is a Kickstarter project for an "upgraded edition" of the game, as well as a variety of physical rewards.

The publisher hopes to release the visual novel on Steam. It is up for voting on the service's Greenlight programme. But why wait for a Steam release when you can download Without Within today!

I should check out some of InvertMouse's other games…