CLANNAD: After Story is the 24 episode + 1 OVA second season to the CLANNAD series, which aired between October 2008 and March 2009.  Ghost Hound is a 22 episode series which aired between October 2007 and April 2008.  He is my Master is a 12 episode series that aired between April and June 2005.

The first parts of CLANNAD: After Story and Ghost Hound are being released October 20th while the He is my Master complete series is being released October 6th.  All three releases, as with past Sentai licenses, will be subtitle-only.

Update

It looks like Ghost Hound might have been revealed earlier this morning on Sentai Filmwork’s presumably soon to be launched (and long overdue) website, but they have since password protected it.

Update 2

I guess I should give some of the credit of this to the fact that RightStuf tweeted this and Scott Frye noticed that they were new.

Update 3

ANN notes that Popotan and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, which are also on the list, were previously licensed by Geneon Entertainment.

Name: CLANNAD; CLANNAD: After Story (Season 2)
Genre: Drama, Comedy, Romance
Episodes: 44 + 3 specials + 1 recap
Aired: October 4, 2007 – March 27, 2008; October 3, 2008 – March 26, 2009
Based On: CLANNAD dating sim by Key/Visual Arts
Director: Tatsuya Ishihara
Produced By: Kyoto Animation
US Distribution By: ADV Films/Sentai Filmworks

Cast

Review

CLANNAD, and it’s second season, CLANNAD: After Story, is about two high school students – Nagisa and Tomoya – who each are having their own problems in life, but are able to lift each other up out of those circumstances together.

Nagisa is a sickly and shy girl who has been held back in her senior year of high school due to missing much of the year with a mysterious illness.  This, on top of her social timidness, has resulted in her not having all that many friends.  Tomoya, meanwhile, has been leading a dismal life, living with his drunkard father and being looked down upon by the rest of the students in the school as the resident deliquient.  However, one day early Tomoya’s senior year (and Nagisa’s repeat of hers), the two run into each other on a hill leading to school, and their extroardinary tale begins.

Along the way, the two hang out with a variety of students at the school, including the student representative twins, the timid Ryou and the tomboy and violent Kyou, the super genius Kotomi, ex-gang fighter Tomoyo, as well as Tomoya’s troublemaker-in-chief friend Sunohara, and the always hospitable Yukine.  The two are also encouraged by Nagisa’s parents, Akio and Sanae, whom Tomoya soon starts living with due to his own domistic situation.

The first season of CLANNAD is mostly spent running through the 5 main girl’s arcs, though only two of the girls, Fuko and Kotomi, have true and distinct story arcs per se, with Tomoyo’s, Kyou’s, and Nagisa’s arcs all essentially running parallel with each other near the end of the series.  The second season begins by running through short story arcs for some of the minor characters, before jumping into the beef of the story, which is Tomoya and Nagisa’s post-high school relationship.

CLANNAD is replete with comedic and dramatic story points which make this series very entertaining to watch (and the overall storytelling helps as well).  The show covers enough ground that, even though it’s 44 episodes long (at least in the series proper), it never really stalls or hangs around any given conflict too long, keeping the series fresh as it progresses.

My only problem with the series is it’s ending, which I personally think invalidates the last 6 episodes of the series, which happen to be perhaps the most powerful episodes of the entire series.  However, your mileage may vary when it comes to whether one likes or dislikes the ultimate ending.  Luckily, there is still more than enough in the rest of the series that the ending didn’t dampen my overall enjoyment of the series too much.

As is usual with Kyoto Animation series, the music and animation quality are amazing.  My only complaint is that the series, as aired on TV, is in 4:3 aspect ratio, while a re-airing in it’s proper 16:9 ratio didn’t occur until 3 or 4 weeks later, though the 16:9 version should be fully available by now (or for purchase from ADV Films for the first season).

Overall, if you’re looking for a good romance-drama with a healthy dose of added comedy as well and want something that doesn’t totally confirm to the norm in the genre, you may like CLANNAD.

Scores

Story: 5/5
Animation: 5/5
Music: 5/5
English Dubs: N/A

Overall: 5/5

First Watched: October 2007 – March 2009
Do I Own: Yes
Do I Recommend: Yes

We jump back a year before the first episode of the first season of CLANNAD – the first day of Nagisa’s first trip through her senior year (making Tomoya a junior). However, her day starts off bad when she learns that one of her best friends, Kimura, is in a different class from her. However, later, Kimura catches Nagisa after class and convinces her to go out on the town along with another friend from Kimura’s new class, where they have some with with Nagisa’s worrywart personality.

Meanwhile, Okazaki and Sunohara have to build a sign welcoming the new students since they were caught trying to escape from class. Much to her chagrin, their class representative Kyou is forced to supervise the pair. We also get some hot and steamy Tomoya/Kyou action too, including Kyou looking at Tomoya, thinking he looks cool and wondering if he has a girlfriend while he’s asleep, but Sunohara shows up to “save” Tomoya.

Back at home, Ryou tells Kyou that a boy well tell her that he loves her at school the next day. While this fortune ends up being true, it ends up being due to Sunohara tricking Kyou by leaving a love letter in her locker asking her to meet in the reference room, and then leaving a series of notes telling her to go to different places. However, Kyou is ultimately able to go from one location to another faster than Sunohara, with Tomoya in tow, can put up new signs and catches them.

Not satisfied, Sunohara creates a ball of sometime with a pan and a note in it, and leaves it above the entrance, leaving a rope with a note on it saying to pull on it. Of course, no one is foolish enough to pull on the rope except, you guessed it, Nagisa. A girl, who has been pay attention to Nagisa in her class, sees this, and this gives her an opportunity to ask Nagisa if she’ll be friends. Meanwhile, the note in the ball – which was written by Tomoya, says to not lose to the obstacles one faces.

This was a pretty fun one-shot episode, and it shows some of the friends that have “moved on” due to Nagisa being held behind. Actually, some of those friends are cute enough that it’d be cool if they had their own story arcs.

Oh yeah, and we have a Kyou and Ryou bath scene. *nose bleeds uncontrollably* I was always a sucker for Kyou, so I’m glad she got a lot of face time here. And speaking of Kyou, this is a sort of “origin” story for Kyou as we see when she and Tomoya first meet and we find out that she was their class rep in junior year, as opposed to Ryou being his class rep in senior year.

But to think! Kyou had a chance to grab up Tomoya before Nagisa even got into the picture! What the heck was she doing all of junior year! That almost requires a new season to explain in itself lol.

P.S., I’m not doing a thing for episode 24 since it’s just a review episode, so it’s kind of pointless to review a review.

This episode starts in the alternate world, where the robot tries to keep the girl moving in the blizzard, but can’t and starts to have thoughts that he should never have led the girl o the trip, mirroring Tomoya’s refound thoughts about how he should have never met Nagisa. The girl then wakes up and tells the robot a dream she had: the two of them lived in another world long ago, and were very close. The robot says they should return, but the girl says she can’t or else all the glowing balls of lights, which are the “feelings of people from the other world” would meet misery.

The girl goes on to tell the robot that he has an alternate self in the other world and that he’ll soon fall sleep in the alternate world and wake up in the other world. However, the girl says that he will get to see her there, but she’ll appear as many shimmering lights which will become a powerful power when gathered together. There is then a huge light and explosion, which blows the robot away and, just before the two disappear from the alternate world, the girl says goodbye, daddy.”

Suddenly Tomoya, who had been moping in a dream-like state “wakes up” and realizes that it was still great to meet Nagisa, and thus “meets her” again in his dream, where Nagisa tells him to never loose himself and never believe that they should never have met.

Then something happens and Tomoya finds himself back at Ushio’s birth, however this time Nagisa lives. When Tomoya looks outside, he sees the town filled with glowing balls of light. We then have a montage of the next 5 years of Nagisa, Tomoya, Ushio, and other people that we know.

Finally, we end with Kouko out walking with her sister Fuko, who is acting childish as usual. Eventually they walk by the hospital, where Fuko senses “someone” and runs off into the woods nearby. There she briefly gets a glimpse of the girl from the alternate world, but then on second look, it ends up being Ushio. Fuko then asks Ushio to play with her and tells her that the fun’s just begun….

OK, am I the only one who thinks that this episode is challenging the last two episodes of Evangelion in it’s abstractness and convolutions?

I somewhat get the “whats,” such as when the robot “returned” to the world, Tomoya “woke up,” though I’m not really sure why nor what all the scenes in the alternate world before this were supposed to do, other than remind us that it was there (and I guess create the relationship between the girl and the robot). Also, I know that the glowing balls were apparently able for Tomoya to “go back” to an Ushio birth where Nagisa survived, but we only saw the glowing balls twice that I can remember, and I’m not sure why this happened now (other than it being caused by Tomoya “waking up”). And what caused the girl and robot to disappear from the world to begin with? The girl dying? I still don’t get that either.

And what was up with the long Fuko scene at the end, which took up the final third of the episode, and seemed to be rather pointless except for having Fuko and having her meet Ushio (suggesting that she saw her in the form of the girl in the alternate world) for…what reason? Hope for Fuko’s future? A Fuko-centric sequel? I have no idea. At first I thought it might lead into the next special episode, but it’s not based on the preview.

In any case, this episode just felt to me like one where a writer or movie director ran out of money and so decided to just “make things happen” to end the story. I realize that such “miracle” endings are nothing new for Key/Visual Arts story, but I at least feel that you could generally follow what was happening with Air and Kanon, though moreso with Kanon. At least Air has the excuse of only being 12 episodes, but even then we had several episodes with Yukito reincarnated to make the final reincarnation at the end not as confusing. The problem here is that everything is explained in maybe 10 minutes and then bang, we’re back to Nagisa living. If they were going to do something like this, I think it should have been better explained so you’re not going “huh? what happened?” at the end.

If this episode was supposed to be emotional due to Nagisa and Tomoya’s reuniting, it didn’t happen to be because I think I was too busy trying to figure out what in the heck was happening.

My other problem with an ending such as this is that it basically buts everything that happened after the Nagisa death episode (episode 16) into an alternate reality that didn’t “really happen” in a sense (unless Tomoya still remembers it, and it’s unclear that he does) because, well, Nagisa didn’t really die in the end. It also creates the paradox of, how could there be a miracle to “save” Nagisa if she doesn’t need saving, and if she doesn’t need saving, then there is no miracle, but if there is no miracle, then how can she be saved?

In any case, I either wish they would have either had a “Nagisa and Ushio are dead, live with it” type ending, or they had spent more than 10 minutes explaining what was happening. And shouldn’t we have seen a lot more glowing balls than we did if they were so important to the miracle at the end?

I guess to round things up, I wondered how they could get everything finished in one episode and in the end, in my judgement, they really didn’t. And even then they still only used half the episode. They just made the ending a muddled, confusing mess which disabled the entire emotional effectiveness of the final third or so of the season. Why cry over Nagisa’s death if she ends up coming back? Why get emotional about Tomoya finally coming to grips with being Ushio’s father if that never happens? And so on. In the end, this episode could have had a worse ending…but I’m not sure by very much.

The doctor arrives as the Furukawa’s house and diagnoses Ushio with the same disease that afflicted Nagisa, but just as with Nagisa, he can’t determine what the cause of the disease is. Meanwhile, in the world with no birth and no death, the girl and robot continue on their journey…

Ushio’s fever lasts for months on end, just as Nagisa’s did, causing her to miss school, and eventually leading Tomoya to quit his job – over Akio and Sanae’s objections – so that he may spend more time with Ushio. However, on this last day, Tomoya and Yoshino swap screwdrivers, pledging to return them once Tomoya returns.

Ushio’s illness drags on and Tomoya starts running out of money. He also starts having visions of a desolate, snow-covered world. Meanwhile, Ushio grows increasingly insistent that she wants to go on a trip, until one day, she begs Tomoya, saying that “it must be now.” Sensing the inevitable, Tomoya finally relents, and starts walking Ushio to the train station, but after just a few steps, Ushio collapses and dies in Tomoya’s arms, causing Tomoya to fall back into his deep depression, thinking it would have been better if he and Nagisa never met. In the meantime, the girl in the other world also collapses into the snow…

As Tomoya remarked at the start of the episode “she was just running around a moment ago” and now Ushio is gone too. I’m starting to believe Tomoya when he says that the town he lives in has it out for him. Ushio’s death wasn’t as powerful as Nagisa’s, just because we knew Nagisa for 40 episodes and we only knew Ushio for about 5 and, having already experienced one death, it wasn’t so much of a “holy crap” moment, and at least I had a feeling that this was going to happen for pretty much the whole episode.

The preview said that the next episode is the final episode of the series proper, so we don’t have a heck of a lot of time to do…whatever is going to happen. I thought we would see more of Kotomi, but that seems increasingly unlikely now, and I’m kind of afraid of a sort of dues ex machina ending now, given the short amount of time. We had the thing with the glowing balls, but we’ve only seen one as far as I can tell. Obviously the girl and the robot in the other world are some sort of analogy, but I’m still not sure exactly what. I think the girl may actually be analogous to Tomoya, but I’m not sure who the robot is supposed to be (Nagisa maybe?). But to what end, I don’t know.

Ushio helped Tomoya come out of his depression the first time, but he doesn’t even have her now. I almost half-expect Tomoya to throw himself off a bridge or become a suicide bomber blowing up the hospital just to be reunited with Nagisa in death, or something. I’m not sure how this series will end in a non-lame way, and I think I’ll feel cheated in some way if it’s just kind of like “ta-da! Everything is suddenly better now, just because!” But, I guess we’ll have to wait for the last episode to know for sure.

I presume we’re going to get at least one more bonus episode like we did with the first season, with perhaps a 24th episode on one of the DVDs.