Clannad After Story: B+
Having watched it, I can see the pattern of what Key is doing with their stories emerging more clearly. Each time they pick a theme and create a number of stories within it, using each of the character paths to explore this theme in various ways. Air explored suffering, Kanon explored memory. Clannad explores family; After Story continues this exploration from 'finding a family' to 'building a family'.
This series is heartwrenching and emotional in a way that's difficult to convey in words: the exploration of the characters as a family results in extremely deep and powerful relationships and watching those relationships grow and change is extremely moving. After Story follows characters considerably further than most romances, we see our characters not only finally get together, but also grow into adults, get married and even have children, accompanied by challenges, hauntings from the past and normal, human tribulations.
Clannad is much more coherent than Air, and has many of the things I liked about Kanon, though I consider Kanon to be better overall, and a far better Visual Novel adaptation than Clannad, due to the ending of the final episodes of After Story. After Story, as a Visual Novel (and like many Visual Novels) has both a "Standard End" and a "True End." After Story's Standard End is actually quite heartbreaking, and so the anime also provides the True End, but since they are separate timelines, they had to find a way to make both somehow happen, and the way they do so (not that I can come up with a better one) makes the emotional consequence of the Standard End (which I personally found to be some of the most moving and deep in the entire series) feel cheapened. This, plus the thinning of the cast as most of the high school gang goes out to live their own lives, leads to After Story's lower rating, despite the fact that I will also say that After Story's high points are higher than the first series', and its emotional payoff is bigger.
Clannad is, in the end: cute, funny, sweet, thought-provoking and extraordinarily emotional. Anyone who can stand a calmly-paced but heavy story that explores a theme of 'family,' in all its varying definitions will probably like Clannad. If you need action, suspense, violence or anything more unbelievable than a few small miracles, the series will put you to sleep.
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