It’s certainly been a long road to Kud Wafter, the anime. Heck, even Little Busters itself took a lot longer to be adapted than frankly made sense (KyoAni’s transition away from Kadokawa and adapting work they didn’t own surely had something to do with that). This project was first teased in 2017, then announced as a one-episode special, then amped up to a movie after a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. I have issues with that in principle – why is it necessary to use crowdfunding for a franchise that was financially successful at every level, including in anime form? But that’s a topic for another discussion…
The fact is, that funding campaign met and exceeded its goal, and in record time, too. Little Busters is a very popular mythology – I would say justifiably, as it’s probably my favorite Key property along with Kanon – and Kudryavka Anatolyevna Strugatskaya is among its most popular characters. Riki was shipped with pretty much everyone else too, most commonly Rin and Kyousuke, but it was Kudryavka Noumi that always made the most sense as a romantic partner to me. Plus she’s so goddam cute (and she’ll beat the crap out of you).
I’m the first to admit that LitBus generally and Kudryavka specifically don’t align with my usual anime profile by a long stretch. No Key work does, though occasionally it works – LitBus and Kanon 2006 being the two examples. There are a lot of cute girls doing cute things in this series and Kud is the cutest of them, and there are a lot of tropes (some of which Key invented). But Little Busters works for me because it’s actually about something quite deep and it has a sense of innocence that’s very genuine. And Kud works for me because somehow she’s not poser cute, she’s genuinely cute. And it doesn’t hurt that she’s both a genius and unquestionably an oddball.
Now, that said, with Kud Wafter specifically it’s worth remembering that LitBus was also an adult VN, and in fact Kud Wafter was originally one (released in 2010). In the anime that’s limited to stuff like the girls reading sex manuals in the dorm, Kud and Riki smooching, and off-camera movements causing on-camera comforter dishevelment. Still, Riki and Kud are both such cuddly teddy bears that it’s a bit jarring to see them depicted in sexual terms. But they have chemistry and always have, which is why that pairing always seems the natural one to me.
On that score, we have the body-painting scene on the beach, which is unquestionably the crucial sequence in Kud Wafter. We saw a sanitized but effective version of it in Episode 21, which was surprisingly sensual given how “stripped down” it was. The tone is quite different here – both Kud and Riki are topless and the ritual is mutual, and we already know them to be intimate with each other (in Kud’s mind, at least). It’s a high-risk moment but it works for me, because it manages to be erotic while at the same time quite emotionally powerful when you know the context Kud brings to the moment.
Apart from that, Kud Wafter is very much classic Little Busters. Secrets are everything here, but we already know what happened in Refrain so it’s less about that and more about Kud confronting her reality. The original story is much larger than what J.C. Staff depicted here – if adapted fully Kud Wafter would probably have been at least twice this length. But it manages to get the point across pretty effectively, and given that it focuses on for me the two best characters in the mythology it has a pretty good head start.
With the completion of Kud Wafter, we’ve seemingly reached the end of the LitBus odyssey. As far as I know all the major components of the VN have now been adapted, and Little Busters can take its place in the Key anime canon alongside the likes of Kanon and Clannad. I don’t think there’s anything in any Key series that can match the ending of Little Busters Refrain for emotional heft, even if the actual emotional climax occurs a couple of episodes before the conclusion. For me all Key works tread a very thin line in narrative terms, perpetually flirting with emotional manipulation and overfondness for cliche, and are often on the wrong side of it. Little Busters pulls it off, though, and Kud Wafter is a good example of how and why.
