So I just finished Clannad, and here's my impression of it. It didn't seem as good as many other shoujo stories. Maybe the manga is better, but the anime really didn't impress me much. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but I had quite a few problems with it.
Foremost was the strangely long episode arcs in Season 1 of Clannad. I mean really, do they need to do 6 episodes about Fuko? Most of them were 10 minutes of watching her run around the school passing out stars, or watching her / others carve them without anything new being brought up. A few of the stories could have been told in two or even one episode, and at times it felt like the episodes were dragging on for no reason.
Secondly, I never really got attached to any of the characters like I do in most other shoujo stories. None of the characters seemed that likeable to me. Tomoya was the typical emo pretty-boy brat that so many other stories have. Nagisa was the typical sickly girl that's determined to be strong (like I haven't seen that before). The other characters all have many bad sides to their personalities, but ended up helping for no apparent reason. The exception to this is coming up.
That being said, I really did enjoy how far they brought the series about half way through Season 2. The fact that they actually had Nagisa pregnant in a couple of episodes, showed the child birth, and actually shown an after story of the main character's lives rather surprised me. I haven't seen any stories that have done this (I don't read many manga, they're kinda expensive and very hard to get around my area).
I also liked that they had alternate endings for each of the women in Tomoya's life. Only problem with this is that they were kinda scattered throughout the series and were somewhat distracting to the story.
The biggest pro to me about Clannad, however, was that Ushio was the single cutest character in any anime I've ever seen. I totally want a daughter like her someday.
So anyway, what is everyone's thoughts on Clannad? Did I get the show completely wrong?