How can anime adaptations be made to properly adapt the source material while also adhering to the anime industry TV schedule and fans who don't read VNs?

[NowItsAngeTime]

So many anime adaptations are written off as mediocre/ok at best, and "doesn't exist" at worst. One thing I was thinking of is how can an anime do the following

• Adapt source material plot/well and fully (or at least the main story)
• Keep to the modern JP Anime TV schedule (13-26 episode seasons minus Gundam and very popular shounen shows)
• Appeal to people who don't read VNs or haven't read that VN
• Properly advertise picking up the VN (which is what apparently VN adaptations are made for these days which is why they are short/ incomplete)
• Have proper pacing/animation/etc

So if we take at big 3 usually well regarded anime adaptations: Higurashi, Clannad, and Steins;Gate...

• Higurashi- So Higurashi is both all ages and a kinetic visual novel. Compared to the the VN it emphasized the horror aspects of it more, especially since you get actual visuals of things happening. It had 2 seasons, each with 24-26 episodes.
• Clannad- As anyone who's read the VN knows, Clannad has a butt load of routes. So what does the anime do? For one, in the main series proper they actually do NOT do all the routes. Second, any routes stories that can be good without the romance were kept in the main series while stuff like KRyou and Tomoyo were made as OVAs since it's hard to adapt out the romance in those. Third, they essentially mixed common route stuff and made the route stories acutally be part of all one story instead of just keeping them all as separate universes. After Story is obviously super easy to adapt. Clannad had 2 seasons, each with 24-26 episodes.
• Steins;Gate- Steins;Gate chose to just forget all the sides routes and ONLY follow the true end. By doing that it was able to stay focused on one story and stay within just one season of 24-26 episodes.

So taking that all into account...

Obviously Kinetic visual novels in theory should be super easy to adapt with stuff like Planetarian and the now upcoming Neko Para.

The real question comes to VNs with routes. Would you prefer the Clannad approach of mixing routes together into one story and just writing out the romance for the non-main heroine? Would you prefer the Steins Gate approach or just ignoring the side routes and just only focus on the main story? Or would you prefer the Amagami/Yosuga no Sora approach where they just show the routes in an 'omnibus' format where it just shows the romance of one heroine, finishes her story then next episode start the route of the next heroine?

If you do the Clannad approach, what if it's too hard to put the heroine's stories as one story and write out the romance? If you do the Steins;Gate approach, what if some side characters' routes help lead up to the true ending? If you do the Amagami/Yosuga no Sora approach, how do you pace the series properly to keep viewers interested in a modern Japanese TV environment?

Is there another approach you'd prefer to see? Or do you just prefer for VNs to not be adapted into anime?

[kokoro]

I thought anime studios didn't adapt vns anymore.

[NowItsAngeTime]

1 hour ago, kokoro said:

I thought anime studios didn't adapt vns anymore.

There is a YU-NO remake anime airing

[Dergonu]

I loved the "route based" approach Amagami had. They actually did it well, too. I compared the game's routes to the anime, (the ones I have played so far anyways,) and they really did summarize the girls' stories well despite of the 4 episdoe limit per heroine. I'd like to see more anime take that kind of approach to VN adaptions, as most VNs do have routes, and mixing one ending from all routes generally does not work well, seeing as routes usually have romantic segments. Not everything can work as one big harem story.

[Yuuko]

5 hours ago, Dergonu said:

I loved the "route based" approach Amagami had. They actually did it well, too. I compared the game's routes to the anime, (the ones I have played so far anyways,) and they really did summarize the girls' stories well despite of the 4 episdoe limit per heroine. I'd like to see more anime take that kind of approach to VN adaptions, as most VNs do have routes, and mixing one ending from all routes generally does not work well, seeing as routes usually have romantic segments. Not everything can work as one big harem story.

Only problem with Amagami is that the routes the game has are like 15 mins long really.

[JoshB2084]

*Remembering Rewrite anime flashback* NOOOOOO! 

[Dergonu]

54 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

Only problem with Amagami is that the routes the game has are like 15 mins long really.

I don't know what you're talking about, I spent hours and hours playing minigam— ooooh...

[Dreamysyu]

17 hours ago, NowItsAngeTime said:

Higurashi- So Higurashi is both all ages and a kinetic visual novel. Compared to the the VN it emphasized the horror aspects of it more, especially since you get actual visuals of things happening. It had 2 seasons, each with 24-26 episodes.

And it also failed to properly adapt mystery and character development. They even had to include a completely new arc at the start of the second season just to include all the stuff that they decided to skip in the previous arcs (and it's pretty obvious that this arc feels quite out of place). The anime is still pretty good, but for completely different reasons than the VN. Considering that, it's pretty obvious why Umineko adaptation is so much worse. All the horror stuff doesn't really matter there.

To be honest, I lost all faith in the anime adaptations of the VNs. Narrative based media are generally pretty hard to adapt into a movie-like format, and the need to combine multiple routes into one generally does not help (Clannad was definitely an exception). And there's also the fact that the anime companies recently rarely plan more than 13 episodes unless they are adapting very popular franchises, and VNs don't seem to be very popular in Japan anymore.

Also, I don't really think there's a universal way to make an anime adaptation of a VN good. Each case needs different approach. Some works should probably lay untouched. Like, I'd be very interested to see how a good adaptation of Ever17 would look like. Though, as things are going right now, I don't believe to see any other good VN adaptations in the near future. Except for Heaven's Feel, I guess.