The current plan is 6 volumes total. All members of the SSS will appear in volume 1, and it will comprise episodes 1 – 9 of the anime. That will be the common route and after that, 3 character routes.

We plan to release volumes 2 and on at half-year intervals. We want to completely finish volume 1 first and use that as a basis, then release volumes 2 and on at fixed intervals as cheaply as we can.

Volume 1 will be the largest. If you install volumes 2 and up on the same PC, certain character dialogues from volume 1 will change.

Volume 1 alone looks like it’ll have more CGs than all of Clannad.

In addition to the common route, volume 1 will tell Iwasawa, Yui, and Matsushita’s stories. Iwasawa and Yui are both popular, so they’re a given. Matsushita’s character has a certain “gimmick”, so we made him the only selectable male character to make volume 1 a little more interesting.

All the male and female SSS members will have routes. We’ll slowly include male characters throughout the first half, or else the latter half will become a sausage fest.

The heroines will not necessarily be intimate with Otonashi.

President Baba rejected having mini-games at first, but somehow we got permission to put them in.

AB! is the most RPG-like work among Key games, so we wanted to make it as an RPG at first. But that would have taken 10 years to complete.

The character designer is Na-Ga, but he will supervise the artwork over a few other CG artists. Na-Ga himself may be in charge of the art for a few characters.

The scenario writers are Maeda Jun, Kai, and Kashida Leo. We’re using a method we’ve never used before. Maeda will touch up the scenarios written by the other two writers. Rather than saying he’s the supervisor, it’s more like a joint work with him at the lead.

The music will be from the anime. The TV anime’s ED, Brave Song, is written from Yuri’s point of view, so the game will have a new ED. If we had more time we would have liked to release a new album by Iwasawa along with the game, but our schedule is jam-packed even into the weekends right now so that’d be tough.

The game will be fully voiced with the same seiyuu from the anime. During the auditions for the anime, we told the seiyuu that it was a “work with a game adaptation in mind.” Otonashi will not be fully voiced. He will only be voiced when the story changes perspective to another character.

Of course, depending on the choices you make in the game, the story will diverge from the anime’s story. For example, the scene where everyone descends down to Guild in episode 2 – you can choose to get Otonashi caught in a trap and drop out, and then when he wakes up the next day the Guild is gone all of a sudden. Of course you can still continue the game after that and reach an ending.

Clannad had several minor scene branches, but AB! will take that even further. We don’t like choices that have no meaning (no effect on the story branching), so every choice will result in some sort of branch or scene variation.

At the beginning of the game, Otonashi’s tastes are plain. But depending on your choices, Otonashi can become a homo who crushes on Hinata or Noda, a yuri-lover, or incredibly idiotic. The other members will have unique reactions to each of Otonashi’s personalities.

They won’t be in the first volume, but we plan to have original characters designed by Na-Ga appear later. They will support Otonashi in his efforts to make the other members graduate from the afterworld.

As a “visual novel by Maeda Jun”, this can be considered his posthumous work.

he killed your waifu

Hercules didn't give him a good fight.

My actual complaint was just Shirou's plot armour and Gilgamesh's stupidity. At least they built up to it well enough.

I'll give you Gilgamesh being dumb about not using his armor but Archer had more plot armor than Shirou in UBW.

>Direct hit from Gate of Babylon after running on like no mana for a long time and having just been stabbed by Shirou
>doesn't die
>yet somehow neither Saber nor Gilgamesh sense that he's still alive when they really should have

But that's what happens in one of the true endings anyway =3c