passage of time · protagonist's daughter as a support character · illness

CLANNAD

Just 200 meters from the school gate, I find myself standing still, sighing as I gaze up at the sky. Read more →

Just 200 meters from the school gate, I find myself standing still, sighing as I gaze up at the sky.

Beyond lies the school gate, and I can't help but wonder who in their right mind would choose to place it in such a location. The slope in front of it stretches out like an unending ordeal.

Another sigh, quieter and shorter than mine, pulls me from my thoughts. I glance over and see a girl standing just as motionless. She's in her third year too, but I don't recognize her. Her short hair catches the breeze, fluttering just above her shoulders.

"Do you like this school?" she suddenly asks, not really to me, more like to herself. "I really, really like it. But nothing can stay the same forever. Everything has to change," she murmurs, her voice trailing off. "Can you still like this place, even then?"

"You just need to find what you love about it, right?" I chime in, catching her off guard. "You haven't really thought about what makes you happy here, have you?"

Back when we were younger, everything seemed simpler—everyone felt that way at some point.

"Come on, let's go," I say.

And together, we begin to climb the long, winding slope.

[Based on [the official site](https://key.visualarts.gr.jp/product/clannad/story/)]

Developer: Key
Publisher: Sekai Project
Length: 70–85 hrs
Rating: 13+

Consensus

8.4

5 ratings

Time to finish

70–85

hours

Platforms

win · ios · and

Curator reviews

5 public reviews

04Tags · ordered by curator score

passage of time protagonist's daughter as a support character illness friendship ending friendship route terminal illness drama club boke heroine human childbirth widow(er) protagonist delinquent protagonist twin sister support character protagonist's girlfriend as a heroine family life comedy+18 more

Reading now

No one is currently logged as reading this. Be the first.

Your reading

03The book

What the text actually does.

Synopsis, structure, content advisories — editorially written, not machine-extracted.

13The Premise

What you’ll actually read.

Just 200 meters from the school gate, I find myself standing still, sighing as I gaze up at the sky.

Beyond lies the school gate, and I can't help but wonder who in their right mind would choose to place it in such a location. The slope in front of it stretches out like an unending ordeal.

"You just need to find what you love about it, right?" I chime in, catching her off guard. "You haven't really thought about what makes you happy here, have you?"

Back when we were younger, everything seemed simpler—everyone felt that way at some point.

"Come on, let's go," I say.

And together, we begin to climb the long, winding slope.

[Based on [the official site](https://key.visualarts.gr.jp/product/clannad/story/)]

14Cultural moment · release cadence

2004
Japanese release
Original edition, shipped by the developer.
2015
English release
English localization · 11 years after original.

16Platforms & editions

Lang	win	ios	and	psp	ps2	ps3	ps4	psv	swi	vnd	xb3	mob
EN	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
ES	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
FR	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
IT	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
JA	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
KO	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
PT-BR	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
RU	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
VI	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
ZH-HANS	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

Per-platform edition detail (physical / download / fan-patch) ships once catalog.editions lands.

17Cast · anti-spoilered · 8 billed

Tomoya Okazaki

protagonist

Third-year delinquent coasting to graduation on spite and a basketball-season injury. Estranged from his father, bored with every adult around him, unexpectedly patient with the strays the school keeps handing him.

Nagisa Furukawa

heroine

Repeating her senior year after a long hospitalisation. Wants to re-start a theatre club she can't quite remember leaving. Calm, halting, genuinely formidable once she decides.

Kyou Fujibayashi

heroine

Class vice-rep, sharper-tongued than her twin, and the student body's self-appointed matchmaker. Smuggles a small dog through school that the administration is not officially aware of.

Ryou Fujibayashi

heroine

Kyou's gentler twin, nurse-in-training, infamously bad at the fortune-telling she nevertheless refuses to stop doing. Keeps hoping it'll come out right.

Kotomi Ichinose

heroine

Library regular, probable school genius (she won't confirm), uneasy in any room louder than a whisper. Plays violin at volumes the school's noise policy was not written for.

Tomoyo Sakagami

heroine

Transfer student who singlehandedly ended the gang problem at two previous schools. Running for student council on a flagship promise about the cherry-tree avenue nobody else takes seriously.

Fuuko Ibuki

heroine

Small, wood-carving, intensely focused on starfish. Lives in the school in a way that takes longer to make sense than anyone expects.

Akio Furukawa

support

Nagisa's baker father. Former player of several sports more seriously than he admits. Uses a bokken to make domestic points. The reason the bakery smells the way it does.

Descriptors stay spoiler-safe — surface traits only. Full character pages ship alongside per-route spoiler gates in Phase 2.

18Content advisory

Sexual content
On-screen adult content flagged at the catalog level.
none
Violence
On-screen violence flagged at the catalog level.
none
Age rating
Rated 13+.
present

19Structural map · 6 routes · spoiler-safe summaries

Common routeBranches into 6 routes

Nagisa Route~18h · 18 decisions

Kyou Route~8h · 8 decisions

Kotomi Route~10h · 9 decisions

Tomoyo Route~10h · 9 decisions

Fuuko Route~9h · 10 decisions

After StoryRequired first

Nagisa End

Kyou End

Kotomi End

Tomoyo End

Fuuko End

After Story · True End

Nagisa Route: The throughline. Every other heroine branch threads back into this one in some way, and After Story requires it closed first. If you read one route in Clannad, this is the one.
Kyou Route: Short, brisk, and sharper-edged than its reputation suggests. Does the most interesting thing a heroine route can do with the word “twin.”
Kotomi Route: The route that locates Clannad squarely in the Key canon — the one most willing to sit with grief as a genre. Slower, gentler, more patient than the school-comedy frame suggests.
Tomoyo Route: The route that takes the high-school frame seriously as high-school — jobs, parents, timetables. Ends with Clannad's most grounded set of decisions.
Fuuko Route: The route that set the tone for what Clannad was willing to do. Read it before After Story — the ground it lays matters.
After StoryUnlocks only after clearing Nagisa Route — this is the second half of the novel, not a side branch: A second novel stitched onto the end of the first. More than a route: Clannad's actual subject. Run the school-life heroines first, then read this as the book the rest has been leading to.

20Memorable · 4 spoiler-safe pulls

“I hate this town. It's full of things that don't change.”

— Tomoya · Prologue · the slope

“I hate this town. It's full of things that don't change.”

— Tomoya · Prologue · the slope

“Even if nothing here is the same as it was, if everyone gathers here again, that's enough.”

— Nagisa · Act 1 · theatre-club speech

“Anpan!”

— Akio · Act 1 · Furukawa Bakery

“Dango, dango, dango — dango, big dango family.”

— Nagisa · Prologue · the walk to school

04What curators say

The discourse around the book.

Long-form reviews, disagreements made visible, what readers keep returning to.

21Featured reviews · newest first

@mei_reviews

4d ago

10/10

Two books in one

Clannad is two books. The first is a school-life ensemble about Tomoya learning to be in a place he thought he'd already rejected. The second is After Story — a book about adulthood, the thing the first half was preparing you for without saying so.

What After Story earns, it earns by refusing shortcuts.

What After Story earns, it earns by refusing shortcuts. Nagisa's route isn't a romance. It is a long argument that the people around you are not obstacles to your life; they are your life. By the final hour the book has collected on every small scene it planted in Act One, and every one lands.

What After Story earns, it earns by refusing shortcuts.

Read in full →

@routes_and_endings

4d ago

9/10

A route gate that earns itself

The After Story lock is the most load-bearing route gate in Key's catalogue. It refuses to let you see the second half of the book until you've finished Nagisa's route — and it's right to, because After Story reads as a continuation, not a reward.

The heroine routes before that are genuine side-stories with their own emotional logic.

The heroine routes before that are genuine side-stories with their own emotional logic. Kotomi's and Fuuko's especially are not training wheels for the main route. Play them for themselves, not as prerequisites.

Read in full →

@vn_archivist

4d ago

8/10

Where Maeda's rhythm stabilises

Shipping note: the Sekai Project 2019 English release is the one to read. The older fan translation (Baka-Tsuki, long retired) is superseded. The release includes After Story on the same disc, which not every Clannad port did — check the platform before you buy if you're on PSP or mobile.

Placement in Key's catalogue: after Kanon and Air, before Little Busters.

Placement in Key's catalogue: after Kanon and Air, before Little Busters. Clannad is where Maeda's rhythm stabilises. Everything after this date inherits its structure.

Read in full →

@blerdy_otome

4d ago

7/10

Past the credits

The heroine set is wider than Key's earlier books and the book is better for it — Tomoyo, Kyou, and Kotomi are not interchangeable. But Clannad is still a book that routes its women's arcs through the male protagonist's growth, and the cost of that is most visible in Kyou's route, where the narrative can't decide if her agency is a feature or an obstacle.

After Story partly redeems the structure.

After Story partly redeems the structure. Nagisa gets to be a person whose life runs past the credits. I wish Tomoyo's route had gotten the same grace.

After Story partly redeems the structure.

After Story partly redeems the structure. Nagisa gets to be a person whose life runs past the credits. I wish Tomoyo's route had gotten the same grace.

Read in full →

@catboy_jp

4d ago

8/10

Akio is the reliable test

The Sekai Project English script is clean and keeps the Kansai-ben cadence of the Furukawa family legible without forcing a US-regional accent onto it. Akio's dialogue is the reliable test: in a bad translation he reads as a cartoon, in a good one he reads as a father trying very hard.

Fuuko's starfish-speech pattern survives the trip.

Fuuko's starfish-speech pattern survives the trip. The dango song is romanised rather than translated, which is the right call — it's a ritual, not a lyric.

Read in full →

22Velocity · completion · heatmaps

Median time to finish

—

populates once finishers log sessions

Completion rate

—

% of readers who reach an ending

Chapter heatmap

—

hot spots where readers slow down

23Rating distribution · 5 raters

24Argued takes · where curators disagree

Argued takes will surface where curators stake opposite readings. Requires at least two contradicting reviews before the pairing shows.

25Lists featuring this VN

This title hasn’t been picked up by any public list yet.

26Reading group

A synced reading group lights up when three or more readers you follow are currently in the book.

27Recent notes

Opted-in reader notes appear here as readers allow their private annotations to be shared.

28Full archive · 0 more reviews

AllCurators onlyFinishedMost helpfulMost recent

Featured reviews above are the full archive so far.

05Adjacent reading

Where to go from here.

Overlap by tags, series position, and curator picks. Sponsored sits behind the sage wall.

29Adjacent shelf · by tag overlap · 5 results

31%

Ever17 -out of infinity-

KID, SDR Project · 2002 · 30–36h

31%

Summer Pockets

Key · 2018 · 48–58h

31%

Ever 17 - The Out of Infinity

KID, MAGES., CYBERFRONT, SDR Project · 2011 · 27–33h

25%

Hoshizora no Memoria -Eternal Heart-

FAVORITE · 2010 · 14–17h

19%

Tomoyo After ~It's a Wonderful Life~

Key · 2005 · 13–15h

30Series chain · Key Visual Arts · 6 entries

Reading order reflects narrative continuity, not release order.

31Curator picks

Three curator picks with personal rationale. The pick list populates as curators publish their recommendations.

32Sponsored · publisher partner

Partner titles you might like

Yumefumi earns a commission when readers purchase from partners. Partners do not influence editorial coverage and live behind an architectural wall from the catalog.

No publisher partnerships are active yet. This block reserves its footprint so the sage wall sits in the right place when partners do light up.