The Rocky Road from Dating Sim to Anime

[http://www.otakunovideo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Konachan.com-44597-amagami-300x225.jpg|300x225px|Amagami SS]

bluemist's post about Amagami SS got me thinking about the difficulty of adapting a dating sim to an anime.

Let's take a typical dating sim cast: 5 girls, each with two endings ("good" and "bad"). How do you adapt that into a show?

You can try to tell all the stories at once, waiting until the end to narrow down to one girl. I understand this is how KyoAni approached Air and Kanon.

You can focus on one girl, and let the others fall by the wayside.

You can split the show and focus on a couple of girls. This is what ef -- a tale of memories did, by creating two protagonists, grouping a couple of girls with each, and following their stories that way. In each story, the protagonist ends up with one girl while rejecting another.

Or there's Amagami SS's solution: The 24-episode series is divided equally among the six girls. Every 4 episodes tells the story of one girl, then resets and focuses on another. It's just like a dating sim: play through one storyline, then restart and pick another girl.

It's a brilliant choice. The main difficulty lies in keeping each story interesting even to fans of a particular girl, so fans don't just watch the storyline involving their favorite character. So long as the other characters stick around and factor in to each storyline, it works fine.

More importantly, this allows anime fans to experience something much closer to the visual novel experience.