The soundtrack is more or less the same as the original Little Busters! albeit with a few additions. The regular opening “Little Busters!” has been replaced with “Little Busters! -ecstasy ver.-”, my personal favorite version of the song and the English version of the opening is the same as the one used in Ecstasy or Memorial Edition but with English and Romaji subtitles. However, if you have the language set to Japanese when you reach the opening, you get to see a different, and new, version. Not much is changed, and it uses the same song, but the sequence itself is slightly changed from the one used for English, as well as having no subtitles. There’s a handful of new additions to the soundtrack, in the form of character themes for Sasami, Kanata, and Saya, as well as emotional themes and ending themes for each, and some background music for Saya’s dungeon crawler game.
Sasami and Kanata’s ending theme is called “Alicemagic -Rockstar Ver.-”, an alternate version of the ending theme for Komari and Haruka’s route that’s a bit heavier and has a different chord progression. Meanwhile, Saya’s route ends with “Saya’s Song” (not to be confused with Saya no Uta), a slow, emotional tune featuring vocals by Lia. The hilarious and awful H-scene theme from Ecstasy also makes a brief appearance in one scene in Saya’s route. For the most part, the new music fits well into the soundtrack, mainly standing out to me because they were the only tunes I’d never heard before. They add to an already outstanding soundtrack, with some of my favorite tunes being Rin’s theme “Ring Ring Ring!”, Sasami’s theme “The Cat the Glass, and the Round Moon”, Saya’s combat theme “Shadow Buster”, and the batting practice theme “Day Game”, among others. The music in Little Busters! has stuck with me in a way very little other visual novel music has, and it’s refreshing to hear it all again.
One unfortunate thing that English Edition lacks is the ability to skip the necessity of completing Refrain. Earlier Japanese versions had a prompt come up when you first start the game without save data, asking the player if they knew “the secret of the world”, that is if they finished Refrain once before. If the player selected “yes”, the game would start with all the routes unlocked and in their final state, how they would be if the player had gone through everything once before. The biggest drawback about not having the prompt is that returning fans will have to go through everything again before they can get to the new routes. While it was no big deal for me, since I’d been planning to replay it all from the start, the option to fast-track the process in such a long game would have been appreciated. It’s really only something that matters to those who have played the game before, and even then, as I said before, there’s value in replaying the whole game to see things you may have missed the first time.
Little Busters! English Edition is one of the most polished translations I’ve ever seen in an English visual novel. I didn’t notice any glaring errors until I got to the extra routes, and even then they were relatively rare and are seemingly still being fixed in post-release patches. I did run into a recurring issue with sound cutting out completely with certain music transitions, which was usually fixed by saving, going back to the title screen, and loading the save. The issue was significantly more serious and prevalent when the game first launched, but things seem to have been more or less fixed since then. However, at this point, the issue is fairly minor and doesn’t detract from the game in any particularly meaningful way aside from being an occasional inconvenience.
Little Busters! English Edition is just as fantastic now as it ever was, with its fantastic stories, generally endearing and engaging characters, and memorable soundtrack. It’s the fully-realized version of my favorite visual novel, and I truly hope that this is its chance to be seen and played by as many people as possible. It’s a massive game, with my full playthrough taking almost 55 hours, even deliberately burning through it as quickly as I could while still reading everything. At $34.99 USD, it has my wholehearted recommendation, especially if you enjoyed CLANNAD and Tomoyo After when they released on Steam.
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Review copy purchased by author
