Anime only viewer here, but of course i have my fair share of having played VN's myself...
I'm quite shocked that the pacing of this episode was this slow. Atmospheric it may be, this is seriously going to cause issues down the line if they are really going for a 12 episode adaption of yet another VN.
I was getting massive Fortune Arterial vibes from this, which is not good. Not necessarily in the tone or pacing, but how the first episode while being a nice introduction to the story, just felt a tad generic overall.
Sakuno while being somewhat moe just felt like yet another typical brocon girl in this show. If there isn't a route involving her and her brother in the VN I would be shocked. The maid was a fairly generic character as well. And of course our lead... Well so far I get nothing from him. He's even less interesting than the lead of Fortune Arterial so far because all he seems to be is the typical "mr.perfect" lead. No inner troubles, or worries, and really no reason why I should care.
That's fine. I'm not expecting this VN adaption to be particularly deep or thrilling. But then I will expect it to be fun, whether it be the plot or the character interactions. The setup between Sena and the main lead at the end seems to be quite a funny one. She will "NOT" accept him into her school
. But that's definitely a problem. If they are going to tread this ground, that means everything has to be held up by good writing rather than good characterization since the characters themselves as presented thus far are just rather flat.
If this VN adaption had all the time it needed, I would not necessarily worry so much, but I'm super skeptical of one cour VN adaptions in general by default. I really don't expect the writing to be smooth and to hold up under such time constraints.
That's primarily where Fortune Arterial hit a rut. Beyond some quality issues overall that saw a decrease in everything on the production side as things went along, the writing just felt so fast, so forced, and so unmoving that everything just came off as flat and boring. I don't expect this anime to do much better unfortunately.
I'll be keeping this as I am a big fan of Maglobe in general (Though I really do miss the days of Samurai Champloo and Ergo Proxy for them), but I'm suppppppppppppppppppeeeeeeeer skeptical of this adaption succeeding regardless of how good the source material is.