Review of Little Busters! EX
Ecstasy is an 8-episode sequel/expansion to Little Busters, taking place before, during and after the events of the original story. For various plot-related reasons however, you should not watch this before you've finished the first series as well as its second season Little Busters Refrain, as Ecstasy's plot goes under the assumption that the viewer is fully aware of the events taking place during Refrain. If you watch them in any other order you will end up getting spoiled. Ecstasy adds three new arcs to the Little Busters story, two of which are focused on the already well familiar Sasasegawa Sasami and Futaki Kanata respectively, butone revolves around an entirely new character named Tokido Saya. Therefore you can easily split up the series into three separate parts and talk briefly about them independently which is what I'm going to do here.
Saya's route: eps 1-4
Half of the anime consists of Saya's route which is the first one off the bat. Saya is a very energetic and self-torturing mayadere character, which is an extraordinarily rare trope to ever stumble upon, but she's extremely entertaining and funny to see in action. The first thing you'll notice about this arc is how vastly different it is compared to all the other arcs of Little Busters. In fact it's much more similar to Angel Beats by having cute girls, guns and action. The story is about a giant underground labyrinth located beneath the school where mysterious shadows lurk, and a rumored treasure supposedly existing somewhere inside it which Riki and Saya together are trying to find. The only problem with this is that in the original visual novel, Saya's route is actually a dungeon crawling RPG containing a map system, traps, puzzles, shooting games and more, and none of this really translates into an anime format very well which makes the atmosphere feel a bit awkward at times.
Overall this route is still very enjoyable and a breath of fresh air compared to what the main series has to offer, but it suffers a bit from adaptation issues and some slight rushing. That being said it's still a very good arc.
Final score: 8/10
Sasami's route: eps 5-6
The ever so loveable Sasami finally gets her own arc here, but sadly it ends up being extremely disappointing for the simple reason that the adaptation is rushed beyond belief. Her route revolves around her being transformed into a cat for some unknown supernatural reason which she and Riki has to figure out and deal with together. This is actually a very emotional story in the visual novel, but here it sadly misses its mark completely because there is no time for the viewer to get emotionally attached to Sasami as a character or the story itself because the arc is already over after a mere two episodes. So unfortunately this arc is kind of butchered.
Final score: 6/10
Kanata's route: eps 7-8
Last but not least we have Kanata's arc... actually that's wrong, this is definitely the "least" of the three stories as it's actually incredibly bland and boring. Again this is only two episodes long, but in this case that is not the issue; rather her arc is really bad in the visual novel as well. It's basically just a rehash of Haruka's route but from her sister's perspective instead, as Kanata's route is also revolving around her family problems. The problem here however is that there's almost nothing happening in this story from start to finish, and it just feels like the whole thing was slapped on there because they could, not because they wanted to.
Final score: 4/10
Overall, if you liked the original Little Busters as well as its second season Little Busters Refrain, then I still encourage you to pick this up. It's only 8 episodes long after all, it's not like it can hurt very much. Just don't put your expectations on it too high, consider this more as a bonus than anything else.
Better still of course would just be to play the visual novel as it is a lot better in the end, but at the time of writing this Ecstasy hasn't been fully translated quite yet so you'll have to wait a while longer for that, if you can't read Japanese that is.