リトルバスターズ！(Little Busters!) is a franchise (kinda) that started with a Visual Novel by Key that later received an Anime adaptation.
It’s about a group of friends who, through the insistence of their ‘leader’, decide to start playing baseball. Lacking the members needed for a baseball team, they have Naoe Riki-kun look for more members.
Unfortunately, I’m still in the process of playing the VN.

The series is overall great. Nothing really stands out as especially bad, but considering I haven’t played the VN yet, this might change.
What I especially like is the foreshadowing. The foreshadowing is hidden fairly well, which makes rewatching the series somewhat of a treat. Highlights include:
Kyousuke’s many lectures to Riki. Kud after recovering from her faint and, by extension, the brief conversation between Kud and Kyousuke. The Busters actively trying to engage with Riki and Rin might count (I always found it a bit strange and unnatural). Kengo’s reaction to Riki and Rin’s shenanigans during the love sickness bit may also be a form of foreshadowing. ‘Did Kyousuke put you up to this?’.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of much else to say. It might be since this is one of my favorite series, and one of the first anime I watched.

A review of the VN is gonna take a while. The main reason for this is that I accidentally wiped my external hard drive a while ago. This drive also happened to contain my completely legal copy of Little Busters! which erased my saves. So I’ll be re-doing it from the start. Not that I got anywhere before then.

I read this before the actual 4コマ because I thought it was shorter.
To my surprise, I found this a very enjoyable experience. To such a degree, I consider this to be semi-canon.
It has a fairly interesting plot, for a 4コマ. The jokes are fairly funny as well, which should be a given for a 4コマ. The characters feel a bit exaggerated, but that’s also standard for a 4コマ.
Unfortunately, the scanlators fell behind so we’ve only got 2 and a half volumes (the series is at 4 volumes I think).

This is the graphical timeline. Note that it is not precise.
_{I chose most of these names arbitrarily and I don’t know if there’s an official timeline somewhere.}
The Timeline of Little Busters! is a bit hard to understand, so here’s what (I think) happened.
First, there’s the Prime timeline. It starts roughly around the time Riki meets Aya. It ends when the crash happens.
At that point, the timeline gets split. The first timeline to come from this is the Death timeline. In this one, Riki and Rin are the only survivors of the crash… but since they’re weak, they end up in the darkest pits of despair. During this timeline, the souls of the dead students (in particular Kyousuke, Masato and Kengo) cry out and the remaining ones (The other members of the Little Busters and possibly other students from the class) reply. Kyousuke then constructs the world with the other students (I will explain my speculah here in another section); he also goes back in time to the crash. From here…
The Refrain, as I like to call it, occurs. Here the events of the VN and anime begin. The world enters a loop that isn’t exited until the end of Refrain (by which I mean the story arc…). Most of the routes take place during the Refrain. One oddity that occurs would be Saya’s route, which happens sometime during the Refrain but I don’t know exactly when. Saya’s route gets exited eventually and she travels back in time… which changes her future, maybe… more on that later.
Refrain is exited once Rin and Riki are strong enough. Around this time, however, the world gets harder to maintain for Kyousuke and the others… which leads to most of them leaving (more speculah on this later). The world is exited by most of the Little Busters.
As the Refrain has ended, the world transitions into the True timeline. Riki and Rin save everyone from the crash and the Death timeline is undone completely.
The rest of the timeline is simple. Sasami’s route occurs after the Refrain (which is obvious from the fact Riki understands the mechanics of the world; he also has a backbone). Kanata’s is also after the Refrain and doesn’t take place in a world (I believe, possibly more speculah?).
That should be the whole timeline. More speculah to come.

I personally think that something changed in the past after the Busters all exited the Refrain.
This would be most apparent with Saya’s route, where she goes back in time after her route (maybe). She would then somehow end up in the same school as the rest of the Busters.
How the Busters would affect the timeline though… I don’t know. It’s possible that something similar happens, just that the more impossible aspects are removed.
Or maybe not, maybe it was all a dream.
An alternative, and one I’m personally leaning towards, is that they retain their memories to a certain extent.

Reshuffle Note: Another possibility is that they never left the world they created, and they simply made it ‘stronger.’

It doesn’t make much sense to me. So the tradition is there to ensure a successor by having one of their women marry two guys.
…
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have 1 guy have 2 wives? A single man can impregnate two women at basically the same time, but one woman can only get impregnated once before having to wait.

That being the case… I don’t actually mind. Old Clans tend to have weird old traditions and superstitions.

• Official Anime Site
• Official VN Site
• The Wikia - Don’t bother, not particularly good.
• This (along with Angel Beats! and Charlotte) made me think Key is obsessed with baseball. If I go through another one of their franchises and baseball is included, it’ll confirm my suspicions.
  • Alternatively… I didn’t realise how popular baseball was in Japan.
• The site includes two Little Busters related generators, those being the Aphorism Generator and the Team Name generator. These were stolen archived from the Kazamatsuri website, which was shut down.
  • Aphorism Generator, English.
  • 名言ジェネレイター、日本語。
  • Team Name Generator, English.