AMINE AND MANGA

In the October 2007 issue of Dengeki G's Magazine, poll results for the fifty best bishōjo games were released; out of 249 titles, Kanon ranked fifth with seventy-one votes. According to a national ranking of how well bishōjo games sold nationally in Japan, the original Kanon release for the PC premiered at number two in the ranking. Three years later in June 2002, the original release ranked in again at forty-five, and then again at forty-six the following two weeks. Kanon has sold over 300,000 units across several platforms, not counting the PSP release.

Kanon's gameplay requires little interaction from the player as most of the duration of the game is spent simply reading the text that appears on the game screen which represents either dialogue between the various characters or the inner thoughts of the protagonist. Every so often, the player will come to a "decision point" where he or she is given the chance to choose from multiple options. The time between these decision points is variable and can occur anywhere from a minute to much longer. Gameplay pauses at these points and depending on which choice the player makes, the plot will progress in a specific direction.There are five main plot lines that the player will have the chance to experience, one for each of the heroines in the story. To view all five plot lines, the player will have to replay the game multiple times and choose different choices during the decision points to progress the plot in an alternate direction. Jun Maeda, who worked on the scenario for Kanon, commented in March 2001 that the Japanese public may have fallen under the impression that Key makes soothing games because of Kanon's influence, but Maeda affirmed that there was not one person who worked on Kanon who thought that.
One of the goals of the original version's gameplay is for the player to enable the viewing of adult scenes depicting Yuichi and one of the five heroines having sexual intercourse. Later, Key released two editions of Kanon without the erotic content. The versions that include the adult content include one explicit sex scene in each of the five main story routes, 50-75% of the way through, excluding one fantasy scene.Outside of these, there are two scenes with nudity which use the same CGs.Yūichi Suzumoto, a scenario writer who worked on later Key titles, commented that the sex scenes in Kanon are very self-contained, and can be easily removed without altering the story. Maeda was asked what he thought if the sex scenes had been written in order to promote human reproduction, but he remarks that it would not work in games like Kanon or Air.