Welp, I just recently finished watching Ef - a tale of memories and Ef - a tale of melodies. If you liked Clannad, or liked similar romantic/drama anime that I recommend you watch these. Each one is 12 episodes long, and each one tells two stories at the same time. By the time you finish both you realize how intertwined all the stories are.
On the emotional level, both are definitely a roller coaster. I personally felt the peaks were almost as high as the peaks in Clannad After Story. On average though, there's a lot more emotion contained in Ef.
The animation style is absolutely superb, as expected from Shaft. If you've watched Bakemonogatari or another Shaft animation you'd probably notice right away. Their animation style fits romantic scenes and dramatic scenes perfectly. One episode in melodies was actually released with a lack of color, and it fit the episode perfectly. (There was also a colored version released and I have no doubt that it works perfectly as well.) The openings/endings are very well done as well, and they change a lot. One opening in melodies is instrumental and has the characters removed, and one has everybody upside down.
I personally picked THORA for subs- they had memories in 1280x720 and melodies in 1920x1080. They used ordered chapters so you have to make sure you set haali media splitter to 'try to open linked files'. I had some problems with one or two of the endings in memories being corrupted when played via the actual episodes and couldn't find a way to fix it- the subs and audio played correctly but the video wasn't there.
Edited, Jul 10th 2010 10:00pm by Deadgye