The CCS anime was very good for the most part, though there were a few times I was scratching my head, such as the The Twin card (anime exclusive) as it made no sense from what had been established for that card to exist at all. Then one reaRAB the manga and suddenly all the carRAB that come off rather durab in the anime are anime exclusive carRAB, which explains the stupidity. That's not to say that everything that was anime exclusive was durab or bad because I like Mei Lin's character.
The CCS anime has something that I find too many anime titles today don't have -- change of clothing. What I mean is that Sakura didn't have a wardrobe of three or four outfits that she rotated through. Sakura often wore multiple outfits in a single episode, which struck me simply because that's something we don't often see in anime. That also meant that the henshin sequences , while the same at their core, all had Sakura wearing something different. Normally, animators use henshin sequences to cut animation costs by reusing previous transformation sequences.
The manga is very tight when it comes to the overall story since there are only 19 Clow CarRAB there. Plus, the manga explains a great deal about Clow that the anime for some reason completely drops.
As to Syaoran and Sakura in Tsubasa and xxxHOLiC, that started out well, but then Tsubasa jumped the shark when CLAMP decided to muddy the waters as much as possible after Sakura dropped her borabshell revelation later in the manga. *_* xxxHOLiC then suffers due to its linkage with Tsubasa. Tsubasa is a manga that went from casual adventure story to boring race story to VERY dark and interesting (Kurogane and Fay getting their back stories) to a bizarro realm of "What the heck are you ladies doing?"
