Arcane Reviews: Angel Beats!

Angel Beats!

Hello ladies, poeples, and animals it is I, the Arcane Reviewer! Now some of you my not know this but I am a huge sucker for a nice romantic anime. Though they are a pain to find sometimes once in a while you'll end up finding an anime with a romantic plot that just melts your heart and makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside! Yeah this weeks anime isn't like that at all. While it tries to be all warm and fuzzy it's a little bit more of lost and unbalanced. So enough beating around the bush it's time for my review of Angel Beats! Let's rock!

Story:

The story follows our main character Yuzuru Otonashi, a young man who finds himself in the middle of a high school and he can't remember who he is, what he's doing there, or even how he got there. He soon figures out that he actually dead. Yup he's dead and the whole high school is a purgatory like space. Why a high school? Well because in Japan nothing exists after high school! But anyway it's in this new high school that he ends up meeting a young girl named Yuri Nakamura. A young girl who's in charge of the SSS Battlefront, a group of teens who have not accepted the fact that they're dead so now they stand up to fight God himself. While joining them he also meets another young woman who's SSS Battlefront's biggest enemy. Her name is Kanade Tachibana, she is an angel so in return she's SSS Battlefront's sworn enemy but a part of Otonashi doesn't see her that way and instead want to know her more. So with all of this set up Angel Beats has a lot of stuff going on for it. Not only does it has a fairly original story but it also has a huge cast of characters. So with all this story to cover and all of these characters to balance out the show has a lot to juggle, unfortunately the anime can't juggle all of this stuff due to a very shot time span. The show's only 13 episodes long and you can just feel how rushed it can be at points, the show will start an episode at an average pace but then it'll rush along and then it has to handle the drama aspect. The episodes that aren't completely drama focused will try to shoehorn the drama and it feels completely out of place. You can't just show me a guy being crushed in a funny fashion then have the main character talk about how her siblings murdered just 7 minutes afterwards. While some episodes did stand out for being either completely funny all the way through or being completely dramatic all the way through there wasn't enough of them which made the anime come off as bipolar and inconsistent.

Animation:

On the technical side of things this show looks good and nothing else really. The animation didn't really do a lot for me but that doesn't mean it was bad it was just really bland. Characters don't really have anything that stands out besides the 4 main characters odd hair colors. While I'll say that the animation in the fight scenes looked pretty damn good nothing else grabbed my attention. So animation is pretty if uninspired.

Music:

Music here is kind of a mixed bag. You have tracks in the song that do stand out as well as the opening to the anime. But aside from those few tracks nothing really was memorable like at all. I am not even kidding when I tell you that I can't remember any of the songs from Angel Beats, it was that bland. So music just okay here but once again uninspired.

Characters:

Now on the the main characters of this shin dig......there also pretty bland as well. Otonashi is pretty much the typical straight man to all of the crazy shit that the rest of the cast does in the show. He also has no real personality to speak of he's just the guy that thinks everybody is crazy and that's pretty much it. Both Kanade and Yuri are just clones from much better characters from much better anime. Yuri is a clone of Haruhi Suzumiya and Kanade is a clone of Rei Ayanami. Though I will give Yuri some credit as she does have more of a personality then the other two main characters but she doesn't seem to have a same amount of charm as Haruhi. But where the main characters fail the side characters succeed! Like I said the cast of Angel Beats is pretty damn big so it's nice to see that a lot of them actually get a good amount of screen time. They make the show freaking hilarious at points and are just so much fun to watch. Also when ever the show decides to give them a episode completely focused on the the show gets really good and it's awesome! In fact two side characters get a love story and I found myself more invested with that then the main love story! So yeah main characters are ass while the said characters kick ass.

Nitpicks:

Well it's pretty clear here that Angel Beats has quite a few things that I didn't like about it. In fact the only saving grace of this show is the side characters and the love story that happens with two of the side characters. This is a good thing and a bad thing because if you make a show with the main characters falling in love with each other a big part of the story and I don't really care about them. That's not very good writing. Also the ending has a huge gaping plot hole that just about breaks the whole story and instead of making me cry like it made everyone else it just made my break down the show for having a stupid ending.

Overall:

Well I guess I should wrap things up here so here we go. Is Angel Beast bad? Yes and no. Angel Beats has a lot of bad writing and uninteresting main characters to pretty much make the show bad but at the same time the rest of the cast just make everything so damn funny that I enjoyed myself all the way through. So I guess I can say that this anime isn't for everyone but I had some fun watching it so I recommend it.

Arcane Reviews gives Angel Beats a 6.5 out of 10.