Hello everyone i'm Matas, this is my first review on here I hope you like it.



~:Story:~
Our main character Otonashi wakes up and finds out he is dead, he is thrust into the SSS and begins operations against the mysterious "Angel" as the SSS unravels the mysteries of the afterlife. Angel Beats presents many interesting themes and has a strange take on it's genre and a strange place for it's purgatory type setting to be in: a high-school. I mean, I know whatever the anime type they can correlate it to a high-school, but this felt like a more interesting type of plot and premise to set inside a high-school. The premise therefor shows lots of potential, and for the first few episodes it shows a good pace and some nice character development. However that comes to a hault not too far in, many of the characters are left undeveloped or only half-developed and the story's pace becomes erratic. The story rushes to try to get it's themes across and obviously get further into the plot but leaves a lot of things unmentioned and opens up many plot-holes. About a dozen more episodes were needed to further develop the story and setting at a reasonable pace, the plot ends up not knowing where it's going and falls apart because of this, and because a couple of the episodes are spent showing them dicking around rather than trying to develop the story when they are already pressured by the amount of episodes left. The interesting premise was put to waste by lack of episodes, don't get me wrong it was fairly well executed but it's still not enough. I can't give this more than an average score.

5/10


~:Characters:~
At the beginning some nice character development is shown but as I said it only lasts in the beginning and many of them are left undeveloped or only half developed. The main character is the only one who is really fleshed out very much at all and he is about as generic as they get, infact the entire cast is. None of the characters seem very memorable to me at all, well besides T.K. I guess because he was bizarre and funny, however they throw all of that interest away by leaving him undeveloped and just keeping him as barely more than a background decoration. I know there are lots anime with an entirely generic cast but there can still be a lot done with a generic cast, for example Madoka Magica uses lots of plot devices to develop them in a bizarre and interesting way. Even just developing them naturally would make the characters average by definition, however Angel Beats doesn't even meet that benchmark due to what I assume is it's time constraint. Also a lot of the character's actions seem to not make sense most of the time, or seem contradictive to the little development they've shown and the characters they've been portrayed as. Yuri is the biggest example of this. I honestly don't see how people cared about these people enough to be emotionally impacted which leads me to believe it's because of the events themselves that caused the emotions and not because they care for the character(s).

3/10


~:Music/Soundtrack/Voices:~
This is where the anime really shines and i'm sure it aided a lot of those emotional scenes. Angel Beats surely has an incredible OST and it is used exceptionally. To me this is the most memorable part of the anime as many of the songs by themselves gave me an emotional impact. The voice-acting is fine if not a little overdone at some points, nothing to complain about though.

10/10


~:Animation & Art:~
The art is fine, I find most of the character designs interesting or appealing. However a lot of the backgrounds or buildings or whatever setting they are at usually seem undetailed and just plain average. The animation is around average as well, it can be amazing sometimes but often in a high-motion scene faces can be distorted or things in the background will be cut out.

6/10


~:Enjoyment and Personal Thoughts:~
The series just felt super average to me until the aid of it's music came along. The music carried most of the weight for emitting the emotion needed for scenes however it didn't make up for it's inconsistent, incoherent, rushed plot and lack of character development. I enjoyed it about as much as the average series because of the neat premise and fantastic music, entertainment wise.

5/10


~:Final Judgement - 5/10.:~