I'm sure you've heard this analogy before, so you figure I must be talking about how the core of the anime, the story concept/idea, couldn't support everything the show did right. That is not the point I'm trying to make here. In all actuality, the idea behind this show is quite interesting. The problem was that the creators made a very solid base, and added it in last, on top of everything else, and crushed the whole damn thing.
The story revolves around the idea that when a human dies, their memories are stored in stone tablets called "books". So far so good. And there is a group of "librarians" that are actually talented individuals tasked with guarding the library. Alright. An early problem is that throughout the story, various plot lines are dropped and forgotten about, most of the time without resolution. So we have a tale that stops being told once it finally gets started, yet the anime manages to hold itself together by strongly using "Chekhov's Gun" to bring seemingly unimportant things into the story as things that really do matter. Unfortunately, once all of these intricacies come together, the creators seem to not know where they were going, so they make one of the most ridiculously, bullshit, out of nowhere endings in anime history. The ending phase I speak of is only four episodes long, but it completely crushes everything that came before it into meaningless drivel.
The characters themselves range from awesome to stereotypes to completely uninspired. Hamyuts is a blast to see on the screen most of the time, and Noloty is a character you come to root for even if she is a bit generic. The anime has a hard time choosing which characters to develop though. Characters we see almost every episode never get any backstory/development, while characters we see for 3-4 episodes get at least two of the episodes they appear in focused entirely on them.
The art quality and animation are definitely the highest point of the anime at all times. Fluid, colorful, and robust. There's better out there, but at least you have something to look at when the story starts diving into a very deep pit.
TL;DR: Before the final four episodes, I was going to give this a 7. Once I finished it I gave it a 5, then came back a week after finishing it and decided a 6 was fair. Despite the ending ruining the story (not because it was bad, or because it didn't end the way I wanted it to, but because it was utter nonsense) there is some entertainment to be had in the first 23-24 episodes of this. Plenty of action, and the occasional plot twist, though plot points are dropped and character development is spotty throughout.
