Whilte Album's story is very good, it's more deep than most harem anime. This story is very realistic for a harem anime (then again, harem itself isn't very likely to happen in real life, but still much more realistic than most others). It's much more deep and portrays how complicated a human can be. The story is played very well, the events that happened can really affect the audience emotionally. Mostly made you grief, rage, or angry, but that's the point of this series. This was not meant to be those happy-go-lucky anime in the first place. Though this is mostly the reason why this series got less than 7 (by the time of writing), most people just hate this series because they do not understand it.
Art is pretty nice, I loved the character designs. Backgrounds are well drawn. And there are times when the art changes to beautifully drawn pastel color animation. Character's thoughts are written in texts on the screen so people can see what is actually going on inside the said person's thoughts.
Sound is also another plus. Nice VA, there are no annoying voice in this series. Songs are also good, most of the songs has lyrics that actually connects with the story itself. I find that these songs are also affecting me emotionally while listening (reading the karaokes' actually). I wasn't really a fan of Nana Mizuki or Hirano Aya but overall I really liked the songs here.
Characters are where many people find this show to be terrible. I disagree, characters are the strong point of this series. Most characters are flawed, either they do things irrationally or some other flaws. Which is what makes many people hate this. Though I say, that makes them more "human". We see characters who do things that we wholly disagree. People bash on the characters. But really, are you sure you won't do the same when presented with the same situations? White Album is a series that really shows how complicated, weak, foolish, and irrational human beings and human relationships can be. Humans are not perfect beings who always manages to do the right thing 99% of the time. When being pressured, burdened, presented with many problems, most human will do foolish things even if they know themselves that it is wrong. And this aspect is really portrayed very well here.
I really enjoyed the series, even if at times I feel angry or mad at some characters, I can't never bring myself to hate them, since I know that I myself might do the same when given the same situation.
I've said that I dropped many harem anime, the main reason is because most of those are filled with stupid, mindless fanservices that really bores me to death. Fortunately, that kind of thing doesn't exist here. There is a few hot kissing scenes, but they are not mindless or played only for comedic effect, they actually contribute to the story and character developments.
Overall, this is really underrated series. An deep, complicated, relatively realistic romance harem story that really brings out the human flaws in characters to the best. Though for some people, this is not their cup of tea, which is why it's rated low.
Flaws are inevitable in human, that's precisely why we have the backspace key on our keyboard.
