Story: The Anime is adapted from a Light Novel of the same name: "Date A Live". It's takes place in a quite near future (at least it seemed to be future), where events called Spacequakes happen, because of which many people die. To prevent this from happening, everyone gets evacuated whenever they happen. The Anime now revolves around Itsuka Shidou, a normal highschool boy that one day wittnesses a space quake and finds a girl in an armor standing in the middle of it. She immediatly attacks since she thinks he wants to kil her. Fortunately Shidou is safed after explaining to the girl that he was just searching for his little hyperactive sister. He finds himself in a big space ship, where he finds out that the sister he had been searching for, is the tsundere leader , of an organization that needs him to seal the powers of the girl from the Spacequake called "Spirit".
Date A Live definitely gets a bit of credit for the originality of the whole concept (I mean saving the world by dating hot girls...I guess it's the dream of every teenage boy). The execution though is only mediocre. The show is set up as a romantic comedy, with your typical fanservice (4 pantyshots in first minutes) and the typical humor (which I myself don't like but that depends on the person). Later on though, where the big twist starts to happen the series suddenly gets darker, seemingly pulling of a Madoka Magika and just fooling around a few episodes and then turn everything into epic darkness. But it doesn't follow that path and doesn't decide where to go, so they just put in a dark scene and a bit fanservice right after, which doesn't fit at all.
6/10
Characters: The characters are in total quite ok. At first seem to be quite generic, but as you dive a bit deeper, you can see some developement and some attachment to the characters presented.
Itsuka Shidou is the typical main protagonist, that wants to help everyone and doesn't have ANY further motive. He reminded me a bit of Emiya Shirou from the Fate/Stay Night Series, but a little better executed.
Yatogami Tohka, is the spirit from the spacequake Shidou witnesses. She doesn't believe in Shidou at first, but as it goes on she realizes he was serious about the saving the spirit thing.
Itsuka Kotori starts off as the cure little sister character that only seems to be there for the fanservice, but it's not that late until we see her Tsundere side as the leader of a group which wants to save the sprit.
7/10
Art: Date a Live has been animated by AIC Plus, which never had any major work before, the only thing that might be notable being "Asobi ni Iku yo". The Animation is nothing spectacular. The fighting scenes are quite well done, but all the other scenes were rather mediocre. The character design looks quite good and whoever is supposed to look cute looks cute as well.
5/10
Sound: The sound was at some points really good. The Opening was one of the best of the whole season in my opinion and it actually got used in an instrumental way several times within scenes later on. The voiceacting was quite ok but not incredibly good.
Personal enjoyment: To be honest...I got bored quite often! While the first half of the series only focused on humor I didn't like (I just have a weird taste I guess), it really wasn't good for me and I would've given it a 4/10 then. When the show reaches a certain episode though, it kind of gets really interestiing and I found myself even looking forward to next week. If it would have kept this up, it might have scored a lot better!
5/10
In total Date a Live is an anime with an original concept, that was not really well executed. When it just got interesting it went down to being a fanservice Anime again, and that was what annoyed me!
in total: 6/10
