Most of the show's first half is not even dedicated to anything resembling a story that knows where it wants to go. Instead, we spend the majority of our time accompanying our characters on side quests that mean basically nothing and accomplish little in terms of bringing depth to our cast of characters. Unfortunately, this simply leaves the viewer wondering what the point of it all is. Most conflicts are resolved in the space of a single episode. Even a major conflict that our MC struggles with that could easily be explored for a few episodes is somehow resolved in a few minutes. The final episode was exceedingly tragic. A conflict that could have comprised the premise of an entire show condensed into 20 bumbling minutes.
As far as our characters, there is not much to like. For an anime in which the plot is an utter disaster, the characters must pick up the slack in order to retain some level of an enjoyable experience. Unfortunately, Charlotte didn't get the memo, or just threw it in the trash. Bland, flat, uninteresting, indistinguishable, archetype, these are just some words that can sum up practically everyone in Charlotte. Each character fits squarely into one of the many abhorrent, overused tropes used in anime today. There is also a major problem when our two leads (in this case Yuu and Nao) are practically as one-dimensional as our list of supporting characters. It's quite a feat too, considering Yuu actually started out as a pretty interesting character, yet somehow managed to completely lose all of those qualities by the end of the first episode and never recovered.
The story itself is, as mentioned, a mess. Not only does it fumble over itslf for about 7 episodes, when it finally gets going the result is nothing to write home about. If you've read other reviews, you'll probably already know that Charlotte is filled to the brim with plotholes and deus ex machinas, well most of these come in the second half so if you somehow make it that far, be prepared to get even more frustrated.
Maybe the worst part is that Charlotte never succeeded in making me care at all, and when you fail to make the viewer care, you've essentially failed. The show makes several attempts to deliver emotional moments, for example, but they fall short of eliciting any of the emotional response they were aiming for. Not only were there clear problems with how the scenes themselves were delivered (e.g. emotional build up is nonexistent) the show utterly failed at developing any of the characters; a necessary component to successful storytelling.
On paper, Charlotte is interesting. The actual result though is an underwhelming, uninspiring, mess of a story with even worse characters.
