For all the good things about Erased, it has some really dumb stuff in there without a doubt. It’s wants to be a mystery but it doesn’t want to hide it at all, like the teacher’s car and candy thing. And it wants to be a drama, but it has these terrible, cheesy lines in it, like the one at the end of episode 11 about Satoru remembering his past. And it wants to have this whole “future, present, and past” scenarios where certain things take place in different times, but it uses awful direction to do it, like throwing moving film lines on the top and bottom of the screen for flashbacks. And its not like it does mystery, drama, or time-jumping poorly all the time either. It had a decent mystery until episode 9, and you didn't really have enough clues to guess who the killer was yet. The drama is spot-on at the beginning of the show, playing with your empathy for children in those scenes where Kayo was being beaten, and using some really endearing situations with pretty good music to accompany it. It was cute, plain and simple. And the changing aspect-ratio between present-day and the past is a really good choice. All its characters are alright, especially since only a few are really fleshed out at all. The voice acting generally is pretty good, but kind of strange and inconsistent, with different VA's delivering different tones and stuff like that. The animation is pretty subpar, but it does have some really well animated and drawn scenes to contrast a lot of scenes that aren't just poorly animated, but poorly drawn, like a child did the scene. With the amount of money A1 Pictures probably is still making, there is absolutely no excuse for bad animation.
Some of the good in the show mainly has to do with that before-mentioned children scenes. I thought Satoru's dedication to Kayo was pretty dang cool, and it felt childish, but not in a bad way. It felt innocent, even though the show is all about murder and kidnapping. I really did love Satoru and Kayo though, and both had character development which made sense. The rest cannot be said for the rest of the characters. The other's in the cast seem like they were given zero though. Kenya, Hiromi, the Teacher, and the Mom are the only 4 I even know the names of, and I literally finished the show maybe 15 minutes before writing this. The only thing I personally thought were consistently good other than Kayo and Satoru was the music, especially the OP and ED, though the score was good too. The OST wasn't anything special, but it serviced the show well enough. Really the OP and ED are the only consistently above average parts of the show.
I believe that most of the problems with Erased can be boiled down to one fault: the directing. The overly-washed out scene with Satoru being, the stupid CGI butterfly, the random red-eyed characters, the film-scrolling on the black bars in the different aspect ratio, all the scenes involving lines of CGI film, the terrible attempts at symbolism, that awful scene at the end on top of the roof, the fact that every episode seemed to follow the same formula and end predictably (ironically enough) with a cliff hanger. It’s like sometimes they wanted a 10/10 show, and sometime they just wanted mediocre, 5/10 or worse crap. There’s no desire for total consistency, just the want to pump out mediocre garbage. Honestly I have never seen a show that started off so well, and got so bad by the end. I’m just disappointed because while I haven't read the source material, I think a better studio could have made Erased a 8/10 or maybe even better, but instead we got A1 Pictures and total mediocrity, with no visible showing of effort by just about all of the team on this show.
