On paper it seemed pretty promising, and it got a lot of praise back in its day but to me its execution was greatly flawed. Angel Beats is an anime example of what you would call wasted potential which is the saddest part about this anime. It spends so much time horsing around then gives you less than an entire episode to reveal a character's backstory before they instantly get snapped out of existence, you don't even get time to process what is happening because the pacing is so god awful. After all you only get 13 episodes which isn't nearly enough.
While Yui and Yuris stories live rent free in my head I can't really say the same about the other characters, their stories either weren't impactful or they weren't even given a backstory at all, they just vanished. Kanades was the worst offender of all with making us wait the last 10 minutes in the entire anime to give us her backstory before dropping a bomb on us all. Sometimes it hits you really hard other times its like "Thats it, I should just cry now"?
