Every person has a unique taste in everything. When it comes to anime, you can choose as you want. The possibilities are almost endless!
Angel Beats has something for almost any taste and genre. It’s filled with action, romance, comedy, drama and more. It has a lot of different characters, the animation is beautiful, the music is brilliant and the story is interesting.
This series has many strong points. It takes the typical «souls that cannot rest because of their former lives» and instead of making a series taking place on earth with psychics and such, it’s a story gathering the souls in a single place and following their fight against the universe.
Anime that try to include a wide spectre of genres often ends up messy and unfinished. That’s not the case with this one. While showing emotional and sad scenes, it mixes in a lot of comedy in between the heartbreak, this without ruining the moment.
The animation in this series is quite detailed and beautiful. The school campus looks good and the scenery is close to flawless. The character designs are wide and different for every character. It doesn’t rely on sex-appeal or moe characters, which is refreshing. The amount of detail put in the weapons and instruments is impressive. If you’re knowledgeable with these kind of things, you can clearly see what model, brand and such the different items are. The violence is dramatic, but not «gory» or noticeably special.
The action scenes does not disappoint as well. It gets your blood pumping, and that’s all it takes for a viewer to want to see more.
The series has it’s own band called «Girls Dead Monster». The amount of detail put into their performances is incredible. If you watch closely, you can see that the guitarist holds the correct chords, the drummer hits the right drums and the bassist plays as if it was a real performance. Now THAT is amazing since anime often just lets the guitarists hand slide up and down the neck of the guitar and so forth.
The musical score includes everything from quick and funny piano pieces to blood rushing and emotional orchestra.
The opening theme «My Soul, Your Beats!» is a beautiful piano song with a quick pace and fitting lyrics.
The ending theme «Brave Song» is a more typical calming song which fits well in after action scenes or emotional moments.
The one flaw I can find about Angel Beats is that it has a too wide cast for a 13 episode series where background stories and motives is what makes the character. You only get to know the story of a few chosen characters, sometimes even new characters that enter along the way of the story. There were many characters I wanted to know more about, but never got to.
The series finishes off with a satisfying final episode.
It may have a few other minor flaws, but all the brilliance of the series makes them irrelevant.
Overall, this anime is one for all tastes, and it will have you crying and laughing at the same time. You will start thinking about your own life in comparison to the pasts of the members of the Battlefront and get caught in deep thought. It is visual and musical brilliance, and I would recommend seeing this if you want a mix of everything. It did turn into one of my favorites the moment I finished it, and the same may happen to you.
Rating from 1 to 10:
Story: 9 (it was too short to cover all its potential)
Animation: 10
Music: 10
Characters: 9 (failed at revealing important info about many interesting characters)
Enjoyment: 10
Overall: A solid 9,5
