2011-04-25, 05:31 PM
Khoi Wrote:It shouldn't be that bad. I just never got into it because I found a lot of characters to be rather bland.
I agree with you about Angel Beats, actually. I'm going to reaffirm and also revise a bit of what I said when this show first ended.
Angel Beats had the potential to have a really interesting story. It's a pity that a lot of that was bungled up with all sorts of plotholes and plothax magic. I felt that Guild was incredibly ridiculous. How'd they fart up a massive underground factory complex? How'd they manage to protect building it while also having to fend off Tenshi and do their night jobs, and why didn't Tenshi just come in and screw the place over when it seemed so easy in Episode 2? In addition, the treatment of the premise wasn't that good either. They would totally change and turn the direction of where the story would go, leaving me to feel like this whole thing was really rushed to fit 13 episodes and the plot as incoherent. There were also stupid things considering how the scale in episode 1 and 2 were so high with all of the explosions and action, whereas in episode 3, the attitude was toned down towards "Let's play a baseball game against Tenshi!"
And that brings me to another point- tone. Angel Beats was confused about this. It was split between being a parody of Haruhi and Evangelion with scattered melancholy, a typical Key drama, and having a somber tone. It never really found a harmony between the serious and not-so-serious that you could find in a show like Haruhi.
Angel Beats had a lot of the human drama that Key, namely Maeda, loves to dabble in with all of the time. Mostly came in the form of episodic sob stories in the form of finding out how they died. Another point in the drama was about coming to terms with how they died and not being able to do something while they were alive. This wasn't too bad to me, and actually one of the better done parts of this series; but to some other people, the drama might come across as forced.
Too many members of the cast felt really two-dimensional to me and a few felt like they were just meant to be walking gags, like TK. I guess that's kind of what you get for loading so many characters into a 13 episode show. Fortunately, the main cast wasn't that bland, and I actually really liked Kanade. Yui was pretty cool too, which was surprising, considering Yui seemed at first to be a character I'd want to punch in the face.