Angel Beats! Anime Review
Angel Beats! is a thirteen episode anime produced by P.A. Works and Aniplex. It ran from November 2009 through May 2010.
The simple premise is that if a kid dies after a crappy youth, they show up at a boarding school as a type of purgetory. Now, there’s teachers, other students, and various other staff on campus, but they’re even described as NPCs in the show, and as a roleplayer myself, I’m amused.
The core group of kids make up The Afterlife Battlefront. These kids are fighting with Yuri as their leader against the student body president, Angel, so they don’t have to move on, as a way to defy ‘god’ for their...quite tragic lives on earth. Now, it has to be pointed out that not all the characters are as fleshed out as they could have been if the series was longer, but what we find out about Yuri...I can totally understand her inability to get over her life, and the desire to want to punish ‘god’ for her life.
There are a few interesting things about this show. I think the first is how utterly awkward it is that these kids refuse to actually shoot the NPCs, but they will flash guns in front of them occasionally, and even when they’re forced to attend classes (generally due to one of their missions), the NPCed staff tend to not do or say much about their general misbehavior. Everything is taken...remarkably well.
I loved the creativity in this series. The Guild may be one of the coolest aspects of this show. Basically anything you understand the mechanics of from your life before, you can make out of dirt. The Guild is basically a weapons manufacturing plant hidden underground behind various traps. there’s also the Angel Player software, which is what Angel uses to make her various “super powers”.
Some parts were a little hokey, sure, but all in all, this series it a tremendous amount of fun. I think visually, the scenes with the all-girl band, Girls Dead Monster, were the coolest. The band is mainly used for distraction while the rest of The Afterlife Battlefront. Operation Tornado...nuff said. Oh, and as a side note, GiDeMo actually has an album (or at least 5 singles from the show) released in Japan.
Overall, I liked it. It was cute, had some touching moments, and kept my interest. I watched it in three days.
Kristi’s Rating:
**** (out of five)