Nopy's Blog

I was planning on writing this post after I had finished watching all of the anime that I had started for the season, but due to me having a lack of time (and interest), I figure if I haven’t finished watching it by now, then it’s going to stay unwatched. That means that for this seasons wrap-up, I’ll only be covering the 3 series that I actually finished: Angel Beats, Arakawa Under the Bridge, and Mayoi Neko Overrun.

Angel Beats

I’ve heard a lot of people complain about Angel Beats from when the character designs were revealed up to the last episode of the anime. A lot of them were about how Angel Beats was just copying other anime, but you can say the same thing about almost any other series, so I just ignored those. When I started watching Angel Beats, I was expecting another drama-comedy with the theme centering around “rebirth”, just like its predecessors: Kanon, AIR, and Clannad.

My expectations were met, but I was a bit disappointed with the delivery. While previous Key works started out with comedy and slowly moved into drama, Angel Beats seemed to be mostly comedy with drama bits thrown in here and there. Otonashi’s reaction at the end of the last episode also made me go “wtf”. For the whole series he was a cool, level-headed guy similar to Yuuichi, Yukito, and Tomoya, then all of a sudden he just breaks down at the loss of his love. I know they wanted to show him as not being a perfect person and having some insecurities, but I thought they went too far with how they handled Otonashi.

Besides the delivery, and that last episode, I actually enjoyed most of Angel Beats. When the series focused on comedy, it made me laugh, and the action scenes were pretty cool. My favourite episode would have to be the one where Yui passes on. I loved the “this is how our lives would be if we were alive” scenes and I thought it was absolutely sweet how Hinata would visit Yui every day and eventually ask her to marry him.

One word to describe Angel Beats: pwahahaawwww (this is me laughing and crying at the same time).

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I wanted to make a post about my initial thoughts on this season’s anime earlier, but due to project deadlines and exams being all during this month, it’s been hard trying to find time to watch everything. So that’s why I’m only writing this now when some anime are already into their third week, but it’s better late than never.

Angel Beats

I think it’s safe to say that Angel Beats was either the most or second-most (after K-ON) anticipated anime of the season. The main reason is probably because one of the collaborators was Key, which also wrote Kanon, AIR, and Clannad (all of which were very successful). There are three other companies working with Key on Angel Beats, but it manages to retain a common theme with Key’s previous works which is life and death. In case you forgot where this theme showed up in Key’s previous works, they were most prominent in: Ayu’s arc in Kanon, the Summer arc in AIR, and Ushiro’s arc in Clannad. The humour usually found at the beginning of Key’s stories was also in Angel Beats with all of the traps that the SSS fell for in the second episode. Some people have complained that the animation quality is poor, character designs were plagiarized, or that the music band was just an attempt at gaining more music fans. I won’t argue that these things aren’t true, but the main selling point of any good anime should be its story. With the way Angel Beats has started out, it looks like it’s following the same pattern as Kanon/AIR/Clannad with the exception that there’s no harem. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series and hoping it’ll stand up to its predecessors.

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With only one month left before the start of the spring 2010 anime season, I’m disappointed at the anime that have been announced. The only series that I’ve been looking forward to for a while is Angel Beats, mainly because Key worked on the story, but also because of how good the trailer looked. Key’s stories have always brought a tear to my eye, but so far they’ve mostly been focused on the relationships between characters (ie: Kanon, AIR, Clannad, Planetarian). The trailer for Angel Beats looks like it contains a lot of action though, so I’m curious to see how Key integrates that into their usual formula.

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