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I can summarize this series in one sentence: This story could have been an amazing, romantic, touching masterpiece if only I gave a rat's ass about the characters.

Seriously. The characters in this show suck. The story is powerful and has its moments, but I just couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to care.

And yet when you examine their background stories, there is such depth. Why did they come out so shallow? The main character has an alcoholic father and a bad home life, resulting in an apathetic and bleak outlook on the future. Yet he runs around squirting milk up a freshman's nose and trying ... to get the crap kicked out of his best friend.

The primary love interest and two other characters are just moe-incarnate and nothing else. They try so hard to make Fuko into a tragic story, but she's so unrealistically dysfunctional that I just didn't care. Not to mention the japanese voice acting... just the cutesiest, most high-pitched stammering you will ever hear.

The main character's best friend exists entirely for comic relief and has no substance whatsoever, even though they try to mention a troubled past a few times.

Then there are the two tough girls. In any other show I would have written them off as being too trope-y, but in contrast to the other offerings in this series, they actually became my favorite characters.

If the characters had stayed true to their origins and the show had been made into something a little more serious, this story could have bloomed into one of my favorite shows. But the authors seemed more interested in just making a half-baked slice of life series. In order to even get through an episode, I basically just have to turn my brain off for 22 minutes and not question what in the Sam Hill is happening.

But I'm only 18 episodes in. Here's to them turning the show around in the last 5 episodes..?

This show is a landscape of peaks and valleys. Some aspects are amazing while others are extremely lackluster.

Pros:
- Artwork and animation are very good. Lighting in particular caught my attention
- The soundtrack is moving and appropriate
- Characters' back stories have depth
- The show has some very emotionally powerful moments, again partially in credit to the soundtrack

Cons:
- The story line is inconsistent. It felt like the authors knew where they wanted to start and where they wanted to end but weren't entirely sure how to get from A to B.
- The premise is cliche, but to be fair it makes sense by the end of the ... series.
- Most characters are very shallow in their actions.
- There are episodes where essentially nothing happens

All in all I feel like Angel Beats would have been a better movie than a series. The world they live in isn't very interesting and didn't need 13 episodes to develop. Most characters weren't developed at all. The authors had some truly emotional concepts to convey, but perhaps felt pressured to fill up 6 hours and so resorted to a lot of filler. But when they let themselves open up... wow, those scenes were powerful. I really wanted more of that and less of the hokey fighting parts.