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[THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS]
So where to start... Oh I know, characters. Well for one thing, they're atrocious. You have Glen-sensei, who try's to be the next GTO/Kouro-sensei, but in reality is overpowered light novel protagonist-kun, even though subjective trash will try to justify that he's not, but the problem is that the narrative will stick him in situations where he has the upper hand, or plot convenience kicks down the door and says, "Hey, he can do this thing that no one/not many people can do." Then there's Sistine, who's Asuna Clone Number Four Million Eight Hundred Thousand and Two, basically ... token waifu, with a bitchy tsundere personality, and wants protagonist-kun's dick, and for whatever reason, the writers of the show decide to show that she's "capable" and "can take care of herself", but then they don't really showcase her doing much, and then halfway through the shows twelve episode run, she gets shoved into this damsel in distress role because some dude comes in to marry her for political reasons because she's the daughter of the queen of the kingdom, and now Glen has to go save her because the guy who's trying to marry her is evil. Also, she gets sexually harassed in the second episode, since it's a shitty light novel adaptation, so it has to have some form of rape. Did you get all that? Okay good, moving on to the next character. Who are we at now, Rumia? Yeah, Rumia. Rumia is BigTits McGee, and a lot of her character is based on the idea that "sad stuff happens to me, so you should feel sorry for me so make me best girl." Then there's Re=L, who's loli service oni-chan complex. Also, what the fuck kinda name is Re=L? You'd think it would have some sort of big, symbolic meaning, but no, it doesn't. There's this blue haired dude that's just kinda there. There's this black dressed boob lady who's just kinda there. Aaaand I think that's all for important characters. There's a supporting class, but they're just kinda there (I'm starting to notice a trend) and there's no really standout villain. A big problem the shows characters have, is that they don't have any after game goals. No "I want to be hokage", "I want to be king of the pirates", "I just want a quiet life", none of the characters have any equivalent of that... Except Sistine.

In the first episode of the show, Sistine states that she wants to go to this castle in the sky that her grandpa wanted to get to, but he died before he could get there, and the actual narrative never brings it up again, except for maybe the final episode, but that's just speculation. But the show keeps on reminding the viewer, that hey, this is still a thing by cramming castle into random shots that just so happened to be aimed at the sky throughout the whole fucking show.

It's kinda like Attack On Titan Season One, where it baits the viewer along with big plot reveals that inevitably lead into the grand scheme of things, even though it rarely ever does, so it just becomes a big cycle of plot reveals. But with Akashic Records, it baits the viewer along until oh, look, it's the last episode, so now we're just going to season two bait, but we have to end this first season somehow, don't we?

The final episode ends with this really uninteresting plot reveal that the big villain was pulling the strings the whole time, and he has some sort of connection to Glen, because everything in the narrative has to be connected to Glen somehow, and Sistine, who was supposed to get married this episode, continues to be the useless damsel she's been set up to be for the last couple of episodes, tears off her wedding dress, which is the writers of the show saying "look how progressive we are", and remembers she's really good at magic, and then she and Glen fight big villain guy in a giant magic laser beam fight, until Glen punches big villain, and yay we won.

Another big problem the show has is the tone shift of its fight and action scenes. At the beginning of the show they set up that all the fights will have a depth of strategy to them, similar to a JoJo Stand battle or an early Naruto fight, but then towards the end of the show, it just changes to generic magic spell battles.

The pacing of the show is atrocious. They try to cram so much shit into the short span of twelve episodes that it whole thing comes off as moving to fast, basically giving certain important plot threads not enough time to develop, making a bulk of the narrative seem pointless.

The animation is decent. It could be good, but whenever there's action it was always happens to quickly to even realize what's going on. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure they reuse the same clip of Sistine punching Glen into the sky a couple of times every episode, maybe not every episode, I could be wrong about this one. The shows aesthetic, is again, decent, it's this pseudo cel shaded look, which admittedly looks fine, but nothing more than that. Just fine. Although, I will say that the effect they use for magic looks pretty nice, reminds me of Konosuba.

The shows opening and ending credits are nothing to right home about. The opening kinda just showcases characters doing nothing, then there's shot of Glen being edgy for no apparent reason, while this shot of Sistine shifts into this girl from Glens past, Sarres I think her name is, and then it interludes into this generic action sequence set to one of the most generic get-the-viewer-hyped-for-action songs I've ever heard in my life. The ending credits are just still shots of the main four characters, exception being the shot of Glen with the spinning magical card.

And now to address the big elephant in the room, the character designs. From what I've said so far, this show isn't one worst things in the world, and that's true, it's not. But these character designs are just God awful, especially the female school uniforms. They're literally stripper outfits, and compared to the modest and classy, it just makes me think that whoever thought that making the female characters wear skirts that are almost as short as my dads belt, should really go back to art school. Plus, add to the fact that they say nothing about the characters themselves merely adds fuel to the fire.

If there is one positive thing I would like say about the show, is its next episode previews. These short thirty seconds previews were probably the one thing about the show I actually looked forward to watching every week. Probably the best bits were the ones with the blue haired dude and all the cats, they always managed to put a smile on my face.

Overall, Akashic Records is bad, but it's certainly not the worst thing ever, and certainly not even the worst thing this year. I give at a 3/10, it's just plain bad.

Easily one of the best emotional driven anime to have come out in a long time. With some well written dialogue, the best male anime character of last year, and the shows absolutely beautiful aesthetic, each episode will leave the viewer in tears. If it's one problem the show does have, it's that the second half of the series was weaker than first, but this is most likely due to the fact that at this point in time there is no paramount ending in sight, even if the anime is going to be getting a second season this season this coming Fall, so ... take what you want from that.