Angel Beats! was definitely the best show of the Spring Season. Anyone surprised considering this s a Key series? Would the makers of Clannad, Clannad ~After Story~, Kanon and Air do something that isn’t the best show of any season? It hasn’t happened yet!

Yuzuru Otonashi wakes up lying on the ground, without any memories beside his last name. The only person beside himself is a girl who is pointing a Sniper Rifle at a defenseless girl on the schoolyard. According to the girl, Yuri, Otonashi is dead. Just like herself. Otonashi considers her to be completely nuts and walks over to the girl she was aiming at. The other girl, called Tenshi (“Angel” in Japanese), tells him the same thing Yuri did: that he is dead. Otonashi asks her to prove it, in reply Tenshi stabs him through the heart with a blade she summons out of her wrist. When he wakes up again (you can’t die if you’re already dead, you just collapse for an hour or so then wake up again, and any injuries or even teared-off body parts will have been restored), he is killed again, this time by a purple-haired lunatic called Noda. Third attempt results in him walking into a trap which makes a large hammer come down from the roof and knock him out of the window – from the 3rd level of the building. At the fourth attempt, he finds Yuri and a bunch of other people in the Principal’s office, where Yuri asks him to join their battlefront (which changes name about once every 5 minutes, some names include “The Afterlife Battlefront”, “Like-hell-I’m-dead Battlefront”, “Near-death Battlefront” and “Barnacle Battlefront”), and rebel against god since Yuri blames this world’s existence on him/her/it. Otonashi actually joins the battlefront, as they all try to “survive” in the world between life and death.

While this is original, the cast and the execution makes it even more so. If we start with the case, The Afterlife Battlefront (they use that name for most of the series) consists almost entirely of complete idiots, or undescribably weird people, with the exception of Otonashi and Yuri who are the only sane and somewhat intelligent. TK is constantly break-dancing, no matter if it’s appropriate or not, speaks only in short phrases, mostly in english catchlines from the 1990′s, for example “Trap”, “Whoa, dancing in the shadow!”, “Goodbye, wild heaven!”, “Knockin’ on heaven’s door…”, “Don’t stop dancing!”, “In the mountains.”, etc.; think Tiamat from Shakugan no Shana, but in english and without his phrases complementing anyone else’s. Shiina is a self-proclaimed Kunochi (female Ninja) who has terrible focus and is constantly balancing something on her fingers – even while doing something else, like balancing a broom on her fingers while playing baseball. Yui is the same kind of character as Rikku from Final Fantasy X, Kaolla Su from Love Hina, etc. who has too much energy and is constantly hyperactive. Yui is also not just a bit stupid, doing things (like accidentally strangling herself with a mic) about all the time,  she’s easily the funniest character in the entire series. She also has a demon tail for some reason, and may be based on Etna from the Disgaea series Kanade “Tenshi” Tachibana is initially pretty mysterious and an antagonist up to Episode 5, then becomes friends with Otonashi – and she’d also gets high on both my badassness and cuteness lists if I ever write them. Takeyama is a hacker and self-proclaimed genius (who is actually just as stupid as everyone else), who always wants everyone to call him “Christ” which no one does. Naoi is completely crazy and thinks he’s God, adores Otonashi and actually notices how stupid everyone else is, and he can also hypnitize people, which he demonstrates by for example making Hinata feel inferior to a clothesclip or making him think he’s a piece of toilet paper. And those are just the more notable ones.

Angel Beats also manages to make a big deal of the slightest of things, in completely ridiculous ways (think Yotsuba&!), such as “Operation Monster Stream”, which is also known as River Fishing to everyone else (I don’t want to explain that one in too much detail, since it’d spoil a lot), Lifting Food Tickets from NPC-students which means to literally lift them using a large fan to blow them away, or visiting their weapon manufacturer “Guild” past an Indiana Jones-style trap labyrinth

Towards the end, the entire series seems to have changed without you even noticing. About EP11, the plot starts actually reaching the climax, and EP12 is an epic Fantasy-Action episode. The last episode are vastly different, really dramatic and actually very sad. Still, they manage to put a Clannad ~After Story~ happy end to it, something I actually thought was impossible to do with a scene of 5 seconds. The last episode also uses what Divine at Random Curiosity calls “The Jun Maeda Emotional Sneak Attack”, first lowering the viewers emotional guard by putting a lot of light-hearted comedy first (Naoi and Hinata fighting over who was out of tune, Kanade writing a serious school anthem revolving around praising Mabu Doofu (a kind of very spicy dish), Hinata dressing up as Principal with a bald wig and hitler-mustache, etc.), then putting in an emotional scene where the viewers last expect it. The resulting ending is both very sad and happy at the same time. And actually very good, it fits this series more to have a more speculating ending than a complete Clannad ~After Story~style ending.

Visually, Angel Beats! is possibly the best series ever made. It’s sharp, has a really unique animation, extemely detailed both character designs, backgrounds and locations, and plenty of eye-candy. Just look at the animation, and tell me one series that could possibly even compare to this visual masterpiece! And since this is a Key series, it has all the music composed by the director and story writer Jun Maeda himself. And he’s a really good composer, something he has already demonstrated with Clannad’s masterful soundtrack, and now Angel Beats! isn’t that much after. It’s not better than Clannad, but certainly not far from it. About the only thing it lacks is a really emotional theme like Clannad’s “Nagisa ~Farewell at the foot of a hill~” (okay, unfair comparisation since that’s just about the saddest theme ever, but still… it doesn’t have anything like the themes Existence, Illusions, The Place where Wishes comes true or Roaring Tides either). The Opening Theme, “My Soul, Your Beats” by Lia (there’s also a remix by LiSA used in EP3, but it’s not as good) is simply a masterpiece despite it’s nonsensical lyrics – but it still doesn’t beat Clannad ~After Story~‘s “Toki wo Kizamu Uta“. The kind of hopeful sadness that Toki wo Kizamu Uta contains is completely impossible to replicate, even for it’s own composer apparently. The ending theme “Brave Song” is really good too (not as good as the Opening though), and the image shown during it is updated almost every episode to show new characters, or excluse “dead” characters – the image at the top is the one from the final episode.

Angel Beats! is a bit hard to classify in just one overbearing genre, since it has about even parts Slice of Life, Drama, Fantasy-Action and Comedy, and also touches the Psychological and Supernatural genres. It’s hilarious, yet keeps serious, a bit like Ken Akamatsu’s stories (Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima! are excellent examples of his stories that keeps serious yet on the side doesn’t take itself seriously at all – you have to read them to see how that’s even possible), a bit like what Fruits Basket tries to do, only Angel Beats! does it right.

You want to watch this now right here. You don’t want to see it because of the description? Yes you do! The description is completely pulled out of the air and has hardly anything with the actual series to do.