I didn’t quite expect Angel Beats! to hit us with the full force of Key melo­drama this early. But this ep… it was a full visual novel char­ac­ter path packed into a sin­gle episode, com­pletely with a short emo­tional roller­coaster ride. Yet despite the focus on Iwasawa’s char­ac­ter development,episode 3 skimped out on none of the other stuff: we’re treated to more Key humor (espe­cially the Miyazaki touch), another top-quality con­cert scene, and the advance­ment of a sig­nif­i­cant main plot hook: just what exactly is Angel? On top of the already ‘just what exactly is this world’?

Mag­nif­i­cent. This kind of Key work should be done more often, where Maeda Jun isn’t con­strained by the dragged-out pac­ing of your typ­i­cal Key Nakige…

Iwasawa’s life story is yet another trope: the char­ac­ter with a tragic back­ground who was saved by the dis­cov­ery of music. As expected, every­one in SSS is fight­ing for some­thing they trag­i­cally lost in life, and for Iwa­sawa it was her music, which had been bru­tally ripped from her by the same despair it once saved her from. It’s a sim­ple and straight­for­ward back­ground, but the emo­tional depth of her melody, espe­cially the des­per­a­tion within, con­trasted sharply with the inspi­ra­tional Alchemy that pre­ceded it and really touched my soul with the mean­ing of her life.

At the same time, she real­ized her own call­ing and finally accepted her life to begin anew. Her sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance, in addi­tion to the emo­tional shock effect, begs the ques­tion — how many other mem­bers of the cast will accept, van­ish, and pass on before the end of the series?

This was melo­drama, musi­cally told, at its finest.

.

From the RPG per­spec­tive, we’ve picked up a new party mem­ber: Christ, whose catch­phrase was nice at start but got really annoy­ing really fast. With the class of Hacker, his spe­cial abil­ity is Pi Chant, with an attack-type of [Intel­lec­tual] and is super-effective against idiots. It appears every series with an RPG theme (e.g. ZnT, Negima, and espe­cially BakaT­est) has a party com­posed of idiots.

Their raid was also suc­cess­ful in obtain­ing infor­ma­tion on Angel’s spe­cial abil­i­ties, the Guard Skills. Yuri notes that Angel is actively devel­op­ing her skills, rather than hav­ing pre-designated hax like you expect of a video game final boss. Com­bine this with the dis­tinc­tively human emo­tions she showed dur­ing this episode, it brought out the ques­tion of just what Angel is once again: is she a self-evolving weapon-grade AI with its sen­tience becom­ing more and more human? Or was she once a spi­ral who threw away her human­ity in order to become an anti-spiral and the guardian of this dimension?

What about this entire game-like world we’re in? Is it just another one of Key’s sur­real par­al­lel worlds like the dream worlds of One and Clan­nad? Or is it more like the world of Lit­tle Busters! where the main char­ac­ter was placed in pur­pose­fully so he could become stronger and face real­ity? Is it really rein­car­na­tion once you log off like Iwa­sawa, or will he find this entire adven­ture to be an elab­o­rately planned scheme, a dream that he wakes up from?

We’ll see…

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• 12 Days of Anime #2: A Heart To Give, A Love To Share (Angel Beats!)
• Thank You, Angel Beats!
• Angel Beats and the Falling Sanc­tu­ary: the School Setting

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 13:07 and is filed under Anime, Key. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.