While in the Purgatory, a group of students rebel against God for their unreasonable cruel fates despite having done nothing wrong. Will they be able to change their destiny or accept what’s already on their plates?

Time for Angel Beats! I just finished all 14 episodes awhile ago in one sitting, and yes – it’s that awesome. This may yet be the best anime I’ve watched this year, and it’s from 2010 to boot! I missed this kind of intense anime that after you get to watch it, you sort of sympathize with their sorrows, then you turn around and look at your own life, and try to make it a better one for the sake of the life lessons the anime has shared with you.

Quite a lot of manly and lady tears have been shed for Angel Beats!, that’s for sure. It’s a well-rounded anime instigating surreal themes of action, comedy, gore, unhappiness, regrets, the afterlife and finding purpose. Don’t expect some moe, fanservice or lovey-dovey crap in this one.

Plot: Otonashi wakes up out of nowhere, not remembering anything about himself nor what previously happened. He is greeted by Yuri Nakamura, who is wielding a sniper rifle pointed towards a seemingly ordinary high school girl that’s considered to be the enemy. She explains that they are in the afterlife, and that everyone in that world has already died.

Taking advantage of the confusion, Yuri invites him to join her Afterlife Battlefront or SSS (Shinda Sekai Sensen) – a group organized to rebel against God because of the cruel fates the members experienced in their lives. Otonashi refuses, and decides to talk to the girl being targeted instead.

Otonashi walks up to the one called Tenshi or Angel, and had her explain to him what’s going on. He insisted to go to a hospital because his memory if fuzzy, but Tenshi tells him that there are no hospitals there since no one can die. Well, they’re already dead to begin with. Otonashi gets stabbed to his heart after daring Tenshi to prove that he can’t die.

He wakes up in the school infirmary, and finally gets a grasp of the situation. Otonashi heads to the school’s Headmaster Room and discovers that it’s actually the secret base of Yuri’s group. To pass time until his memories return, he decided to join them for the meantime and participate in the Afterlife Battlefront’s daily operations.

More things have been explained to him from that point on: that they rebel because Tenshi will ‘erase’ them if they try to live a normal life in that world, and that they don’t want to just disappear because they might be reborn as a water flea in the next life, as based from Buddhism belief.