This review will start as a spoiler free general overview of Charlotte, but after revealing my rating I'll dive into some of the issues I have with the story. This point will be clearly marked as to prevent spoiling anything for you.

The first word:

An entertaining show, Charlotte falls short because of major problems with its story. Focusing on a world where children have supernatural powers, Charlotte has a number of parallels with series like X-Men. Kids have powers, governments/organizations want to research and abuse said powers, and there’s a group wants to keep everyone safe. Charlotte actually comes across as a fairly lighthearted show at first, but adopts a slightly darker and more serious tone later in the show.Enter our protagonist Yuu Otosaka, a kid with the ability to temporarily take over someone else's body. Originally using his power to get higher grades in school, Nao Tomori catches and recruits him to help in the search for others with powers.The characters of Charlotte are a part of the show that could have really shined. Yet for some reason there’s little to no backstory presented on any of them. You won’t come away from this show feeling as if you truly know the characters.Yuu Otosaka, who has the ability to take over other targets. He complains early on about the “incomplete” abilities that others have early on, but seems to abandon this sentiment rather quickly. The incomplete side of his power causes issues with the story later on.Nao Tomori is a female student who has the ability to turn invisible. This power is limited to her target, as others in the area can still see her. Mature beyond her age, she searches for other ability users in order to protect them from those who would abuse their powers. While she seems cold at first, progressing through the anime we see she is a sweet and caring person.Ayumi Otosaka is Yuu’s sister. A cute, sweet and caring middle schooler, Ayumi is a ray of sunshine. Her positive and bubbly personality makes her one of my favorite characters.Joujirou Takajou is the other male main character, whose ability is teleportation. Coming across as a goofball with moments of inspiration, Joujirou’s main role is comedic relief. Yusa Kurobane is an idol with a supernatural power of her own. After it’s discovered that she has powers, she transfers into school with Yuu, Nao and Joujirou and aids with their search for others with supernatural abilities.Animation for the series is very well done. Stylistically it's basically the same you’d find in Angel Beats, which I love since I really enjoy this style of animation. On screen movement is fluid and natural, certainly no complaints here.Music for the Charlotte didn't have the same impact on me as that found in Angel Beats; however, it certainly didn't disappoint. The opening was catchy and I never found myself skipping it, the ending was much the same. Background music for the series was fitting, I never felt as if something did/didn't belong. The only gripe I have is with Zheind and the shows insistence on calling the group “post rock”, while a quick look into the post rock genre of music shows that the band certainly shouldn’t be classified as such. Just a complaint from a music geek.The story is where Charlotte begins to take a number of hits. The show starts with a number missions where Yuu and the group go on missions to warn others with powers about the risks of using their powers and I certainly feel like the series could have continued along this path for a while without the show becoming stale. In this sequence we regrettably learn very little about the characters, and it certainly would have made the show better had they dived into character backgrounds during this phase of the story. The story separates from this pattern with a bombshell and begins pursuing another more emotional path, yet even this feels good and works well with our group of characters. We begin to learn more about our characters and they begin establishing a better understood relationship with one another. Yet this new direction is derailed by the introduction of another twist, which I consider to be one of the cardinal sins of storytelling. I’ll dive deeper into this in the section of the review that contains spoilers. To summarise, Charlotte certainly has good aspects, but the most important part of a show, the story, brings it down. This is an anime with great (although unexplored) characters, music and animation that suffers from what becomes a muddled and confusing story with more holes than swiss cheese. A watchable and enjoyable anime with a number of flaws, I give it a rating of 6 out of 10. Thanks for reading up to this point! If you don't want to read the spoilers but want to drop a comment, feel free to scroll down and tell me what you think!Here I’ll dive into where I think the show went wrong and even let you know what I think should have been done instead. I've divided this part of the review into three sections where I explain each of my issues.I mentioned the Cardinal Sins of storytelling earlier. I consider the four major cardinal sins of storytelling to be time travel, aliens, a character committing suicide when they’ve been written into a corner, and the “Tolkien eagles” (character(s) seem to be trapped and are simply rescued by some strange new power). Shows that have these elements in them from the beginning are fine, I mainly take issue with them when they’re used as a “magic eraser” in order to get out of troublesome situations. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of time travel being used as a plot repair tool, and this was a case where it didn’t need to be used at all. This deals with the first major bombshell of the series, Ayumi’s death. While I certainly wasn’t happy about the death of the cute and innocent Ayumi, it certainly opened up the story to a new, more emotional route. The main problem I have with this is how they went about bringing her back. Ayumi died when she activated her collapse ability in school when Konishi threatened her with a boxcutter and brought the entire building down on her head, but if Konishi survived the collapse why couldn’t Ayumi? While the school was owned by the syndicate led by Shunsuke Otosaki, a building collapse would certainly involve a police investigation. When the government finds the one responsible was a student with a supernatural power, it stands to reason that they would report Ayumi had died and bring her in for research and medical experimentation. Instead of traveling back in time to prevent the collapse, we could have had an episode (or string of episodes) where they learn of her survival and stage some sort of rescue. I feel traveling through time to prevent her death certainly hurt the relationship built between Yuu and Nao (at least on Nao’s side of the relationship), and it leaves the previously resolved fate of Nao’s older brother in limbo.I certainly understand the point of making abilities imperfect, as it prevents characters from becoming far too overpowered; however, in the case of Yuu’s ability his imperfection becomes a letdown. Yuu has the ability to steal powers from others, yet once he has them it seems he can’t unlearn them. The mental strain of possessing what is probably hundreds of thousands of abilities causes him to experience a severe case of amnesia, so severe that he forgets everything about his past.His limit could have easily been something that allowed him to retain his memories, be it a rather long cooldown on his ability to possess someone or a set limit on the number of stolen abilities he can possess at one time. Yet the writers decided against this route for some reason.I definitely feel it put poor Nao through the unnecessary heartbreak of being nearly completely forgotten by the one she loves, and it effectively erases most if not all of the sparse backstory we had on Yuu.Compared to another anime by Key, Angel Beats, Charlotte suffers from a distinct lack of character development. With Angel Beats, you felt as though you knew a number of the side characters as well if not better than the main protagonist. This is not the case in Charlotte.The first six or so episodes follow a pretty generic supernatural anime storyline with injected bits of “comedy”, but what do we learn about our side or even main characters? The only one we learn anything about is Nao, and she’s honestly the only character you can actually say you know by the end of the anime. You could argue we learn some about Yuu, but most of that is from a separate timeline and is erased along with the rest of his memories by his amnesia from absorbing too many skills.I’ll end this section here to avoid repeating myself, I was very disappointed with the lack of character development in Charlotte.These three flaws are really what bothered me about Charlotte. I feel that had these segments been handled better Charlotte would have been a much better show. This anime certainly had potential. Coming from the minds that made Clannad and Angel Beats it was justifiably looked forward to, but major problems with the story really hamstrung it.Thanks for reading my long review! What do you think? Was I too hard on the show, did I leave something out? Feel free to drop a comment below, I love a good discussion.

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