How would I summarise Erased? Well, there’s plenty of heartwarming scenes and (emotionally manipulative) moments that will make you want to cry. Consistently great animation and art, and I thought the differing aspect ratio was a nice touch too. The soundtrack is solid, with some particularly good ambient tracks in the more tension filled and tender moments. The actual story is interesting if somewhat unoriginal, and I had plenty of positive emotions about the show once it was over.

So, I’m kind of conflicted with Erased. When it’s good, it’s very good and the show never hits a true low point. The problem is that there’s a number of notable flaws which, while they don’t sour the experience overall, they prevented a ‘good’ series from being ‘great’ or even something above that.

Before I go into my problems with Erased, I’m going to give the show some leeway because (as is usually the case) most of the faults lie in the fact that they had to fit a lot of story and character development into just 12 episodes. Meaning, they had to cut out content from the source and even had to change the ending too.

Let’s talk about the mystery first. Well, let’s be honest here and say that there was no mystery. It was blatant from the beginning who the perpetrator was and I rolled my eyes at the reveal. Any possible tension started fading away early on because it was so obvious who the big bad was. I had hoped they’d be a bit smarter about it and possibly even present a different (or at least plausible) villain to us but that didn’t happen. Even his backstory was severely cut down. I guess you could praise it for how ‘in the open’ it was but it didn’t work in practice. Just a missed opportunity, and probably the biggest disappointment in the show.

It’s gotten a lot of criticism, but I thought the ending was still decent. That’s the problem, it was ‘decent’ and not any better than that. I wasn’t left with a bad taste in my mouth, and again it comes straight back to the problem of fitting everything into so few episodes resulting in them having to come up with a new ending. The pacing for most of the series while not perfect was still acceptable, but the last few episodes felt rushed. My main fault with the ending lies with the ‘final showdown’ which makes use of a trope called ‘Batman’s Gambit’. You’ve probably seen this plenty of times before but didn’t know it had a specific name, so here’s Tvtropes with the details https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BatmanGambit (god I love that website). To put it simply, I despise this trope with a passion because it’s intellectually lazy and rarely plausible. Parts of the last two episodes felt like they were lifted straight out of a fan-fiction, this sort of writing doesn’t belong anywhere outside a Superhero cartoon (like its namesake).

I thought half of the cast was fine as they were, and the other half were severely underdeveloped. As an example, I thought Satoru and his mother were solid characters while Gaku and Kenya were very generic. The child characters I think suffered most, they either didn’t act like kids or weren’t given enough time to feel developed or worth caring about. Kenya in particular was an annoyance for me because he was essentially a child genius with no flaws. There was more than one Mary (and Gary) Sue in the cast.

That being said, I thought Kayo was a fine character too and I disagree with a lot of comments about how the abuse storyline was a cheap way to garner pity for her. I also didn't see much to complain about with how her relationship ends with the protagonist. I liked that it was realistic, life isn’t a fairy tale and I respected the show for taking that path; it’s rare that something like that happens in an anime. I did however not like how her character was handled at the end; she is the focus for most of the story and then all but disappeared at the end because the focus had to shift to the 'showdown'. Again, more content being cut to fit 12 episodes.

Not without its flaws, I still recommend the show overall and would be happy to watch it again.