Well, it seems Clamp continues on a CCS¹ type anime, but Honestly I enjoyed this more.

It’s about Misaki, who ends up becoming a deus in a game called “Angelic Layer.” Angelic Layer is a game where… dolls fight. And the deuses control them. Basically that would be the general plot, but of course there’s always more.

At first when I read other reviews mention dolls, I really stayed away from it, till my office mate showed it to me. The “dolls” apparently are like miniature androids controlled by thought and a whole lot of technology. And I suddenly had this absurd urge of imagining my fully posable Evangelion model kit in the series (unfortuanately it wasn’t made by Gainax hehehe)

The anime touches on themes related to family, love, sportsmanship, hardwork and realizing your dreams and ideals. All in all I’d say it’s a very healthy anime to watch, since there is no dying, and everything is just a game, nevertheless it still is “healthy” outlet of releasing all those negative vibes.

The humor is very pleasant, I loved Icchin and his “wrong answer games” wherein he makes his subordinate do ridiculous things when he answers wrong.

And upon mentioning CCS, it’s like they used the same character design and put them in different stories and different situations.

SPOILER WARNING (on CCS and Angelic Layer) The most blatant parallelisms (in personality) would be Sakura = Misaki, Tomoyo = Hatoko, the rest were like a mesh of the CCS characters like Tamayo = Mei lin, Ohjiro = Yukito, etc. etc. But despite all there comparable aspects, Angelic Layer is still more fun to watch even if it only spans 26 episodes unlike CCS.

I guess a reasonable assesment of this anime would be: If you like CCS, you’ll like Angelic Layer