Lately, I’ve been avoiding talking about my opinion on Charlotte as a whole, concentrating on discussions of the content instead. So let me get this over with right away:
Like several others here, I consider Charlotte to be my least favorite Key work of all, but still a pretty good anime. It’s good compared to a lot of anime out there, but it’s just not Key-tier. I kept my hopes up, expecting another masterpiece for a long time, finally giving up after episode 11.
Do I think Charlotte has faults? Yes, lots of them. Do I think that makes it a bad anime? No. Do I feel like I have to discuss my disappointment? No. Do I regret complaining about the gloomy mood in certain discussions? No. Did I like Charlotte as a whole? Yes.
So now that I got that out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff.
I’d like to adress the issue of expectations that has been discussed before. Most, if not all of us, have expected a lot from Charlotte - because Jun Maeda. We have been told it’s going to be “a typical Key story”, so we perceived it as such and judged it accordingly. For example, we expected fleshed out characters that we would love so much, we’d cry rivers whenever something sad happens to them. So we got worried when many characters still weren’t fleshed out after many episodes. But it turned out that Charlotte was in fact not “a typical Key story”. It was Maeda trying out something new. Charlotte was, in many ways, different from what we had expected it to be. And we’ve never been told what it’s actually about. Even late into the show, we still didn’t know for sure where the story was headed and what the main conflict was. There was confusion and question marks all over. We have not been spoonfed the answers. Only now, after the series has ended, do I believe to understand it: (episode 13 link) It was all about Yuu.
I will draw some comparisons here. (Little Busters & Charlotte spoilers ahead)
Like LB, Charlotte spent most of its time preparing the main character for something that would await him in the future.
As @Velunari pointed out in the episode 13 topic,
(heavy LB & Charlotte spoilers) But unlike Riki in LB, Yuu has not been deliberately trained by other characters so that he could deal with certain circumstances. Nobody planned for Yuu to go save the world all by himself. Over the course of the first 12 episodes, he has grown as a person and became someone who’s both willing to take on this huge task and capable of seeing it through.
No wonder we didn’t understand where Charlotte was headed for the most part. Yuu didn’t expect it, either. None of the characters did. So there was nobody around to give us hints. Admittedly, I do think we should’ve gotten some hints here and there, just to lessen the confusion and prevent thoughts like “Oh no, there’s not many episodes remaining and the main plot still hasn’t been introduced!”. Some people even took the panic so far as to perceive some episodes as time-wasting fillers. Fortunately, now we can confidently say that those episodes had a solid purpose.