Angel Beats Anime/VN pasta

Because Key's adaptations horribly misrepresent Key/Jun Maeda's capabilities, I'll paste this here:

People continue to blame Jun Maeda for the shit adaptations studios and producers shaft him with. Air, Angel Beats, Little Busters, the first (heavily over-dramatized) season of Clannad and. They're all rushed shit, full of added unnecessary added tears (forced drama), have erratic pacing and issues with character introduction and story handling, and overall have issues that aren't nearly as prevalent in the VNs. It doesn't make sense that Jun Maeda would've
intentionally planned for this anime full of the most shallow characters Key has ever made, when he publicly rebuked the anime, claiming it doesn't represent his vision for Angel Beats. Maeda clearly had a lot of ideas to make it more than 13 episodes. Interviews say that he had to cut things out like gags and whatnot to fit other info in the show. When voice recording for the anime took place, Maeda instructed them to voice with a later VN in mind. Extra content to patch up the Kanade arriving after Otonashi "plot hole" (which is actually just elaboration of The Afterlife) and info on the SSS prior to Otonashi's arrival are some of what made it to the AB! manga and light novels. Whether he actually wrote a 26 episode script and cropped it to 13 episodes is questionable, and is something often brought up. Honestly, with there being ~500 lines of dialogue per episode and erratic screenplay where a scene will shift after 20 seconds, it's believable.

Maeda's mentality behind character creation is that each one is designed to represent different emotions, and music compositions are created for specific scenes Maeda has planned in advanced. A lot of the OST wasn't used to its full potential, (and often feels misused, compared to how Key's OST have been utilized in the past) and most of the characters never ascend beyond their traditional gag role, while Maeda showed he could turn around gag characters in Refrain.

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As a side note, it's funny that the arc people loved the most (Yui's) had far less development than the one it's a homage to from Kanon (Makoto's).

Let's not even go into how the development between Otonashi and Kanade is probably more shallow than the 5 minute backstories Key writes for plot device side characters. I honestly can't see Jun Maeda being THIS bad intentionally, when he didn't even have issues these horrendous 16 years ago when he worked on the VN "One". Besides Otonashi, there's no other male Key character aside from Kyousuke of Little Busters to get his own theme song. Maeda announced that Otonashi would get a personality rework along with fixes from the anime, so he'll be improved significantly there. There will also be character arcs for every character of the SSS to look forward to.

It's going to be the longest VN ever created by Key, and it's already going to have the most CGs and highest quality art, and has been in development for years since the anime's production, so I would urge people who enjoyed some of Key's other works to check out AB in the future, and see if Maeda manages to deliver in the medium he's been the most successful in.

Not trying to say Maeda is god, because I don't think his writing alone is "masterpiece" level in the least, but most of his works have been ruined in adaptations, and I've seen plenty of people dislike the adaptations and love the VNs. It's the combination of Key's music, the voice acting, and the timing of the emotional scenes with some decent buildup that have always won people's hearts through Key.