| Angel Beats! 1st Beat | |
|---|---|
 Video game cover, featuring (clockwise from left) Angel (Kanade Tachibana), Masami Iwasawa, Matsushita, Yui and Yuri Nakamura | |
| Developer(s) | Key |
| Publisher(s) | Visual Arts |
| Designer(s) | Jun Maeda |
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| Series | Angel Beats! |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows |
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| Genre(s) | Visual novel |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Angel Beats! 1st Beat is a Japanese visual novel developed by Key, a brand of Visual Arts. It was released on June 26, 2015 for Windows and is rated for all ages. The game is based on the 2010 anime television series Angel Beats!, originally conceived by Jun Maeda, and also adapts scenes featured in the anime. The story takes place in the afterlife and focuses on Otonashi, a boy who lost his memories of his life after dying. He is enrolled into the afterlife school and meets a girl named Yuri who invites him to join the Afterlife Battlefront—an organization she leads that fights against God. The Battlefront fight against the student council president Angel, a girl with supernatural powers.
The gameplay in Angel Beats! follows an interactive branching plot line with multiple scenarios. Originally meant to be a role-playing game, Maeda eventually conceded to making it into a visual novel adventure game. When designing the game, Maeda did not want to include choices for the player that would not have a meaningful effect, so the choices given were focused to have an effect on the plot and character interactions. A reviewer noted that its game structure makes it feel more like a game compared to other adventure games released around the same time, which have less choices available to the player and less-divergent plot lines. 1st Beat ranked as the best-selling PC game sold in Japan for the time of its release, and charted in the national top 50 twice more after that.