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All done with Guilty Crown, and I've been pleasantly surprised. With all the negative hype I've heard about it, I had my doubts about this being any good, but I have to say that I honestly had a really good time watching it. It may not be a perfect show, but I think it's less worthy of the hate than, say, SAO.
Basically, following the outbreak of the "Apocalypse Virus," Japan has been occupied by an organization known as GHQ. Shu Ouma, a socially awkward, isolated boy is living his typical life when he gets involved with a rebel group known as the Undertakers and obtains the Power of Kings, which allows him to use Voids (objects representing the heart of whoever he takes it from). From here on, cue dramatic battles, crazy plot twists, and some fanservice too.
Guilty Crown is essentially like a combination of Code Geass and Neon Genesis Evangelion in my opinion. More than anything the plot reflects the story of Code Geass, with a similar setting, very comparable circumstances, character roles that are very close, and quite a few events that are extremely similar. Some might call it a rip-off, although I wouldn't say it's close enough for that, namely because Shu is VERY different from Lelouch (and nowhere near as awesome of course), which alone changes many things altogether. I might say that GC is like throwing Shinji Ikari into a Geass-like setting, but even that doesn't really cover everything quite accurately. In any case, I wouldn't say that Guilty Crown is quite as good as those two series (then again, very few are to begin with), but I felt Guilty Crown was still great fun when it all came down to it.
Enjoyable though it was, there were some problems. There are times when Guilty Crown tries too hard to pull off plot twists, and a lot of those are indeed reminiscent of Geass in execution. Now I'm not gonna rant about originality because it's stupid when you realize that pretty much nothing in anime can be "original" at this point in time, but I will say that some stuff is a bit predictable, not necessarily because it's something that you can blatantly see coming but rather because the same type of stuff has been done in other series we've seen. Stuff can get pretty rushed too and that means not everything is explained quite properly, but overall it's pretty easy to fill in the blanks. Another thing is that the characters weren't quite as amazing as I would've liked. Obviously you aren't gonna find another series with quite the same awesome cast as Geass, but even then Guilty Crown doesn't have any characters that stand out as godly, and sometimes the characters feel a bit inconsistent personalitywise, particularly the two leads.
In the end I really did like it, and I get the impression that maybe I'm missing something obvious with the hate. It had its share of flaws, but nothing that I felt ruined the anime for me. Of course, it could just be that I had my expectations so low that when it ended up not being so bad, it just made me like it instead. If that's the case, then I should really set my expectations for everything to be rock bottom. It may not be a Code Geass, but let's face it: What is?
