Normally, I wouldn't waste my time reviewing a show that I didn't like very much, but Guilty Crown was such a disappointment that I felt like it was almost necessary for me to put my thoughts into words regarding this trainwreck of a show. I think this feeling of disappointment stemmed from a couple of main grievances. The first being that the groundwork was so solid. The premise was interesting enough, the character designs were fantastic, and the music was absolutely incredible. Most of the things that I'm usually disappointed with as far as anime is concerned were strengths for Guilty Crown. That, however, leads me into the second, less positive thing regarding Guilty Crown. The writing, story, and characters. I'll dive deeper into those as I continue this review. Consider this your SPOILER WARNING from here on.

Before we can dive into the disappointment, I want to go into more detail on the strengths of Guilty Crown. The visuals, as I've said already, were spot on, especially coming from a show that was produced in 2011. The backgrounds are gorgeous, capturing a futuristic dystopian Japan beautifully and adding in the GHQ's beautiful and iconic pyramid-eque structure.

Beyond just the backgrounds, the characters are all well designed and interesting, they just pop off the screen and immediately catch your interest aesthetically. This is made most clear with my favorite design in the entire show and potentially among one of my favorite character designs ever: Inori Yuzuriha. I doubt I'd be exaggerating when I say that she's probably what allured 90% or more of interested anime fans to begin watching Guilty Crown, or at least, put it on their planning list. Unfortunately, this is something of a double-edged sword once you actually start watching Guilty Crown, because you can't help but feel like these designs are wasted once you realize how much life was sucked out of these characters once they're put onto the screen. Beyond the designs, Guilty Crown's animation is also phenomenal. Fight scenes are enjoyable- I would even go so far as to say the best parts of the show- but are too few and far between to save the show some points.

I honestly don't have too much to actually add in regards to the music and sound of Guilty Crown beyond the fact that it is fantastic. Sawano never disappoints and Guilty Crown is no different as he knocks the soundtrack out of the park, giving Guilty Crown a far greater soundtrack than the show deserves. Surpassing even the soundtrack, are the opening and ending songs, sung by the band created specifically for Guilty Crown: Egoist- along with one of my personal favorite artists in Supercell. I cannot possibly heap more praise onto these songs than a simple statement: I didn't skip either opening once.

Favorite Character: Ayase Shinomiya

And here is where all the praise comes to an end. Don't get me wrong, I liked Ayase, but that comes with a huge asterisk next to it. That asterisk being that she was the best of terrible choices. There were moments where I didn't even like her. But when you compare her to the lifeless husk of Inori; Shu, who calling him a beta male would be far too great of a compliment; or Gai who was a giga chad, but also unreasonable and incomprehensible- the choices become really narrow. Ayase was great once you got past her phase of abusing Shu and her random inferiority episode, but I still had to get past those parts to get to the point where I actually liked her.

This leads me into Guilty Crown's huge problem. The writing. You can break it down into two separate writing issues, the characters, which I've already touched on a little, and the story, which is laughable at points. I think the characters are the big problem in the first half of Guilty Crown, while the story is the big problem in the second half. Beginning with the first half is what I've alluded to previously: it's solely a beatdown of Shu for 12 whole episodes for what feels like no reason. The poor dude is just a socially troubled high schooler, who happens to stumble upon Inori while going to eat his lunch alone. She unreasonably tries to get him to help her and he's understandably reluctant, before deciding that his crush on her means he should. This leads him all the way down the rabbit hole into acquiring the Power of the King entirely on accident and saving Inori, delivering her to Funeral Parlor, the generic band of freedom fighting rebels, who attempt to recruit him. He declines. He literally wants no part of it, because he is a normal person and wants a normal life. Yet, Gai and Funeral Parlor force and manipulate him into joining and then proceed to do nothing but ridicule him episode after episode for being so halfhearted about all of it.

Don't get me wrong, Shu is a worthless carboard cutout of a welcome mat, but I couldn't help but really feel bad for him, constantly getting yelled at and manipulated into doing things he didn't want any part of. It really turned me off to the entirety of Funeral Parlor, sucking away all my sympathy for them. I was even on the side of Segai when he was coercing Shu to betray them. Somehow, I don't quite think that's the feeling the writers had in mind for me there. There was a scene where Inori straight up tells Shu that Gai told her to essentially seduce him so he'd work with them. Afterwards, I was only sitting there thinking that Shu had absolutely zero reason to care about Funeral Parlor at that point, because Inori was his only reason for even reluctantly helping them to that point and Gai had messed even that up. I could go on and on about how many times writing of that nature that came up, where the writers were trying to tell you to feel some way, but in reality, I felt the opposite.

I'll go into far less detail with the story because, honestly, by the time the story becomes an issue, the damage is already done and I almost guarantee that any watcher will be so checked out that they'll just be laughing instead. To be fair, in the first half, the story is okay. Passable, given the nature of the character writing that you'll be slogging through, but it really falls apart once Gai 'dies' in episode 12. If we were being honest, it should have ended there and saved itself some story points. Guilty Crown just loses all sense at that point. Gai is back somehow, people betray each other pointlessly, characters die without any impact, et cetera, et cetera.

Guilty Crown is just something of a poster child for "how not to write a plot and characters". It blows my mind that something with such a great foundation and technical prowess could fall so short in delivering something that, at the very least, could have been forgettable. Instead, we get something that is disappointing and irritating, because all the promise was there, even if Code Geass, Evangelion, and the many other shows that it obviously took inspiration from had told Guilty Crown's story better.

All this disappointment isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it at times, but I certainly had more moments where I just sat there thinking "why" instead. Which leads me to the conclusion that I can't really recommend Guilty Crown to anyone. I could see a world where I recommend it to someone who hasn't seen much anime, because it's not as disappointing when you haven't seen the shows it takes inspiration from. Once you have, however, the magic is all but gone. Those stories and characters make Guilty Crown look worse and worse the more you see those. In the end, Guilty Crown can only take the crown of a let down.