It’s the distant future. After being ravaged by a devastating ~~war~~ plague, the once glorious nation of Japan has lost it’s independence and sovereignty to ~~Brittania~~ several other nations. One day, a teenage boy has a chance encounter with a mysterious ~~green~~ pink haired girl on the run from the oppressive foreign power. This girl, known as ~~CC~~ Inori, grants him the mysterious power known as ~~Geass~~ Power of Kings, thus turning his life upside down as he finds himself thrusted into the conflict. With a faction of freedom fighting extremists and his own classmates by his side, he’ll have to decide whether to treat them as comrades or pawns as he puts everything on the line to ~~return his homeland to providence~~ protect those around him and preserve the status quo!

There’s a lot you can say about Guilty Crown, and I’m going to in due time, but if there’s one thing you can’t criticize it for, it’s the production values. As soon as I mention the name of Studio IG, you’ll probably be expecting some of the most high quality visuals of the time, and in this case you’d be right. Guilty Crown is so well produced that I genuinely can’t tell whether it had a good budget or not, and that’s some rare praise for me. The 2D animation isn’t flawless... With the amount of expensive CG that went into this show, it was never going to be... But corners were cut so smoothly that you might never notice. Characters move exactly as much as they need to in order to not look stiff or like the slightly mouth-moving key frames the medium usually presents us with, never dipping too low and never showing off too recklessly. The only part that’s kind of inconsistent is the direction, as there are occasional shots that aren’t framed quite right.

There’s a ton of 3D animation in this show, as it it does take place in the future and there’s advanced technology everywhere you look, and since that’s almost exclusively what the CG assets were used for, the sense of visual dissonance between 2D and 3D animation actually helps it to blend far seemlessly than you’d expect. It would be fair to say that a lot of the technology was designed to look futuristic rather than have any clear function, but it’s sci-fi, that’s just part of the package with this genre, and it all either looks cool or fades into the background unobtrusively. The characters are equally generic, but with very little exception, they all still look good. The only ones who really look distinct in any way are Inori, the character whose pink and red aesthetic is supposed to make her stand out against everyone else; Ayase, one of the only disabled characters I’ve ever seen in anime who wasn’t just being used to amplify some weird tragedy porn; and Guy, the resistance leader who, I’m sorry, looks really bland given his position in the show.

There’s actually a pretty interesting story regarding the music. When this series was in production, auditions were held for the in-universe band Egoist, and they actually formed a full fledged pop duo to sing the show’s theme music. With newcomer Chelly officially providing Inori’s singing voice, Egoist actually outlived the series, and they’re still active to this day. I’ve listened to some of the music they’ve made since, and it kind of slaps, even if my dumb monolingual ass can’t fully appreciate it. Hiroyuki Sawano spared no expense in bringing professional musicians in to provide original songs to the soundtrack, including pop star Mika Kobayashi and previous collaborators David Whitaker and Aimee Blackschleger, creating an epic bilingual soundtrack that’s punctuated by an equally powerful array of BGMs. The animation is superb, but if you know Sawano from shows like Attack on Titan, you’ll have no issue believing that the music is by far this show’s highest quality.

The english dub was a Funimation effort, and they hired out a good mix of company staples and(at the time) lesser known names. That might just have something to do with the excessive number of named characters in the cast, but it IS well cast. Most of the casting is safe, but still smart, with Inori adding an almost alien-like softness to Inori, Emily Neves playing up the strength, pride and vulnerability that are constantly at war within Ayase, and Monica Rial doing a solid job on a peppy catgirl character who pretty much had the words “Monica Rial character” stapled to her the moment she was drawn, but there are two surprising duds in the cast... The two male leads. Micah Solusod is good at playing cool characters with a bad boy edge, but Gai is just too cold and humorless to really convey his talents, and as a result, his performance is a bit boring. Austin Tindle didn’t do too much better with Shuu, as there’s really nothing interesting about him outside of his involvement in the plot, but I can’t help but feel someone like Aaron Dismuke could have added personality where there was none. Tindle does what he can, but he feels lost, thrown astray by every insane turn of the plot. It’s a good dub for the most part, but the prominence of these two roles really hurts it for me.

Believe it or not, Guilty Crown used to be a very popular show. It might sound surprising now, given just how far the series has fallen out of the public consciousness, but I can distinctly remember it having a considerable fanbase, which included the person who got me to watch it. It was so popular in fact that when I finally sat down with it, I was almost kicked out of a few anime facebook groups for roasting it. I made fun of it for being unoriginal, for having a dumb plot full of unlikeable characters, but the specific joke I remember telling back then was “If you were writing an essay in this universe, and you ran out of ink, there’d be someone three feet away from you with a fresh pen hidden in their chest.” I guess you could blame all that on the over-all ‘toxic positivity’ attitude that plagued the internet the time, but I said worse about far worse shows and aside from my Heroic Age review, I didn’t get called out for any of those.

I never reviewed it back when I was running my blog because I didn’t want to rewatch it, and I didn’t know how I could review it other than just nitpicking it to death, but now that I’m finally writing again as a hobby, I figured I’d take another look at it. It’s been over five years since my first time through it, and this time... Honestly, I came away feeling very differently. This review is not going to go the way I thought it would. That’s not to say I think it’s a good show, but it’s bad for several reasons that I hadn’t considered back then... and the show’s infamous rip-offs of other anime aren’t one of them. First off, let’s talk about rip-offs. Personally, I don’t think that kind of unoriginality is necessarily a bad thing. Just because you stole an idea doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to use it that’s smart, that elevates the material you’re producing, and that shows respect to what came before.

Honestly, the stuff Guilty Crown stole work pretty well for the most part. It’s nowhere near as poignant as the stuff Rozen Maiden 2013 stole from Chobits, but it’s also not as lazy as everything Your Lie in April stole from Clannad. As far as usage goes, it’s somewhere between the two. On the other hand, it made up for this by stealing from an unexpectedly large number of sources. As you may have guessed from my plot synopsis, they lifted a lot from Code Geass, but there’s also some obvious influence from Evangelion and Eureka 7. Hell, there’s even some Steins;Gate in there if you know where to look. Again, it doesn’t use these rip-offs poorly, but with this many of them at once, it feels like a smart pastiche of the genre and more like what Jurassic Park scientists did to frog DNA.

Before I get to my actual issues with this show, I’m just going to get this other point out of my way quickly, since it’s not connected to anything else I have to say. Guilty Crown has not aged very well, and I’m not talking about Shuu’s ‘nice guy’ attitude towards Gai and Inori. The premise, as we’re told, is that Japan lost it’s independence and sovereignty because they were being ravaged by a deadly pandemic, and they trusted in other countries offering them aid. They essentially traded their freedom for a vaccine that barely works. If this anime came out today, it would get memed to death by right wing conspiracy nutjobs, and you can not convince me otherwise.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to say something that, as far back as a week ago, I had never even thought. Guilty Crown is not a lazy anime. I don’t know if it was the director, or the producers, or someone on the writing staff, or hell, maybe it was all of them, but there had to be at least one person in a high position during production that genuinely wanted Guilty Crown to become the next big thing. I don't actually think all the stuff they stole from other anime is there to cut corners, even if it kinda feels that way at points... I think it’s there because the creators were deeply inspired by those titles, and in their efforts to replicate the feeling they got from them, they just sort of unintentionally ripped them off. Guilty Crown plays like an anime that knows what good stories look like. It strives to provide depth, complexity, character development and earth shattering plot twists, but as I’ve said in other reviews, the purest of intentions can be worthless if you don’t have the talent or experience necessary to realize your ambitions.

You’ve probably heard the term ‘bad writing’ applied to this series, right? The best way I can describe what it is specifically that doesn’t work about the writing is to provide examples, but considering how dense the plot to this show is, I’m going to have to cherry-pick to avoid spoilers.

1: In an early episode, Shuu meets Ayase, and immediately makes a remark about her being disabled, which causes her to judo-flip him on his ass, establishing to the audience that she’s the kind of proud badass “I can do it all on my own’ kind of person. The problem with this is that Shuu’s comment was wildly out of character, and feels forced in order to set up her reaction.

2: Not too much later, he wakes up in bed naked, no idea where his clothes are. Ayase barges in on him naked, screams and slaps him(despite being ten feet away and, oh yeah, stuck in a wheelchair) and then reveals she has a pen that belongs to him, that he needs back for spoiler reasons. She doesn’t know it’s his, despite acknowledging that she found it in his pocket. She uses it as incentive to motivate him through some trials, and he agrees, instead of calling her out and demanding his property back.

3: In episode 12, we get Shuu’s backstory. There are at least half a dozen plot twists in this flashback, and while they all should have felt massive and game-changing, they ALL come directly out of nowhere, with no set up, answering almost no questions that viewers had up until that point. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Master of Martial Hearts had better foreshadowing than this show.

The weird thing is, I don’t even think the twists in that episode were unplanned. I think they were a part of the show’s original outline, the problem is... Well, all three examples have the same problem, really. Guilty Crown knows what it wants to do. It knows what it wants to be. Whether it’s an epic line delivery, a memorable character moment or a heart-stopping reaction from the audience that they’re trying to capture, they know damn well what the destination is, but they never, ever know how to get there, and their attempts to do so usually result in Shuu looking bad in some way; He comes off as a condescending ass in his introduction to Ayase, then a doormat when she takes his pen, and everything we learn about his past does a big collective nothing for him as a character. The only detail we learn about him (At least that people were asking at that point) is that there actually WAS a reason for him specifically to get wrapped up in all this. That’s right, it takes half the run time of the series to learn than Shuu wasn’t just a random bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Shuu does develop through the course of the story. He is constantly present throughout, and as such, every little turn of the plot affects him in some way. He’s constantly being challenged and tested, forced to make tough decisions, and then forced to deal with the consequences of the war he’s embroiled in, and it’s more than fair to say that he’s not the same person at the end of the series that he was in the beginning on the series... The problem is, there was nothing interesting about him in the beginning, and every single thing we learn about him has something to do with the plot. He starts out as a slightly weak-willed lego brick, brave in some scenes but cowardly in others, with no real values or distinctive traits to speak of. As much development as he gets, it’s all just so basic, to the point that after everything you see him go through, you’re still not sure you know him, outside of him being kind of tougher and wiser. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the last person who would ever praise Shinji Ikari, but at least I knew who the fuck he was, and why he was the main character, even if he was terrible at it.

And the same goes for the rest of the cast. With the exception of Ayase, who starts off on a bad foot but eventually gets really likeable down the road, not one character has an interesting or unique personality. While that might just be a side effect of there being too many characters in general, the ones we do get err pretty close to the territory of cliches. Of course there’s an uptight class rep. Of course there’s a peppy cat girl. Of course there’s a comic relief loser who’s far more girl-crazy than the protagonist. Of course there’s a girl who’s hopelessly in love with the protagonist. Of course the two main villains are an effeminate psycho in weird face paint and a cold-hearted bastard with long white hair, because as we should all know by now, the two most popular villain archetypes in anime are discount versions of Kefka and Sephiroth. Inori is supposed to be some pop star... From the group Egoist, just like in real life... You never see that side of her life, you just take her at her word... And you already know how I feel about Gai. For a freedom fighting resistance leader and force of personality, he’s just some gai.

Just like Shuu, you barely get to know any character outside of their journey through the plot. And while we’re on the subject, the plot is paced terribly. There’s very little room for anyone to breathe for more than five minutes at a time, and the story never slows down. I think part of the reason we don’t get to know anybody very well is because we almost never get to see them in low stakes, low stress situations. The plot is always turning, always changing, there’s some new setback lurking around every corner, and it’s just too much. Every victory is met with some new betrayal before you have a chance to celebrate. The only time anything happens that you’re able to feel anything towards, it’s in those rare moments where some big scene they were trying to build up actually winds up working, and while such scenes are few and far between, they do offer a glimpse into the anime they were TRYING to make. The climax of episode 19, for example, is amazing.

I wanted to hate this show. I wanted to come in, ego swinging before me, and call it totally worthless, a so-bad-it’s-good trainwreck at best that I’d recommend specifically for shits and giggles. Instead, what I found was a deeply flawed passion project that just feels so tragically underwhelming compared to what it was intended to be. I’ve been reviewing anime for a long time, and while I might have stuck to my guns at one point, I know when to eat crow and admit I was wrong. I’m sorry I made fun of you, Guilty Crown. You were always bad, but you tried. You really tried, and I appreciate the effort.

Guilty Crown is available from Funimation, most recently released as part of their Essentials collection. A series of short chibi comedy skits is available alongside them, but I don’t know if the 15 minute prequel ova Lost Christmas is there as well. The manga, which premiered a month after the anime and outlived it by a fair margin, is not available stateside. In-universe band Egoist is still active and releasing music to this day.

Guilty Crown is one hell of a mixed bag. It exceeds admirably in some areas, such as the animation and the music, but falls short to some degree just about everywhere else. It tries to be way more than the sum of it’s parts, but those parts do not add up to very much. If it had a shorter run time, like 13 episodes rather than 22, I’d recommend it purely as a curiosity, but at 22 episodes, it’s hard to justify the time that would go into it. One thing I can say to it’s credit is that it’s not boring. I was able to watch this in the wee hours of the morning on a work night without drifting off, and there are far superior anime that I can’t say that about. Sadly, that’s more of a consolation prize than honest praise, and while I may have come away from it with more respect than I went in with, it’s still just not a very good anime.

I give Guilty Crown a 4/10.