
a review by C00kieMaster

a review by C00kieMaster
What the actual F I just watched? I am less confused after leaving the cinemas watching Christoper Nolan's TENET for the first time than I am watching this mess of a whatever its called.
Evidently I am absolutely flabbergasted by what is going on most of the time watching this but I will try to explain the premise the BEST I can. Guilty Crown is about a boy living in a post apocalyptic Japan where there seems to be some dangerous crystal virus going about. The government is taken over by a somewhat tyrannical administration that kills all that is suspected of being infected. Then obviously rebel groups emerge to confront this tyranny and the boy somehow gets intertwined with the fight and later he becomes a major main character. Many other THINGS happen along the way which are basically ass pulls in a really pathetic attempt to string half-baked events together.
Lets just get whatever positives out of the way first, voice acting, animation, art, music are pretty good. They are ok. The action scenes are not bad at all and in fact they are the most entertaining part of the series for me.
Ok lets start with the characters... They ALL suck and there are SO MANY OF THEM. Honestly the main character Shu is the only one that I somewhat feel is OKAY. He is stupid, really stupid but later he gets smarter, he learns from his mistakes and he makes an effort to be a better or more competent person and OK that is pretty cool. Other than him the other characters are so badly written. Lack of personality, lack of understandable motivations, contradictions to what little character traits they have, sudden change of personality, etc. If I want to write a dissertation of how awful each character is written I guarantee I can make a 10k essay. For example one of the villains in the show is basically a literal psychopath that wants to experience up close the fancy lights when Shu uses his power. That is his driving force, that is his motivation to be evil... To see fancy lights...
And there is this absolute waste of animation resource.

If you seen this show you will know exactly what I mean. This is such a stupid pointless caricature of a evil character that adds NOTHING to the story but is given so much unnecessary screen time. I have no idea what the writer is trying to do with this stupid guy. You will know what I mean when you see that there are some scenes where it is obvious the writer is trying to somewhat give him a sad backstory and other scenes somewhat try to make him seem sympathetic. He is introduced as an evil guy, then he have family issues, then he gets a crush with one of the girls on the good side, then in a battle he have doubts and save her, then later try to kill them again, then before his whole organization gets destroyed some literal RANDO character saves him and tell him to be a good person.
The character I described above is definitely the worse and thus I vividly remember how bad the character writing was for him. But as I said ALL the characters (except Shu... he is cringe but the writing quality is ok for him i guess) Suck! Both on the good faction and the evil faction. And many of them seem to develop personality traits and characteristics on a whim which just feels like an ass pull. There is another character other than Shu that I think is pretty ok tho, but ultimately the reason that character does not annoy me is because that character literally DIES early on giving little chance to be ruined.
Alright how about the plot? There are a lot of ASS PULLS. I cannot remember another show where I seen so much ass pulls to try string together a mess of a story. The whole mystery of the virus, where it came from, who is responsible is never even touched upon in the first half of the series. Sometimes they try to insert some flashbacks to insinuate a promise of an exciting larger arching story later. But as I watched the series in the second half where the writer is forced to piece together and string all these exposition together because the story is nearing its conclusion, for me at least it is obvious they never planned it out properly and now is relying on really insultingly dumb ass pulls to wrap all the random sequence of events up. Not only that, there are MANY stupid writing choices that just makes me cringe. Example: 1st episode this girl is being hunted by the government because she has ties to a terrorist group... later she attends public school like its nobodies business... furthermore her appearance/identity did not change... furthermore she is a famous pop singer... WHAT THE F? There are many dumb writings like similar to this that makes absolutely no sense.
In conclusion, the characters sucks, the story sucks and they do not make any sense, music is fine, fight animations are pretty dope. The PACING IS SO SLOW. I don't want to write another paragraph talking about how the episodes seem to be filled with nonsense most of the time or just drag out simple events in the story which sometimes do not even contribute in any way to the main plot... if there even is one...
41.5 out of 53 users liked this review