Anime Review: Guilty Crown

Recently, I finished watching an anime called Guilty Crown. It was mostly because my idiot older brother wouldn't shut up about it. He even ventured to call we a weaboo. How. Dare. He. (Nothing against weaboos he just didn’t respect my opinions involving anime.)

Anyway, the anime I’ve heard resembles Code Geass so the next thing that I will be (hopefully) watching next will be that. I’ll review them separately and then if I’m not too lazy to do it, I’ll do a comparison between the two. Anyway, it is time to review.

Guilty Crown is an anime adaptation of a manga with the same name by Hiroyuki Yoshino. Licensed by Funimation and Madman, Guilty Crown is an anime that revolves around Shu Ouma. Complaining about life (let’s admit it, we all do it sometimes) he accidentally gets involved with a terrorist group called The Undertakers, when he witnesses one of the members get kidnapped. He knows her by Inori of the internet singing group Egoist Deciding to help rescue her, after some influence from the terrorists group leader Gai, he gains the power of the “Power of the Kings” through a genome, developed from an apocalyptic virus that caused a mad Pandemic one Christmas some years ago. His new power gives him abilities to where he can pull materialized souls of teenagers, called Voids, out of their bodies and use them. Of course it continues but I wouldn't want to spoil too much.

While I personally did not like the main character for the majority of the 22 episode series, he was a very natural character. By that I mean he was human, and made and thought in a way a normal person would. I personally related more to Gai than to Shu, but that’s just me. Not that, that had anything serious to do with the character development, just saying.

Anyway, concerning the cast of characters, their was a rather large cast of characters that were focused on. Despite that, they were all memorable in some way to the plot to the point where you at least knew their name and their personality. Every character had some kind of importance and made some kind of change in the movement of the story, even if at first it doesn't seem to look that there in anyway important.

One thing with character relationships that I didn't like was the romance between Inori and Shu and just Inori in general. She didn’t really have any character at all. Inori is a bland character that more than halfway through the show, starts to show….something? I’m not really sure how to explain this. She was, and then she wasn’t in love with Shu. And suddenly it became blind obedience. It was confusing and not thought out or believable in any way. She was the one failing thing I saw in all of the characters.

In this picture you can really see what I'm talking about with the vast amount of characters.
 But you'll be able to recognize pretty much all of them. (not counting the (XXX'X XXXX XXXX)

For animation, it was all pretty fluid and good. You can see it in the beautifully animated opening. I mean, come on. Look at it.

Amazing. The rest of the show sticks with this same kind of animation as well. On that note, the music is fairly good as well. On the average more as it. Not anything you’ll really be wanting to download anytime soon. Other than the opening song (“Dearly Beloved”) and the song sung by Inori (“Euterpe”) that are both by Supercell, it keeps it normal. The background music consists of soft or powerful instrumental music with towards the end, more of a rock sound.

Plot wise, it can be a little confusing.

You might not know what’s going on half the time and only part of the way understand what their doing and why. Some things you won’t completely understand until later in the story when they fully explain everything. It might be how it was supposed to be but if you don’t pay attention you’ll miss quite a bit of valuable information. There is part in the story where it takes a temporary turn, but the plot still flows properly. It’s almost like a checkpoint and then you go until the end.

Inori, Mana, Shu and Gai

Overall, the storyline was well thought out and finished other it be confusing from time to time. The characters were really well done and that is something that stood out the greatest in this anime (disregarding Inori) The animation is really great, not like SAO good but really good. OH! I almost forgot about the ending. It was extremely anticlimactic and forced. It left a feeling of incompleteness as they tried to jam in all the characters quick endings and personality turnarounds and how the main conflict was suddenly resolved. After that, they do a brief time skip and… well that’s something in itself. The ending of the anime probably made it a lot worse than it could have been. It personally pissed me off, but whatever.

If you don’t like bad endings, it’s a no-no but if you can stand that then it’s a fairly decent watch. Go ahead if you want.