Guilty Crown has two priorities: to make the audience sad, and to make Shu Ouma miserable. How the story intends to reach those goals, however, is sorely lacking in elegance. There are too many things happening in the plot. We have a Japanese rebellion, needlessly cruel military, supernatural powers, a bizarre, do-anything virus from outer space, the struggles of teenagehood, and Adam and Eve references are even thrown in. Guilty Crown is juggling too much at once and it just turns out being a mess. Events spring up and advancements in story occur so quickly and randomly that the only way to possibly keep the audience up to date is to sloppily spout exposition and have the characters say "it's as I feared" as if that justifies whatever new direction the story shoots into.
Characters are also extremely two-dimensional, and any "developments" they have typically feel undeserved. Inori seems to jump from indifferent, to madly in love with Shu without visually showing the progress of their relationship. Gai can be ruthless one second, and caring the next, but we are never shown any consequences for having this side of him. Basically, every character behaves how they need to behave depending on the episode or situation. Shu is an ordinary boy with no hint of anything special one episode, to having supernatural powers, to suddenly, coincidentally being the cause of the entire plot. It's all so fabricated. The only character who has a coherent character arc is Daryl, and he isn't even given a proper conclusion. *Ayase also gets decent development in the second half.
Beautiful animations and an admittedly unique and interesting concept for the void powers cannot save this anime from a complete wreck in the story department. I don't think the writers could decide what they wanted Guilty Crown to be. It at first seemed like your typical anime about a boy overcoming social-awkwardness by finding his brave side, but then it spirals into alien/religious/hyper science/powers-that-be territory and it never straightens itself out. And the hastily thrown together epilogue does nothing to put into place just what happened over the past 22 episodes.
Dark and Edgy, but messy
Guilty Crown has two priorities: to make the audience sad, and to make Shu Ouma miserable. How the story intends to reach those goals, however, is sorely lacking in elegance. There are too many things happening in the plot. We have a Japanese rebellion, needlessly cruel military, supernatural powers, a bizarre, do-anything virus from outer space, the struggles of teenagehood, and Adam and Eve references are even thrown in. Guilty Crown is juggling too much at once and it just turns out being a mess. Events spring up and advancements in story occur so quickly and randomly that the only way to possibly keep the audience up to date is to sloppily spout exposition and have the characters say "it's as I feared" as if that justifies whatever new direction the story shoots into.
Characters are also extremely two-dimensional, and any "developments" they have typically feel undeserved. Inori seems to jump from indifferent, to madly in love with Shu without visually showing the progress of their relationship. Gai can be ruthless one second, and caring the next, but we are never shown any consequences for having this side of him. Basically, every character behaves how they need to behave depending on the episode or situation. Shu is an ordinary boy with no hint of anything special one episode, to having supernatural powers, to suddenly, coincidentally being the cause of the entire plot. It's all so fabricated. The only character who has a coherent character arc is Daryl, and he isn't even given a proper conclusion. *Ayase also gets decent development in the second half.
Beautiful animations and an admittedly unique and interesting concept for the void powers cannot save this anime from a complete wreck in the story department. I don't think the writers could decide what they wanted Guilty Crown to be. It at first seemed like your typical anime about a boy overcoming social-awkwardness by finding his brave side, but then it spirals into alien/religious/hyper science/powers-that-be territory and it never straightens itself out. And the hastily thrown together epilogue does nothing to put into place just what happened over the past 22 episodes.