Arcane Reviews: Guilty Crown

Guilty Crown

Hello ladies, peoples, and animals it is I, the Arcane Reviewer! Fear not I am here to bring you a new review for all of you. Oh boy this is gonna be fun. To jump from the awesome that was Madoka Magica to the ahh......potential that is this weeks review which the anime that hit 2011 with minimal storm. I bring you the Guilty Crown review, enjoy.

Story:

Guilty Crown takes place in a future where Japan needs help from the U.N. due to a event which cut down Japan's population. This even t is called Lost Christmas and the results were a new type of virus called the Apocalypse Virus, a sickness that give the infected crystal like skin which consumes their whole body. It is in this future that we meet our main character Shu Ouma, a 17 year high school student who is just pretty much moving through the motions of life with no real purpose. This all changes when he meets Inori Yuzuriha, a beautiful but mysterious young women who is most known for in this world for making YouTube like music videos. No I'm not kidding. Inori ends up pulling Shu into the world of  Funeral Parlor (Or the Undertakers if you watch the Japanese dub) a rebellion organization that is fighting agents the dictator like government of this new Japan. During this war between the two is where Shu gets a hold of the Guilty Crown, a weapon that allows the user to pull the Void out of a person and use as a weapon. Voids are pretty much the object representation of that person's personality and feelings. So with all the pieces in place and a pretty interesting plot you'd think that Guilty Crown would be a collection of pure badass and enjoyment right? Well no, in fact Guilty Crown is kinda shit in the story apartment. The story in the first 12 episodes were actually really fucking good! I was having so much fun with and I couldn't get enough of it too. But then they decided to drop the ball really, really, really fucking hard for the last 10 episodes. The story itself started to fall apart and the quality of the anime's writing also started to suffer a lot. I really feel like the writers after they wrote first half of this show they just looked at each other and said "Fuuuuuck I'm all out of ideas." You can really see the huge drop later in the show and it kinda broke my heart watching it. This show that I was loving is just turning to crap! So yeah story isn't great here. Starts out strong but then falls flat on it's ass.

Animation:

Holy shit this show looks gooooooood! Sorry about that but yeah this anime looks really damn good. Production I.G is behind this one and I'll be damned if they didn't give it their all for this one. The animation is top notch here and it never drops at all for all 22 episodes. Simple little things like background and scenery is given full attention to detail and all the fight scenes in here all just awesome to watch! Just about everything in this anime is given a lot of detail and handled with care and I love it all. So even if the story is shit at least the anime looks pretty.

Music:

Well what can I say? This soundtrack is amazing! From full orchestral themes to full blown J-pop tracks made for the show and including one of the best intros to an anime that I've seen in a long time. So as you can guess the music here is once again top notch. Tracks were mainly used for the fight scenes and they fit pretty damn well. All orchestral themes are used to emphasize the drama of the moment and I'll be damned if it didn't actually made said moments more important or just more suspenseful. So once again music saves Guilty Crown here.

Characters:

Now this here is pretty much a mixed bag. While you have some pretty damn good characters that actually get full and complete character arcs like Shu, Inori, Yhiro, Ayase, and Hare. But then you get characters that start off good but then became irrelevant or had their characters completely rewritten for no reason what so ever like Gai, Arisa, Daryl, and Haruka. The anime does build up some good characters but once again after episode 12 a lot of them get completely new personalities or hell just aren't in the show at all afterwards. Then you have characters change all motivation then what was established in the earlier episodes because.....I don't really fucking know except for the fact that the writers had no fucking clue what to do with these people so they just went fuck all lets make them do this now with no explanation what so ever. Which is shitty fucking writing! 

Nitpicks (Warning: Spoilers Ahead!!!):

What didn't I like about this anime? Well aside from the drop in quality in the later half of the show, the complete disregard of making a new climax for the last episode and just literally redoing the climax in episode 12, and the awful rewriting of characters! The thing that I really fucking hated about this show is the ending. The ending was just fucking awful. The shows ends (Mind you after redoing the climax in episode 12) with Shu not only going blind but guess what? Inori dies for some unexplained reason as well! Yup the show has a sad ending just for the sake ofn having a sad ending and it didn't even earn that sad ending at all. Though out the later half of the show, almost every character ends up getting killed. So many characters die that it realloy becomes a normal thing and ends up losing all impact that a death should have. Now this is not to say that Inori's death wasn't sad but I felt like it lacked all the emotional depth that it should have because you've seen so many main characters die you can guess that Inori isn't going to get out lucky by the end of this show. Not only that but me being the romantic that I am I find it very fucked up to not only to kill the secondary main character who was also the main love interest but you make the main character fucking blind and alone only ever able to see the woman he loves in the music she left behind for him. Yeah no show you can go fuck yourself.

Overall:

To ends this review I guess I can say that Guilty Crown is just a big disappointment. While the animation and music was great and the first half of the show being amazing I can't really say the same for the second half. I do not recommend this anime to anyone but I feel like I have to point out that the first 12 episodes I do recommend just not the last 10. I still get some pleasure out of this show from my own personal stand point but as a critic I have to say this show is bad.

Arcane Reviewer gives Guilty Crown a 5 out of 10.