First, the facts: I enjoyed
Shin Sekai Yori a
lot more than
Psycho Pass. I thought the
Shin Sekai Yori ending made its point brilliantly, whereas I didn't really get the point behind the
Psycho Pass ending. Note that I'm talking about my intuition, here, and that a "point" isn't necessarily something that I can define. I felt the SSY ending was very satisfying and redeemed some of the show's flaws. PP... I wasn't dissatisfied, I wans't satisfied; the show just ended.
I don't think there's that much difference in terms of hope. I disagree about Akane:
I find Akane and Saki pretty much on par, with Saki better positioned to actually work change, but one person can only do so much.
My biggest problem with PP was ultimately the basic concept. SSY has set up a situation that's
very hard to resolve even ethically. The social controls in place feel
necessary. With PP, we have a system without any perceived need. What would happen if you went back to a human-run system? I thought PP failed to justify the system.
Why do we have Sybil? What's the point? I wasn't fond of the Sybil reveal:
Spoiler:
Brains in a jar? They set up an interesting question: what if we could scientifically judge people and put them where they're the happiest? If that actually worked, we'd have an interesting set up. What does the psychopath-brains-in-a-jar aspect add? Very little. It makes the show harder to take seriously (how did such a thing get started, in the first place?). It lessens the trust in the system and thus undermines the dilemma, making it easier to choose a side. In theory, the we-want-Makishima-as-part-of-our-collective should have made things more interesting. We demonstrate that outsiders have a more objective view of the situation, and then we demonstrate that there's something said outsiders won't get... But in the end, all we get in Makishima is a spoilt brat who was never punished and felt lonely for it. That made Makishima vs. Kougami seem to me like typical shounen rivals. None of their two fights actually moved me in any way, and I half wished they'd just take out each other. It's a pity they focussed on that so much. PP was at its strongest, when it dealt with character, but the nature of the plot distracted from characterisation more often than not. In the end, I felt that character resolution and setting/plot resolution was at odds. The conflict between Kougami and Makishima, rather than enhancing all the philosophy about utopias, distracted from it.
Finally, I think SSY did a
much better job at displaying a crisis:
Spoiler for crisis comparison:
PP suffered from uniform crowd behaviour. People beat others up in the street? Everyone watches with pretty much the same expression. Violence is uniformly over the top... It's all really just for effect.
SSY? Regular people: crack under pressure, go gung-ho to relieve stress, find stength in the hour of need, let themselves be riled up for genocide... When it all goes to hell, unnamed characters in SSY show us pretty much the entire range of emotions - fear, compassion, courage, despair... and that's just for walk-on characters.
To me, this more than anything else, shows that SSY is more interested in the exploration of its subject. PP, instead, focusses on pretty standard dystopia tropes, but it doesn't really transcend them in the way SSY does. I still enjoyed PP, but I can't say I felt they're on a level. SSY was much, much better. The ending is really only an expression of that.