|
Despite the fact that my inner critic is telling me, screaming at me in fact, to rate it lower, I'm rating it "Good". 7/10.
The positive things about Code Geass R2 is that it's ambitious, creative and has a lot of balls. It had these characters that, under most circumstances, would be completely loathesome, but the show made them vulnerable enough to still be sympathetic. Particularly Lelouch. I really appreciated the parallel in character development between Lelouch and Suzuka, in that, in a way, both of them "devolved" and were really hardened by their experiences and it actually (ironically) lead them become allies after being enemies after being friends in childhood. And yet, despite this, Lelouch still maintained a semblance of humanity up until the unfortunately ambiguous ending which actually brings this into question. And as far as entertainment value is concerned, I'm not going to debate that the show was a hell of a roller-coaster ride.
The big negative for me was too many plot twists. The pacing was too rampant and it was like a pit bull that someone just pricked with a needle. Every episode had one or more brick-shitting plot twist, and it just became too much. In a universe where anything can happen, who cares what really does? The pacing wasn't conducive to truly credible drama because things weren't allowed to develop properly. Issues and thematics were cast to one side in favour of shocking revelations and cat-and-mouse games of suspense (against who, exactly, is ultimately of little importance). Code Geass R2 isn't exactly a show that demands to be taken "seriously", so I can't really blame the people who didn't or couldn't. I was impressed by Zero Requiem which did actually fill in some of the holes of the very frustrating sequence of three or four episodes between about 19-22 (or there abouts, I can't remember the exact episode numbers) where hardly anything made sense, but in hindsight I thought the ambiguous ending was a cop-out (take note of the fact that people have interpreted it depending on what they'd prefer, so basically it made everyone happy, even if Lelouch is basically anime's version of Schrodinger's Cat) and it brought into question just what sort of person Lelouch was, when I thought we were given an answer in the very well executed (cinematic-wise) Zero Requiem scene.
So yeah, there's good and bad in this show. I enjoyed it, but I think its critics have tended to present more convincing arguments about its merits as a credible piece of storytelling and/or drama than its proponents.
This is actually my first post in the Geass subforum.
|