Animation/Design/Visuals: 9/10
Gorgeous character designs from Redjuice with great animation by Production IG, the visual effects from drawing out voids was particuarly nice. Overall very little to complain about in this department apart from some off-model art towards the latter 1/3 of the show.
Soundtrack: 9/10
Hiroyuki Sawano delivers a superb soundtrack once again. The songs by Supercell were also excellent although I much preferred the vocalist Chelly(ed1+op2) over Koeda(op1+ed2).
Story: 3/10
The main story ideas (apocalypse virus, voids, endlaves) had some potential but was marred by poor execution throughout.
Script/Writing/Characters: 2/10
Here is Guilty Crown's biggest flaw imo. The writing is inconsistant at best but mostly just plain bad.
Shu was not a likeable lead character for me personally despite getting all the development, everyone else was severely underdeveloped and as a consequence never really felt alive, they felt like tools - only acting as smart or as dumb as the plot requires to move things forward.
Villans were of the cardboard cutout variety, the Da'art thing went nowhere and was brushed aside with a
very vague and lazy explaination.
The lack of any truly likeable and sympathetic characters meant that any emotional investment was pretty much non-existant.
Possibly the only redeeming quality was the script could be hilariously bad at times (my king's powerrrrrrr!!!
).
Voice Acting: 6/10
Competent performances all round which is about as much as you could ask for when the script is this bad...
Overall: 3/10
Wasted potential is how I'd sum up Guilty Crown, with better writing this could have been the blockbuster worthy of it's initial hype.
A real shame.