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When this season started, there were two highly anticipated shows. One was Geass, the other was Macross. Both had a very solid footing. Macross had 25 years to build off of, Geass had a highly successful first season. But, in the end, Macross knew what to do, which Geass ran out of ideas.
Geass's strong point to me was the music. They stopped doing some of the non-traditional synth stuff and started working with a very traditional background. The song at the end of episode 25 was beautiful, the song at the exile was amazing, OP2 was really goot, etc. Season 1 sort of overdid everything music wise making it less amusing to listen to, but I was able to listen to this season a second time without problems. Yes, I do listen to anime without watching it the second time through.
Visually, Geass was also superb. Going with full high deph video, and never really losing the art form, it was able to create a very appealing visual experiance for the viewer.
So, the chips were well played, but it's plot was a complete trainwreck. At first, they made plot twists only happen at the end of the episodes. This is a nice tactic when working with a week to week fanbase, but it really failed to make the storyline progress. It was just filler-esque, where there was a problem, here's how Lelouche deals with it, onto the next episode.
It also introduced a whole bunch of new characters that were un-needed, and would have been better if they developed them more. Gino, Anya, Xian-ke, Tianzi-sama. Yeah, Anya is cute, but it's hard to say they developed her like C.C. or Kallen in the first season. These were all static characters given too much screen time who served no real purpose in the end. Only Anya did, and she could have easily been replaced by someone else.
One character I really got annoyed with was Kallen. Throughout the first season, they developed her, but once they got to this season she became nothing more than a hate machine. And then they had that whole captivity thing. I thought that would have been worth something in development, but instead she just went back to being nothing more than a ball of hate. By hate in here, I mean, her hate was what drove her.
Another thing that really annoyed me was "Refrain". This could have been a REALLY big thing if they made more out of it. But instead, it wasn't developed. It just was there, and we knew what some characters thought of it.
But, all of this could have been forgotten if Geass didn't have one fatal flaw. NOBODY CAN STAY DEAD! I wouldn't have minded a big revelation of somebody being alive at the end. Like, Marianne alone could have been fine. But if you kill a character off and bring them back, you lose credibility. It seems like Sunrise didn't realize this, so each one of their killings seemed so unlikely by the end. Heck, Suzaku wasn't even dead or 5 minutes.
And not telling us C.C.'s real name was just stupid. Don't make a big deal out of it if it's not important.
That's Geass in general. They made huge deals out of things that they failed to eventually develop.
Geass was better suited for a 37 episode continuous run than 2 25 episode seasons. There was far too much stupidity in this season.
It was a bad show, so I'll give it a 3.2 for bad.
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