Review of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

Overall: 97 Story: 90 Very interesting. It’s relatively political (fictional politics obviously), but I mostly ignored that kind of stuff and I understood the story fine. The main thing I like about this story is how it doesn’t always play out like you might expect. Since it doesn’t explain everything to you, it can just pull stuff out of nowhere that makes sense but also “twists” the plot in a surprising way. Once you finish season two, you can tell they had the whole thing (or at least most of it) planned ahead of time, because everything important starts developing early. I don’t like the ending ofthis season, though.

Art: 78
The art overall looks okay, most everything except the characters is not particularly stylized, so it’s not really good or bad, but I do like the character designs, although some people don’t. I guess I’ve always liked that kind of tall and lanky way of drawing anime characters, but it’s not for everyone.

Sound: 87
The soundtrack is mostly unnoticeable to me, with the exception of one or two tracks that are really good. The voice acting was pretty good, again, no problems but nothing stuck out to me. The OP’s and ED’s for some reason always felt out of place, but one I got used to them, I thought they were amazing (except OP 3), but some are better than others.

Characters: 81
The characters themselves are fairly good, they aren’t one-dimensional, and even seemingly unimportant characters are fairly developed in the first half of the season. I’m not one to talk about character designs, but I never thought a design was completely un-fitting of a character, regardless of how they are all drawn. Since the show is two 25-episode seasons, character development happens relatively slowly, thus the seemingly low score.

Enjoyment: 98
I did really enjoy this show a lot. There is nothing really impactful that I actually disliked. I’m not a big fan of the mecha genre, but it’s not a mecha show, per-se, it’s more focused on the character interactions and psychology, and characters fight in more ways than just one. This is the only philosophy-heavy show where that didn’t feel forced to me. I can actually get behind some of it, and even when you can’t relate, you know why they feel the way they do, but it also doesn’t feel like the show is trying to impart values on me, the characters just have reasons, i.e. motivations, that are clearly explained and, like I said, make sense given their circumstances.