Ouma Shuu, Tsutsugami Gai, Yuzuriha Inori, Shinomiya Ayaze, Tsugumi, Daryl Yan
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「学園 isolation」 (Gakuen)
“School”
After the conclusion of “Guilty Crown season one” last week, I’m admittedly torn over the direction of this continuation. The new opening sequence foreshadows a much darker and gloomier tone with Shuu manning up in Gai’s absence, but the episode itself switches back to the school life side of things with a culture festival during a quarantine lockdown.
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「再誕 the lost christmas」 (Saitan)
“Resurrection”
Did I just watch the finale? Because it sure felt like I watched the finale. Every subtle development that’s been built up so far culminated to a finale-worthy conclusion — and in ways that were fairly satisfying too.
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「軌跡 reassortment」 (Kiseki)
For a one-hour recap special that added absolutely nothing new — not even from the small amounts of narration — this felt like a pilot episode more than anything else. Viewing it as such, I dare say it was a pretty darn good one too because it cut out all the irksome developments and simply focused on all the stuff that makes Guilty Crown good.
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「共鳴 resonance」 (Kyoumei)
Considering how the last episode went, this week’s was definitely a step in the right direction. Most of my complaints about Shuu’s flakiness were addressed with him coming clean with his friends about his Void Genome; however, just as things were looking up, the writers had to script in the most unconvincing reason to get them to help him save Funeral Parlor — “They believed in me.”
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「縮退 retraction」 (Shukutai)
I’d like to think that I’m pretty forgiving as far as anime goes — particularly when it comes to overused stereotypes — but while Guilty Crown’s done a decent job of avoiding that pitfall lately, there always seems to be something else that rubs me the wrong way. This time it was Shuu and almost everything about his character.
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「捕食 prey」 (Hoshoku)
At times, it feels like Guilty Crown is on the verge of shaking off the jitters from a rocky start, but every time the series is about to, it has a knack for injecting a sudden development with no precedence or build-up and expecting viewers to get emotionally invested in the subsequent scenes.
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「夏日 courtship behavior」 (Natsubi)
“Summer’s Day”
It’s a breath of fresh air to see someone other than Gai take the initiative, though I never thought I’d be saying that about Hare of all people.
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「輪舞 temptation」 (Rinbu)
“Round Dance”
More so than what kind of series Guilty Crown is trying to be, this latest episode left me wondering what kind of series the writers want it to be.
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「檻 leukocytes」 (Ori)
“Cage”
I haven’t been as harsh on Guilty Crown as some viewers who may or may not be trying to find faults with it simply because it’s popular, but that doesn’t mean I’m not looking at it objectively either. If there’s something that I find irksome, you can be rest assured that I’ll bring it up, much like in this sixth episode where I felt there was a serious discontinuity in the characters’ behavior from the previous week.
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「訓練 a preparation」 (Kunren)
In the back of my mind, I knew better than to trust a pretty face and already suspected that Gai might be using Inori to get Shuu to join them, but I’m still kind of disappointed with the cold shoulder that Inori’s giving Shuu all of a sudden. The only thing worse than a tease is a tease with a manipulative ulterior motive, regardless of whether she’s simply following orders or not.