Code Geass R2 – Well, pretty much Code Geass in general (again…..artbook scans coming soon)

After doing the year in review, I felt that I had missed out something rather important. After spending some time pondering over it, I realized that I had omitted Code Geass R2, which is probably one of the best anime series ever. Why is it so good? The answer is simply due to it being extremely shocking, and undeniably entertaining.

Overall, season 2 left me with rather mixed emotions. Despite the show being pretty amazing in many aspects, I’ll readily admit that it had its downs.

Firstly, they obviously didn’t have enough time to flesh out everything. While it wasn’t really the producer’s fault that things spun out of control, the end result was that they were practically rushing at light speed for quite a number of episodes. As a result, a lot of the stuff that they planned for had to go, and they were forced to introduce buffer characters to fill in the gap, thus scrambling the story up.

You might argue that Code Geass’s first season raised the bar to insane heights that the second just couldn’t keep up with, and I do not disagree. However, I would at least expect the second season to live up to the first.

Now I have to give the developers props too, as despite all the problems that they were facing (their director almost resigned, the leak of one of their episodes and time constraints), they DID manage to produce a somewhat worthy successor to the first season. (Though I was expecting much more)

The problem that me and my pals find with this originates from what Code Geass is so good at doing. Its twists were definitely pretty amazing and never fail to confound the imagination of many fans out there and send their theories about what would happen back to square one. However, when you compress so many twists into an episode, after a while, the audience becomes “desensitized” to it all, no matter what revelations you hurl at them. It’s like “WOW” the first few times but as you keep bombarding your audience with twist after twist without giving them time to recover………..

I’m being pretty harsh and I don’t deny it. For everything season two does wrong (or not quite up to expectations), there are plenty of redeeming qualities to more than make up for it. The animation quality was pretty astounding throughout R2 and the story turned out to be pretty decent in the end, even with its repeated spamming of plot twists. The music….. just WOW….. that pretty much describes it. That AND the fact that I’m now a fan of Hitomi (Japanese choir-like group behind Code Geass’s amazing soundtrack). The cast of characters was also pretty solid, and most importantly, it was an entertaining ride throughout. No doubt the show was rushed, but if anything, it was rushed with skill and style to ultimately bring both seasons full circle to a fantastic closure.

Quite frankly, the final few episodes were brilliantly done in context with the entire show. If you watched the show, it was plainly obvious that Lelouch’s goal was pretty impossible to achieve. But how the team behind Code Geass engineered the conclusion with him finally achieving his goal (with all his sacrifices and failures along the way), is definitely a sight to behold, and the best part of the second series for me.

I was harsh to Code Geass R2, but that was because I really wanted the show to succeed, to be larger than life, to epitomize all the advances that have been made in the animation industry for the past few years. If there was a show that could ever hope to achieve that, it was Code Geass, especially after witnessing the amazing first season.

It’s a waste, as the show could have been so much more. If the developers had more time to work with (and possibly more episodes to screen the show), that would have definitely helped with the pacing issues that plagued the second season.

But what it all comes down to is that Code Geass is an amazing series. I’ve said this once, and I’ll say it again: if you haven’t watched it yet and happen to like anime, you’re missing outon one hell of a good show.

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