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I feel like most series telegraph what they are within the first two episodes. Guilty Crown is apparently about Production I.G.'s 2011 Q3 fiscal report and nothing else.

The plot is near-meaningless, horribly-explained, and not at all believable. It hinges on recklessness and sheer coincidence. I don't get the motivations of the bad guys outside of "kill everybody and be evil!" and I don't get the motivations of the "heroes" outside of liking their guts to stay inside their torsos. Stuff just kind of works out for the best no matter what unbelievable contrivance is pulled out to make it happen. Characters are all cookie-cutter tenth ... generation ripoffs with no development.

I'm not going to talk any more about that, though. Instead, I'm just going to talk about The Quota™. That long checklist of elements cynically designed to pander to the primal, unseemly elements of otaku culture. Instead of a "proper" review, I'm just going to list as many of these as I can think of (oh, spoilers for the first two episodes like it matters):

* Only takes 37 seconds to see a woman barely covering her shoulders with a feather dress while basically naked. It should be noted that this is after 20 some seconds of a meaningless panorama of a lighthouse in a city, so it's closer to the 19 second mark in terms of actual meaningful information. At least it's a YouTube music video, so hey, maybe she wears real clothes at other times?
* 2 minutes and 11 seconds, we confirm that nope, that's the kind of stuff she wears full time. Even when running out of a heavily guarded facility.
* The red dress she wears is the type where somebody ripped the front vertical third off down to just above the crotch so you can see the inner boobs and midriff. I don't think anyone in the history of ever has worn something like this for any other purpose than to be shocking and ostentatious. You see something like this and you can't take anything seriously about the character or the production. You don't believe anything the character does while wearing that outfit because it's completely inappropriate for any reason but for people to masturbate to it and that's what the studio expects you, the presumed young straight man, to do. Yes, it's crude to put it like that, but there is no artistic justification for stuff like this.
* Giant robots remote mind-controlled by people. We first see some guy in a full body armor suit, so we already know the Evangelion suit is coming for the women.
* Girl is doing that overly gentle, innocent stuff (or "moe"). I don't want to imply anything specific about these creators, but that's usually done because they think their audience are the type that fantasize about vulnerable women they can take advantage of.
* Main character is a put-upon loser boy that's going through the motions of everyday life, smiling, laughing, but deep down inside, he's troubled and conflicted. JUST LIKE YOU, DEAR VIEWER!
* School antics. Nevermind that we saw giant robots and a woman get shot and exploded off a bridge. No, that's of secondary importance to high school, the place where anime studios assume their audience stunted their emotional development forever.
* The main character randomly walks into a restricted area and chances upon red dress girl. Wouldn't it be nice for you, dear viewer, to stumble upon such a life-altering moment?
* Cat's cradle held just above the boobs in the frame... how do they not break free of that flimsy dress just from the mere act of breathing?
* She even sounds cute when she gets beat up. Also, we get a clear view that somebody ripped most of the back off from this dress. Again, this is her "top secret mission to steal experimental biotech from a heavily secure facility" outfit.
* Not really a pandering bit, but did the military group seriously just leave a possible accomplice behind and not search the entire building for the item she stole? What kind of lame oppressive government is this, even?
* Long-haired blonde guy beating people up effortlessly while nu-metal plays in the background. Brilliant. I feel my inner 13-year-old filling with determination.
* Catgirl. Yes, it's just metal ear-looking things on top with hair covering her real ears, so basically a catgirl. She's also short, has tiny breasts, acts bratty, and is implied to be underage. Sigh...
* Yep. Evangelion suits for all. Enjoy those big boobs swinging free like water balloons. Suits like this look like they just hurt to wear. It almost looks like circulation is getting cut off by the pinching at the chest.
* This girl also looks and sounds sexy when she gets hurt. (Also, if these are remote mind-controlled, why were they programmed to feel pain?)
* When some magical stuff happens, the girl says "Shu, please, use me" while gesturing at a point of light between her boobs and then looking away demurely.
* Ooh, a flashback implies that hey, they knew each other as children! Or something. I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to unravel that mystery.
* The framing of the main character taking a phallic rock sword out of the girl's limp body has to be seen to be believed.
* Without having to think about it, the main character, a loser JUST LIKE YOU, is able to take that magic sword and wreck absolutely everything! Do you not feel powerful?
* And that's just the first episode. Next episode has some repeats of the above, including a scene where the main character crawls behind a girl in a vent and peeks at her prominently displayed crotch in a skin-tight latex suit. Oh, also, despite all this rebellion and fate of the nation stuff, not only does the main character get to go back to school, but so does this girl that, you know, is a known, wanted fugitive that even has her DNA in a database. She also uses her real name because why not?

In conclusion: anime studios, if you're going to make porn, make porn. If you're going to be shameless, actually be shameless. Go big, go all out, make the characters actually aware that people are jerking off to them, and be done with it. All of this is trying for that chaste, "innocent" middle ground and it does. Not. Work.

I don't really have much to add as far as reviewing it as a show goes. It's a shallow, pointless series full of wasted potential, plot holes, plot threads that go nowhere, one note characters, tedious romance fanservice, generic slapstick comedy you can see in any other unambitious show, and deus ex machina moments that don't have the good sense to at least be entertainingly stupid. The action scenes, while fluidly animated, get boring real fast because the game mechanics are not well established, rules are broken constantly, and the main character is ludicrously overpowered in using brute force as his only solution. The art ... and animation are good, Yuki Kajiure's score is phoned in but still decent, and there are rare moments where it at least acknowledges interesting implications of its world that it never touches again.

Instead, I want to warn that the second half of this show (besides being utterly, irredeemably terrible even compared to the low standards of the first half) is some of the most distressingly sexist, misogynistic, utterly insensitive exploitative crap I've ever seen jammed into a mainstream series. If this was at least actual exploitation schlock like La Blue Girl, you'd just be getting what you paid for, but no. This series intended for teenagers gets incredibly, inappropriately rapey in ways that are offensive to a very real problem with society. The following are spoilers, but I don't want you to give money to these people, so I don't care.

Amongst other things, this show has an incest subplot (barely worth mentioning compared to the other stuff, sadly) and a rapist villain in his forties or fifties that has somehow convinced the parents of a 17 year old comatose girl to let him "marry" her without either her informed consent or the expectation she'll ever wake up. He has her mentally trapped in a virtual world where she's kept in a cage and emotionally abused by him constantly.

There are threats of brainwashing, a tentacle groping scene, and the penultimate episode has him chain her down and rip her clothes off so he can molest her in front of the main character while promising he's going to do the same to her in real life (apparently, her luxury hospital has zero security and no concept of visiting hours). None of this is explored in any meaningful way; it is using a topic that psychologically scars people for life as cheap shock material.

And I just wanted a show about a virtual death world that requires creative thinking in video game mechanics to succeed instead of one part boring action, six parts boring romance, and fifty parts "what the goddamn hell is wrong with you people!?"

Panzer Dragoon is four video game series developed by Team Andromeda and released by Sega. While the latter three installments were very good games in their own right, it was their aesthetics that made them transcendent. The visual and sound design did more than the plot and dialogue to paint a world littered with the remnants of a fallen civilization (similar to El Hazard: The Magnificent World), giving everything a poignant, almost-gloomy atmosphere.

Don't expect any of that here.

This OVA is a cheap rush job of a tie-in to the (mediocre) first game, a trite, directionless adaptation of something that really didn't have much of a ... plot to begin with. It becomes clear very quickly that they are only paying the slightest lip service to the empire and their huge role in the series, with their scenes serving only as useless padding that could be cut altogether. The story they actually care about is just yet another "young guy's love interest is kidnapped and a magical creature helps him rescue her... and also save the world or something".

Events happen with little development and everything about it seems designed to hit every infuriating fantasy cliche possible. The characters (all eight of them, only half of which really matter) are all transplants from a million other heroic fantasy stories. They think and speak only in the bluntest exposition, little of which adds up to any cohesive explanation of the world or the motivations of anybody but the simplistic hero. Not a minute goes by without something infuriatingly stupid happening, with plot points that go nowhere and sudden, unexplained powers cropping up out of nowhere. It's really clear this is a completely-missing-the-point adaptation of something with considerably more depth than they cared to put into this production.

Attention must be given to the groan-worthy translation. This was only released dubbed and the original Japanese version (subtitled or otherwise) doesn't seem to exist on the internet. The script is at best unbearably corny, at worst tone-deaf and unintentionally creepy in the way the hero keeps referring to his kidnapped love interest as "his lady" as if she were a stolen trinket. Nothing anybody says sounds like anything a real human being would say.

The actors deliver their lines in the classic bad dub style of hammy indifference, everybody sounding like they're thinking about their grocery shopping instead of conveying any convincing emotion. No attempt is made to line up the speech with the lip flaps and there are many moments where I'm convinced they gave characters lines that weren't in the original.

The animation is a discordant mix of traditional 2D cells and CGI. It's pretty clear they took the 3D models straight from the game and did zilch to give them any real weight or presence, with awful integration of the two styles. The human character designs are stock mid-90s anime fantasy designs with nothing to really distinguish them and their body language doesn't really match their supposed emotions. The dragons are taken directly from the game, so they at least look passable while sitting still, but move in a weightless, inconsistent manner. The fights are laughably bad in their cinematography and pacing while also lacking any real impact.

The sound isn't as bad as the animation, but it's still subpar. The dialogue is often murky and drowned out by the ambiance, but generally doesn't sound like it really exists within the world. The sound effects sound like they come from one of those CD compilations and fail to give any weight to the actions they accompany, made worse by the couple-frame delay of many of them. The music of the video game series didn't really find its unique voice until the second game, so this has the cheesy synth-orchestra score from the first game. It doesn't even base it on any of the actual good tracks (the main theme or either version of "Flight"), instead sounding like generic fantasy mush.

I'm not even sure I'd recommend this as so bad, it's good. It's mostly just sad and pathetic, really. It's certainly a study in how not to produce a fantasy story, but only in ways that are self-evident to a well-read twelve year old. It's twenty six minutes of your life you won't be getting back and considering how obscure it is, you won't even get the benefit of at least being able to talk about it with others. Just don't bother.