Story - I absolutely LOVED the twists and turns in the story and I was always on the edge of my seat throughout every episode. The plot is ridiculously good (ignoring the normal plot holes) and I really enjoyed the contrasts between normal, everyday life and insane mech battles and action! If there's one thing that this season deserves, it's high praise for its story.
'So what's so bad, if you loved it so much?' - you may ask.
The writers seemed to be unable of ending an episode without a massive plot twist or cliffhanger, and they didn't need to do this! The story was gripping and outstanding enough to keep me interested all the way through without the unnecessary cliffhangers. It was especially annoying that these cliffhangers could be resolved within the first few minutes of the next episode, and that they didn't mean anything in the long run.
Art - The art style is what causes this anime to lose out, in my opinion. The characters look stunning when in action poses, with their angular bodies and long limbs, however, they look borderline broken when doing normal things! Another quarrel I have with the art is that the character designs are downright ugly- there were no characters that looked appealing to me and usually with a series I can find AT LEAST one character who can be labeled as 'pretty'. The colours were awful (I'm looking at CC's hair mainly here) and the clothing designs looked like the team has just given up after they finished the mechs.
Ah, right- the mechs. Oh, the mechs! If anything about the art was ridiculously cool it was the mechs! Beautifully drawn and animated, they really brought the series to life, and I forgave most of its sins just for another glimpse at those giant robots.
Sound - The soundtrack was not noticeable but it did add emotion to certain moments (which I won't mention because spoilers) and caused me to cry like a baby. The opening themes, however, were extremely out of place. They would've better-made sense in a sport or slice-of-life anime than this! And the footage to go with it was reused from the anime or just still images of the characters!! I had a lot of trouble being hyped by the openings for this season.
Character - The characters were interesting and their motivations were plausible (somewhat, anyway) and I couldn't help but find myself falling in love with them. I cared about them and their struggles to the point where I would cry with them or on their behalf! The team did a really amazing job with the characters and I honest-to-god actually wrote an entire psychology essay on Lelouch because of how intriguing he is.
However, some characters really, really fall short of the mark and I couldn't care less about them. Namingly, CC. She's very weak, for a character who appears in most episodes. She has little to no character development and her only clear character traits are 'likes pizza' and 'can be sassy when she tries'. She really ruined this series for me, and her inclusion in it felt forced at best, considering she was a sort of 'deus-ex-machina' in the plot and many of the character's struggles would have been much more interesting if we hadn't been conditioned to know 'CC always saves the day'. She's bland and boring and I hate her. She ALONE brings the score for character down from a ten to a low 8.
Enjoyment - I have to say, I really enjoyed the series while I was watching it, however, after finishing it I felt cheated. Looking back over it, I saw all of its flaws and setbacks. So it now has no rewatch value for me. I feel like it's enjoyable to watch once, but when I watched it again to show it to a friend, I was unfathomably bored because all of the twists and turns were familiar territory by then, and the emotion had gone stale.
Overall - While it has some plus points and some minus points, the plus points to outweigh the minus points, and I did really like the series when I watched it. Look, I'm not saying it's absolute crap and that you shouldn't watch it (in fact, I think its pretty good for a newcomer to the mech genre), I'm just saying that there's a lot better out there and that this isn't the only mech anime that you can use to get into the genre! If you're not watching from a critical point of view, or with massively high expectations, you will probably really enjoy it!
