Would the main character become a cunning LeLouche? Perhaps a brave Suzaku? Will we identify with his teen angst like we do with Shinji? Will he seem human?
The answer to all of these questions ends up being "no." The main character is someone you increasingly dislike as the show goes on.
Not only is he generic, he's a bad execution of the generic shonen protagonist. He doesn't feel very human, and his courage & competency literally manifest only as required by the plot, only to disappear immediately afterwards.
Sadly, despite an A-list team and a huge budget they really just made an unbelievably bad series. I can't understand how this could have happened. Even mediocre garbage like Symphogear told a more emotional story, and that show was butchered by a huge budget-cut (and a much worse premise, honestly).
Fairly early on you start feeling a sense of disappointment as they layer on extremely generic "twists" that the main character literally cuts through with a magic sword.
The worst part of this show rears its head mid-way through, but it becomes especially prominent in the second half. I am referring to the fact that people change sides without ANY reason to do so, only to change back later without any serious reasons for their actions. The worst example of this by far is the student council president.
It's my guess that the flailing writers looked for any opportunity to inject some kind of pathos into a story that is honestly much to happy for its apocalyptic setting. "Why don't we have his mom help the bad guys for a while?" "Oh yeah! Awesome! The audience will be shocked!"
So many of these twists end up half-baked. Mana's character is a particularly strange creation, honestly. Who came up with the idea to add in all the (barely avoided) creepy incest and rape to a show that is already struggling to tell a convincing story about geopolitics? Not to mention the plague that turns people into crystals. Not to mention the terrorist v.s. government war. Not to mention the other sub-plots that get forgotten until the last episode clumsily ties everything together with a big "reset" button after a boring "final battle" influenced by strange forces never explained.
Not only does an abundance of cheese-ball dialogue ruin the mood on the few truly dramatic scenes, but the writers lacked the balls to really hit us with anything big. The audience never feels much when people die, because the people that die are almost exclusively fodder.
There was one exception to this, but it felt really artificial. It was a terrible 3-episode mini-arc where the main character ends up killing the sibling of his friend, but special circumstances removed all the moral questions in this case. Why not make your main character kill a friend who wasn't already about to die? It worked in Evangelion. Twice in-fact.
Even the action - which should be the one area this show simply cannot fail on - is often really simplistic and boring. If you compare the knightmare suits duels from Geass to the mech battles here, it's just pathetic. Not that these battles ever end up mattering, since the entire show is setup to allow the main character to save everyone repeatedly.
If they had just stopped trying to layer on really shallow twists and developed the core Japan v.s. The World narrative a little more, putting Shu in a moral dilemma regarding Gai's ultimate actions, and dropped the character Mana entirely then this would have been a much better story.
Watch it for yourself. Maybe with low expectations you will enjoy it as a "pretty mess" as some have suggested. As for me, I can't see myself ever recommending it to anyone after this post. It's a cautionary tale for writers, perhaps, but beyond that it has little value.
We all weep for the show that COULD have been. What a waste.
