Review: Guilty Crown - Ep. 15 (Sacrafice)

Since I don’t have a new pick for my Anime of the Week, I figured I would revisit a previous pick. Originally when I picked Guilty Crown the show was only on episode ten, but now it’s moved past its first story arc and onto something very different. The first story arc was about discovering Shu’s powers and stopping his father from activating a second “Lost Christmas.” Shu and Gai were only partially successful in doing that and now the city of Tokyo has been sealed off with thousands of quarantined survivors inside. This includes Shu, his friends and his entire school.

The students seal themselves off from the rest of the city due to the violence and chaos that has spread from from within the trapped city. This has turned the school into its own functioning society/government with its own presidentand presidential cabinet. In episode fourteen, Shu is voted to be the president due to his enormous power and his ability to pull out voids from the student body.

This episode begins with his one-time friend and one-time Judas, Yahiro, who wants Shu to rank the student body from A to F based on their voids importance. Shu doesn’t want to do this and feels that it's discrimination that will cause him to be hated. Unfortunately, he’s forced to after it becomes clear that the vaccine that they have to fight the Apocalypse Virus is running out. This betrayal to another of Shu’s friends causes him to leave the school with other low ranking voids to find more of the vaccine. This sequence of events leads to the death of one character and forever changes Shu’s character.

This episode is really tough to judge. It’s a good episode with some really strong character moments for Shu and the character that dies,but it takes the series on a path that’s nowhere near “happily ever after.” Not that this story could ever have a happy ending, but especially now it seems that Shu’s character is going to dramatically change. Depending on how that goes this could be the episode that broke the series or it could extend the life of the story and create interesting possibilities.

There is a problem with the pacing of this episode as well.It definitely feels like a continuation from the previous episode as it picked up right where the other ended. This causes the beginning to be choppy and jump around a lot; there wasn’t a clear picture of what was going on in the story until the students left the school which hasn't been the norm for the series.

In general this is still a very good series that I’m enjoying watching and I hope that the next episode won’t scare me away from finishing it. The shake-up of the characters death has definitely changed the possibilities of where it can lead, but ultimately there needs to be something interesting waiting at the end of the path.