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Non-spoiler TL;DR: Amazing and thoughtful show with a few weak episodes at the start, wholeheartedly recommended to anyone that likes any kind of thoughtful and interesting strategy and well written characters.

I could save a decent amount of time and space on the internet and just say "Death Note but with mecha," however I feel as if that would actually be selling Code Geass a little short. My opinion summed up in four words would probably be "starts good gets great," but I'll get to that in a bit. Code Geass centers around Lelouch vi Britania Lamperouge Zero InAGaddaDavita Baby and his quest to make the ... world a better place for his sister. The show is full of wonderful twists, turns, and strategy often accessible even to the mentally subnormal.

And mentally subnormal reminds me a little of the character designs as... well I wouldn't say they're "ugly" per-say, but their over-elongated features and strange proportions take a little getting used to, but they animate smoothly and realistically enough. As realistically as giraffes that have learned to appear as humans might, but realistically nonetheless.

The series also includes giant robots, as I mentioned earlier, and for once their design actually makes some damn sense. See, normally a mecha could only make any remote amount of sense in space, whereas on earth they're at least a touch ridiculous, as one well taken shot to the legs would make them about as useful in battle as an outrageously expensive brigade of sloths. Code Geass remedies this by making the feet of their Gundams - ahem - I mean nightmare frames, have incredibly fast wheels on the bottom of them, making them incredibly fast and mobile, and therefore difficult to hit. Almost as if they are suits that are mobile, but the name is actually apropos.

Now like Death Note, the main character is a sort of mastermind, but instead of being a notebook themed serial killer sort of mastermind, he's more of a military and politics based mastermind. And while the show has a few wonderful exhibitions of this mastermind at play (the landslide on the mountain cutting off his enemy, his successful attempt at discrediting Jeremiah, etc etc), this show falls into a trap that I like to call "too smart for the audience syndrome" in the first few episodes. What I mean by "too smart for the audience syndrome" is that the writers clearly knew they wanted the main character to be a rain-man-esque genius when it comes to strategy, so they just have him spouting vaguely strategic things over a radio at some insurgents and showing them gun down enemy combatants. The problem with this is that it doesn't actually show the audience anything of substance, it's basically just saying "obviously this character is a genius, and what he's doing is so smart that you probably wouldn't get it anyway, so watch this montage of things that are related to that theme." Thankfully, the show diverts from that near the end of the second episode and very rarely ever comes close to it, very clearly displaying and explaining the main character's strategies in a way that is clear without being condescending. It's a nice touch that's refreshing to see when it comes up.

And on a final note the... product placement. Depending on the version you're watching, you may occasionally notice that every single episode has some kind of Pizza Hut product placement, to the point where they have a character eat pizza almost every episode, possibly for this very purpose. I for one had more fun with it when I took it as "no matter what, in the infinite possible divergence of universes, even in a universe where Great Britain But Not ends up more or less conquering the entire world, one thing remains constant: Pizza Hut."

On a more serious note, I wholeheartedly recommend Code Geass. Especially if you're looking for a smart and fun show centered around strategy and the interactions between interesting and conflicted characters.