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The fact that "Roze" is just an anagram of "Zero" is an encapsulation of everything wrong with this show: it is derivative, uninspired, sloppy, and built to entirely to say "Hey! Remember this better show?", which it really shouldn't do given how bad it is.

Firstly, the pacing is atrocious and is probably one of the core problems that has led to this mess. It tries to do everything the original Geass does but with a quarter of the run time. It gives no time to flesh out characters or give meaningful resolution to character arcs. New faces and factions pop up and disappear so suddenly ... that you end up just simply not caring about them. The writing is so rushed that the world building suffers and you're left scratching your head about what's going on. The ending is meant to be bittersweet but its never given enough time to make it land properly. In fact, the only bittersweet I'm feeling about the ending is that they fumbled the one original, interesting plotline (the main story romance with the trademark Geass sprinkles on top). They could've hung so much on that but they didn't and its a shame. On the bright side, with only 12 episodes, you don't have to suffer through much. Hooray?

The characters are horribly generic and its incredibly easy to make parallels with past characters. It feels like many of characters were written specifically with the original Geass cast in mind but we have other people sitting in their seats who kinda look like them: Roze/Sakuya is a a blatant-yet-inferior Lelouch clone, Ashe is wearing the metaphorical clothes of Suzaku, Haruka is a knock-off Kallen, etc. The list is numerous and very obvious. They're little more than inferior palette swaps with their original series counterparts. Everything about them makes them feel like their the equivalent of the off-brand soda you find at a supermarket at a discount. The only interesting characters here are Ashe and Scissorman (what a name), and even then you can still make the parallel's to who they're supposed to be replacing.

Speaking of who they are replacing, this show is full of fanservice appearances of characters from the past series. They pop up all over the place and they even include characters from stuff like spinoff manga series. But they're done so poorly, I don't even think fans would really get their fanservice needs met. The past, recurrent characters have such incredibly minor roles. Some of the biggest, most beloved characters probably each have a total of less that one minute of cumulative, total screen time and the screen time they do have is irrelevant. They could easy cut them and nothing happens to the story. Yet, they felt the need to give a relative ton of screen time to Nina "I like Tables" Einstein of all characters. Baffling.

The animation and music is fine, though it can feel extravagant and amazing at times yet incredibly cut-rate at other. This is probably the one part of the show that doesn't entirely feel misused but its still not groundbreaking or consistent. Just the least bad part of a really bad pile.

Would this how have been better received if it wasn't tied to the legacy of prior Geass shows? Maybe. It wouldn't have been a good show and expectations wouldn't have been as high, but they hitched their wagon to the past seasons and that just made the let down feel so disappointing. Avoid this show. Its not worth watching and the only way it will be is if they release a new Geass and the events here become required reading to understand some plot point, and even then you can probably get by with just reading the plot.