Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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They fucking got me again.

Let me explain. Nearly 20 years ago, a little anime called Code Geass (subtitled Lelouch of The Rebellion) premiered, and it barged into the hearts and minds of myself and so many other impressionable young teens with reckless abandon. Short of perhaps Death Note, no anime was more synonymous with a certain kind of mid-aughts I’m 14 And This Is Deep chuuni shit. Quite unlike its former chief contender, Code Geass has remained an active franchise in the years since.¹ I haven’t seen them myself, but the Akito the Exiled spinoff films have their following, and the series has kept chugging along with various ancillary media too, some available in English and some not. In 2019, the Lelouch of the Re;surrection film staked out an alternate continuity where Lelouch comes back to life. That movie was a bit of an up-and-down experience, and mostly succeeded off the strength of being a movie full of Lelouch doing Lelouch Shit, but its best moments were classic Code Geass camp and proved that the franchise still had some life left in it. Code Geass has been around, so the existence of Rozé of the Recapture, a new series of theatrical OVAs that are also being streamed week to week as a regular TV series (don’t ask me how this works, I don’t know), is not too surprising.

It’s also probably not too surprising to any longtime readers of this blog that I, the Magia Record defender, think that the first episode of what some would deride as a pointless spinoff project is actually really fucking good. In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever doubted the project. I am still the same person I was in 8th grade in one very important way; I love campy goofball shit, and Code Geass is and always has been some Grade-A campy goofball shit.

Rozé of The Recapture takes place many years after some version of the original series’ events—I’m not totally clear on how many, but it’s been long enough to let some additional light sci-fi elements seep into the setting—but rehashes the same fundamental premise. A resurgent “Neo-Britannian”² empire has once again conquered and subjugated Japan (or at least Hokkaido), once again rebranding the region itself as Area 11 and its citizens as second-class Elevens. Once again, an underground cadre of resistance fighters struggle against their imperial overlords. There are some extra elements this time around (such as a gigantic energy barrier called the Situmpe Wall that surrounds Area 11), but the fundamental premise is the same. And once again, it’s up to a Britannian outsider to help the resistance win the day. More or less. We’ll come back to that part.

The main difference is the most obvious one. There’s no Lelouch, here. He’s gone. The emperor is dead.

In his place we have a mysterious pair of Britannian siblings named Rozé [Amasaki Kouhei] and Ash [Furukawa Makoto]. Ash has yet to make much of an impression on me, but his brother is a different story. Rozé is not Lelouch—nobody could be Lelouch, that’s an impossible pair of shoes to fill—but he’s a pretty fun protagonist so far, with a whimsical and playful personality that belies the brain of a serious tactician. Rozé, however, commands a battlefield that is significantly weathered from his predecessor’s day. In general, Rozé of the Recapture has a marginally more grim aesthetic sensibility than the original series. It’s as though the order was to make it just as camp but twice as dark. Everyone still dresses like a lunatic, and the show has that same love of cutting from battlefield to command room shenanigans to domestic scene and back at a wild pace that the original did, and it even also has its love of bold—perhaps reckless—incorporation of very bleak imagery into something that’s otherwise so fun, but it does feel a bit less bright, even literally, than the original Code Geass did. It’s as though Code Geass knows it is returning to a world that is, if you can believe it, even bleaker than the one it left in 2008. Having not seen them, I can’t comment on how directly this follows from the sensibilities of the Akito the Exiled side series, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those have been quietly building a bridge from the original series’ point of view to that of this anime.

As for the actual events of this episode, despite the slightly updated setting they’ll be very familiar to any returning Code Geass heads. We open with some exposition, and after the OP, a pretty grim scene of Britannian noble siblings—both of a class of knight called Einbergs, something that seems like it will be a recurring thing over the course of this show—Greede and Gran Kirkwayne [Nojima Hirofumi and Ono Yuuki, respectively] being absolutely horrible to a group of random Japanese citizens. This culminates with Gran, the more hotheaded of the two, shooting a man he’s holding hostage in the head. When his wife cries out in grief, Greede makes a token effort to perfunctorily apologize, only to then shoot her when she understandably spits on him. The scene ends with Greede ordering his men to unceremoniously massacre the rest of the gathered group. The message is pretty clear; the Kirkwaynes are bad people, power-drunk authoritarians and bigots with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Fair enough.

So of course, our protagonists are tasked by the fabulously-named Seven Shining Stars resistance group with taking them out. Their infiltration into the Britannian base, to the extent that it even counts as infiltration, is classic Code Geass. Ash’s knightmare frame emerges from a wrapped-up present box and Rozé spends much of the scene dressed like a clown; you can’t ask for much better than that. Rozé does eventually actually properly infiltrate the base, confronting Greede, the brains of the operation, directly.

The two have a very classically Geassian back and forth. The series’ famous chess motifs return here, as absolutely ridiculously goofball as they were in 2006. Rozé and Greede strategize while poking at some kind of holographic tabletop chess display. When the moment is right, Rozé orders his brother to go all out, and back in the actual battlefield we get some genuinely riveting mecha action, complete with Ash skewering Gran and his knightmare frame with a pair of its own swords after laying down some pretty fantastic shit-talk about how Gran’s a worthless coward.

^{The robot is pretty cool too. We don’t get a name for it here, but look at it!}

Back in the base, we get a fantastic twist here as Rozé, with Greede at gunpoint, offers the Britannian noble a choice. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he doesn’t give him a choice per se. Because Rozé doesn’t do anything per se. There is no Rozé.

Meet Sumeragi Sakuya [Ueda Reina], the actual protagonist of Rozé of the Recapture.

I am almost never at a loss for words when writing these columns. There’s a lot to say about even fairly uninteresting anime, and Rozé of the Recapture is anything but that so far. But seriously, what the hell does anyone want me to say? They made a character who looks like Lelouch a woman and had her crossdress for most of the first episode. I’m in love, sue me. I’ve seen the phrase “Lelouch of the Transition” drift around the Internet in regards to this twist and, I mean, what can I possibly say that’s better than that? (It does say a lot that this random tweet showcasing the scene immediately following this has done more marketing for Rozé of The Recapture than Disney+, who are distributing it in North America, have, but that is perhaps unsurprising, given their track record.) This scene is what made it truly obvious to me that the show is dedicated to recapturing that spirit of the original as much as possible, hopefully without too-directly rehashing many of its plot points. Rozé of The Recapture does basically nothing at all here to endear itself to any new audiences, and it definitely isn’t going to change the opinion of anyone in the “Code Geass sucks, actually” crowd, but I honestly think that is fine. Code Geass is so entirely itself that trying to “adapt to the times” would’ve been doomed to fail. Call this the rare Millennial nostalgia play that I’m fully onboard for.

In any case, Sakuya shows off her Geass. We don’t know how she got it or precisely how it works—my reverse-engineering attempt here is that it somehow forces the target to choose between two options if they hear her give a command—but she offers Greede the choice of saving a hundred times more Japanese people than he’s ordered dead or killing himself. Suffice to say, Mr. Kirkwayne does not survive to the end of the episode.

We close on Sakuya—back in-character as Rozé—talking to the Stars. She says that she and Ash knew from the jump that this entire mission was more of a test than anything else, and asks what the real objective they’re being hired for is. The answer? To liberate an Alcatraz-like offshore prison to free some of the Stars’ comrades. It just so happens that someone that Sakuya euphemistically calls a ‘friend’—someone named Sakura, who looks so similar to Sakuya that they could be mistaken for each other—is also being held there, under the pretense that she’s Sakuya. The amount of hilarious shenanigans this is setting up is truly dizzying to consider, but the main takeaway is one very important thing; if Code Geass isn’t back per se, that’s only because it never really left.

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^{1: Technically, there actually have been a few short story collections and one-shots and things. But I think there’s a reason that there’s no Death Note spinoff airing right now. Lelouch would whip Light’s ass in any serious battle of wits, by the way. Just saying.}

^{2: I will be using the series’ ridiculous alternate history terminology religiously while discussing it as it airs, thank you.}

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