I mostly found this to be not very good at all. Apparently I watched it wrong. Yes I mean the first season, because the sequel was an improvement. Sort of.

The show is mostly about showing how the Sybil system is bad and wrong. Which is a pretty pointless endeavour given how starkly obvious that is from the very start. The only reason anyone is remotely surprised by this is because all the characters are incredibly stupid, despite apparently being brilliant detectives. For instance Akane spends a lot of the first part needing basic concepts about her own world explained to her. Which doubles up as horribly awkward exposition. Not that the others are any better, as for all their book quoting and mystery solving none of them display any actual intelligence beyond having to force the plot forward.

Not that they show much of anything else. There's Naive Girl With A Sense Of Justice, Loose Cop Who Breaks Rules But Gets Results, Slightly Rebellious Genius Hacker, That Old Guy Who Has Been Doing This For Years, and so on. None of them are terribly interesting. And that's before getting to the villains, who are much worse. Most of them are just crazy murderers with utterly bizarre excuses for motivation.

Then there's Makishima, who is not only immune to Sybil's scans, but is also a charm wizard, master of some ill defined criminal network, a well read genius, and a ninja close combat master. None of which is even addressed, never mind explained.

And of course Sybil, the mysterious and sinister intelligence ruling Japan. Quite badly. Because for an all powerful mind-reading lord of arbitrary justice, it's not actually very good at controlling the population. And then it turns out to be made of the brains of sociopaths rather than an AI, which is both bizarre and largely irrelevant except in giving them a reason to want Makishima alive. Also the scene that reveals the Shocking Truth is unintentionally hilarious.

(This is getting a bit long, so I'll skip to why I liked PP2 more.)

The second season does away with most of the attempts at intellectual bullshit, and focusses on what the original was actually good at: ridiculous schlock. The high point of which was probably the cannibal feast followed by burning down a building full of immigrants. The low point was the nonsense about the omnipotence paradox, which was both irrelevant and stupid.