So... where did the cyberpunk go? All the yummy mood and atmosphere that the GitS movie brought is gone and replaced by a bright, clean and shiny world where it never rains. I get that a TV series rarely can stand up to a movie in terms of graphics, but the difference here is not technical, it's a design choice. This combined with the extremely episodic "mission of the week" format makes you think you're actually watching sci-fi CSI.
The main overarching plot is great, but it's spread out too thin in a tedious mess of one-shot episodes that has nothing to do with the big picture. I didn't quite pay attention, but I'd say that if you skipped all the "Stand alone" episodes and just watched the "Complex" ones, you wouldn't have missed anything important. Sadly, these Complex episodes are way too few both for keeping the viewer interested, and for telling the story in a satisfying way. 26 episodes is a lot, but still the main plot feels rushed. I like slow paced shows, but SaC is slow where it doesn't matter and too fast where it does.
The animation is a fair bit above average for a TV anime, and offers some cool action scenes but there is way to much dialogue. Sure, it is a complicated story with politics, corruption and a whole scifi world to explain, but all the talking gets a bit tiresome in the long run.
As for the characters, they are all cool, if not very deep. If the creators had spent more effort on character development and less on complicated but pointless mysteries for those characters to solve, this could have been a very different experience.
