Aug 9, 2014
The work the animation team did is rather outstanding here, the animation and music is superb and the whole thing is relatively well directed. But, and it's a big but, like "damn, Becky, look at that but", the source material has several glaring issues that prevent the anime from truly earning its gargantuan hype. Most of these stem from the fact that nothing really significant seems to happen in terms of progression, for both the plot and the characters. Note that I am taking the manga chapters I read into consideration here too, which was up to about 50. Each arc suffers from one of
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two major problems, they either aren't properly wrapped up or they are just plain boring. The first arc is part of the latter, it just wasn't satisfying to see all the training from past episodes barely even get put to use. Most of the other arcs suffer from the other problem though, they each seem to bring up some kind of head scratching question, these questions are some of the best things in the manga/anime, but the problem is that the anime ends before any get answered. Normally this would be okay because you can just move on to the manga, which most people do, but here that doesn't work because 28 rather large chapters later I still haven't found any complete answers to these questions. This is not because despite large investigation on the characters' behalf the questions are too hard to answer. This is because the characters all seem to either forget or give up on these questions completely. However, I can never tell which reason it is because the characters are so underdeveloped. Attack on Titan has quite a few characters, and since they are all too busy running around in circles trying to figure something out or solve some kind of problem only to inevitably fail they get little time for growth. And despite its reputation Attack on Titan doesn't actually kill off its characters any more than any other anime, a few of the many side characters die occasionally but since none of them get enough screen time it really doesn't matter much. There are a few characters that seem interesting and do see some development, but none of these ones get killed and I doubt they will for a long time if ever. Namely are Jean, Armin, Christa, Ymir and maybe Levi and Hanji, but with the exception of Armin these are all side characters whose screen time is eaten up by the male stand-in Eren and his all-too-familiar yandere sister that conveniently isn't actually his sister. This leads me to one of my smaller problems but its worth mentioning because it may become significant. People want Eren and Mikasa together. This is bad because it could ruin Mikasa as a character. If given a good enough justification for her obsession with protecting Eren, like not wanting to lose the last of her family she has potential to be a unique character, but if they get together that gets flushed down the toilet because it just turns her into an overly attached girlfriend and makes her obsession too cliché. Add on to this the fact that their relationship right that now is more like that of a mother and son, because she has been taking care of him since they were kids and he wants to take care of himself and be independent because he is a super typical 15 year old boy. Another problem I have there is that Eren actually can't take care of himself. Without the convenient boon of his thing that I won't spoil he would totally suck ass and get eaten. This takes me to my final issue: there is an enormous power gap between Levi, Mikasa, maybe Hanji and literally every other person in the whole show. The fact that Levi and Mikasa cut through hordes of Titans like swiss cheese makes it hard to believe and sympathize with everyone who gets eaten or "has" to retreat, especially when Mikasa is so strong for pretty much no reason at all. So yeah I may have bashed this a lot but it is because I got so into the show in the first place that I feel so strongly so I have hope that Isayama might actually start tying stuff together and if he does he'll have fixed the largest of the issues, so while AoT is not nearly as good as its made out to be now it may get closer soon, so it might be worth getting into if you think you can wait for that.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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