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I struggle to collect my thoughts, having just finished the final episode. I'm still confused on how exactly I feel and why. I have championed Attack on Titan as a modern masterpiece ever since Season 3, and even knowing the ending was incredibly divisive, I welcomed it with open arms, putting my full faith in Isayama-san. Ending a story in a way that is not only good, but pleases EVERYBODY is nearly impossible. But at the very least, a DECENT ending would have been an acceptable way to cap off this incredible story.

Unfortunately, the only word that fits is disappointing. I've tried writing out ... my thoughts in greater detail, but they're constantly changing and new things are constantly coming to mind. I'll try to keep it brief, but I have gripes with both the writing and the production.

MAPPA's animators actually did a pretty good job, especially with the action sequences. Many are on par with WIT's work (finally). But for some reason, whenever characters change age, clothes, etc., MAPPA's animators start making them look like aliens. I do not understand why--in AoT specifically--this has been such a huge issue ever since Part 1 of The Final Season.

The pacing feels very one dimensional, like they just wanted to adapt the source material as straight as possible. Very "next scene" with little tension or build up. It was very hard to be invested at any point because there was never time given for things to build up or create any sense of anxiety. Perhaps this could've been remedied had the two specials been edited as one larger movie, or simply adapted episodically.

The sound director just kept shoehorning tracks back to back to back to back in the 2nd special. Not a single OST had any impact whatsoever. This was incredibly annoying during the action sequences especially, as the mood kept changing constantly and it felt like they were trying to fit fan favorites wherever possible, rather than actually thinking about what songs felt good next to each other. Very distracting.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but the ending Isayama chose for AoT is shockingly similar to how Arc 1 of SAO ended. "What was it all for" and the answer is basically "nothing". A painfully shallow attempt at a realistic ending that is anything but profound, and basically invalidates everything. Which, on paper, doesn't sound bad. I can appreciate writing that doesn't give the audience everything they want, or even spits in their face. But even a spit in the face leaves an impression. This doesn't even accomplish that. It's odd, because the overarching events played out pretty much how most of us expected, but it just feels so poorly executed. No emotion. Just contrived, generic-at-best dialogue that's pretending to tie things up in a nice bow, but instead of a ribbon it's a shoelace.

The scene that is shown during the end credits felt like SUCH a middle finger. A laughably bad attempt at trying to be profound that I couldn't believe it's actually in the original manga. Isayama, what were you thinking?? I actuall pity the MAPPA employee that wasted hours of their life animating that.

Reading over what I just wrote, I definitely sound angrier than I actually am, but I'm honestly still trying to sort through my thoughts myself. I'll need to rewatch this finale a few times to get a clearer picture on how I feel, but man... I wish I had better things to say. I don't regret experiencing Attack on Titan, and will still recommend it to people. But I'll no longer have that same glimmer in my eyes when talking about it. My passion for this series has been thoroughly extinguished in it's final 90 minutes.

I'll try and keep this as concise as possible.

I was very interested in this movie based on the trailer, and it took a while to get around to it. Having just finished it, I'm a bit disappointed. There was a lot of promise, and unfortunately it doesn't deliver. There's more good than bad, but the bad REALLY deals a heavy blow.

Romantic melodrama really makes the middle and latter half of the film rather cringeworthy, and it quickly turned what was a rather enjoyable film up until that point into just an all around bad time. At least the film doesn't try to hide it, I ... guess? I mean, within the first few minutes, the film makes it obvious that our main character is a love interest and that two girls will create "conflict" out of jealousy.

Josee is an endearing character at times, but creates monumental problems out of insecurity, selfishness, immaturity, so on and so forth. It's actually crazy that the "final arc" actually happened. It's a whole new level of irresponsible for her character, in the last ten minutes of the movie.

All in all, these absolute ball drops in the writing chewed up what could have been a fantastic film, and spit out mediocrity.

The Aquatope on White Sand is...fine? Definitely not bad.

It's cute. It's charming. Somewhat boring. But the characters are likable, and the occasional glimmer of deeper emotionality manages to string you along to the next episode. I just wish the writing was really there to help capitalize on those emotional moments. There's greater potential here, but the climaxes really just feel like hints of what of could have been.

I enjoy it enough to keep watching week to week, but it's not something I think anybody should go out of their way to watch. It's simply not entertaining enough to sit down and watch several episodes ... at a time.

Granted, I just found out it's running for 24 episodes, so my opinion may change by the end. I honestly thought it was just a single cour show and had just ended with episode 12.

Tokyo Revengers is the new decade's Sword Art Online. I said what I said.

It is OK, but deserves to be regarded as little more than that in my opinion.

Honestly it had me pretty interested in the beginning. Stiff animation aside, the premise was solid and the events taking place definitely kept me engaged. There were definitely some jaw-droppers. But as time went on, little cracks started to show in the writing. "Okay, no biggie, better shows have done worse," I thought to myself. But then they just kept piling up. 20 episodes in and it's a bit laughable how many plot holes you can poke ... in this narrative. The mangaka has laid the groundwork for a really solid story, but doesn't seem capable of keeping his plot threads untangled. Those little cracks became gaping holes, and it's honestly a bit hard to take this story seriously at this point. It's not even like we're super deep into the story. This is only the first season. I imagine things only get messier later on.

Here are a few VAGUE SPOILERS regarding some of the inconsistencies that stood out to me:

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- Naoto should not be retaining his memory throughout multiple timelines. I think the argument i've seen defending this is that since he is linked to Takemichi's ability, he is "immune" from being overwritten in each timeline. A weak explanation, but plausible I suppose. This was the first issue I noticed, but deemed it dismissible.

- Hina and Naoto's death in episode 1 is never actually explained. An explanation IS PROVIDED, but only makes sense in the newer, altered timelines. It is absolutely implausible in the initial timeline.

- This was what really did me in. Long story short, we see a character die from a single blow. Metal pipe to the skull. BAM. Ok, cool. But then 2-3 episodes later we see literally dozens of people get bashed in the skull with metal pipes. And often several times. And they just...walk it off? At worst, they pass out. Do they just not make pipes like they used to? Why would you frame such an important character conflict this way if you were going to treat the cause of death like a joke?

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For a show with such stiff and lazy animation, you would hope the art would at least be consistently good. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. There are just a lot of really bad looking frames in this anime production. Which says a lot considering this anime already depends heavily on still frames to pad its runtime and animation schedule. This studio really does not like drawing.

All in all, I think the concept and overall narrative structure for Tokyo Revengers is solid. It has all of the big pieces to be a high-tier shounen anime. Unfortunately, it is left soaking in its own mediocrity simply due to a lack of foresight from the writer. And it's cheap animation. In more competent hands, this could easily be as good as people are making it out to be.

At least we managed to get a banger like "Cry Baby" out of it.

I don't want to waste too much of my time going over what several others have already laid out in abundant detail, but with the amount of praise this season of Attack on Titan season 4 has been receiving, I feel it needs to be echoed:

If you take Iseyama's source material out of the equation, Attack on Titan: The Final Season is subpar at best.

And it's a shame that this opinion gets touted as being ungrateful to MAPPAs staff. Let's get one thing clear. Praising MAPPA for churning this out in an absurd amount of time only reinforces this awful practice in the industry. The ... bottom line animators are not dumb. They know that they were overworked, and they know the product they put out is not great. They know that better than anyone. They literally do this for a living. Nobody at MAPPA was assigned to this project out of passion. They were assigned to this because they were the only ones available, director included. How do you think they feel knowing they got the opportunity to work on the biggest anime of the last decade and it boiled down to drawing still character frames and sloppily redrawing the arms to create lazy walk cycles? Props to them for not doing worse, but its a far cry from great work.

If there is one thing I can commend this final season on--as an animated version of the manga--it's the voice acting. As always, the established cast has done a great job, and new characters seem to be well cast as well. I haven't noticed any major decline in how voice directing has been handled either. This single thread of continuity from prior seasons is nice, at least.

But everything else? Very disappointing, to put it lightly. Allow me to haphazardly spill my thoughts:

Art style change? Great in MAPPA's trailer (false advertising by the way) but gross in the final product. It has also created an alarming amount of inconsistencies in character illustrations from scene to scene due to being more detailed than before. The character illustrations are often overly round compared to the reference materials the animation team are using. Backgrounds have gone from being absolutely stellar in prior seasons to "use stock textures wherever possible" now. Absolutely no time was put into them because, as we all know, there was no time. 5/10

The animation? Anything hand drawn is stiff at best. And Episode 2 is filled to the brim with vomit inducing rotoscoping. The CG Titans are weightless, as everyone and their mom have said. And despite the models actually being decent, the actual quality of shot compositing fluctuates anywhere between passable to laughably bad, making how good the models are irrelevant, since they don't ever sit properly in the frame. Usually, lazy still frames are used in anime to help make time for other, more demanding parts of the production. Unfortunately, given the production schedule for this anime, they are exclusively used for the team to play "catch up", meaning there is nowhere in which the mediocrity is made up for. 4/10

Effects work? Titan transformations have receiving a considerable down grade. Basically just a yellow frame with some lines thrown in. The "glow" effect MAPPA likes to overuse in every anime they produce reduces the fidelity of and cheapens nearly every scene its used in. WITs color grading and effects gave this series a sense of visual clarity that stood out among other other anime, making the entire series look polished. Unfortunately, MAPPA's team likes to do it the easy way and utilize a lighting effect that basically anyone can do with Adobe After Effects and 5 minutes on YouTube. 5/10

The music? Well, Sawano's score continues to be incredible. Unfortunately, a new composer has been brought in to help "expand" the brilliant atmosphere previously established. These new tracks do little but detract from scenes in my opinion, as they do not gel well at all with what came before. That's not to say that they are bad tracks, but they simply do not belong here. Which makes the fact that they so often feel shoehorned into every episode all the more annoying. What was once a 10/10 has dropped to a 7/10.

One thing I don't see people talk about at all is the sound design. How is it? I'm pretty sure I've heard better sample selection from the Spongebob anime. So many times this season i've heard one-shot samples just blatantly copy and pasted back to back to back. Where are the velocity layers, MAPPA? Not to mention, the impact effects during Titan fights sound like someone put their iPhone mic next to someone's foot while they step in gravel. Where is the weight? Certainly not in the CG animation. 3/10

All this to say; for only 8 months of production (if that number is true. I have yet to validate it myself), it's actually a miracle this didn't turn out worse. But keeping a ship from sinking, and building a ship that doesn't sink in the first place are two separate things. And MAPPAs team simply kept the boat afloat. It's a shame they didn't turn down the contract. At the very least, it would've forced Kodansha to redraft their contract terms, and MAPPA--if not another studio--would've at least had a chance of producing a result capable of living up to WITs adaptation. Or at least still doing justice to what is an incredible series, in a different way.

But what we got? This isn't different. It's just bad. Season 1 of Attack on Titan, to this day, is one of the most well produced anime productions of all time. Its quality still sets a high standard that few manage to meet nearly a decade later. But this final season? It already is, and will continue to age like milk. It feels wrong having such a mediocre production dethroning FMA:B. It's sad to see Studio WIT's overwhelming talent and passion overshadowed simply because MAPPA chose to sign the contract and adapt these last chapters.

The Promised Neverland season 2 is a remarkable achievement. Usually sites like Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube are considered "spoiler zones" and you should avoid interacting with any content based around a series that could be severely gimped by knowing future plot points. But never before have I watched a show and felt like the series itself was giving me a spoiler. I dropped this series on episode 7 (i believe), after a very predictable, yet very important plot point was nonchalantly revealed in perhaps the most unearned way imaginable. However, what followed in the minutes after is what drove me to drop the series. The ... sheer amount of crucial plot points revealed later this same episode are so hastened in their reveal, that by the end of the episode I felt as though someone had just screamed spoilers into my ear.

Needless to say, I dropped the show immediately for fear of having the rest of the story ruined.

I do want to say that, despite being slow, the first 3 episodes were decent. Uneventful, but at least they made sense coming off the ending of season 1. But things quickly fall apart from there.

Now I have to go read the manga if I want any chance of enjoying the rest of this story. And I HATE reading manga.

I do have to wonder if this piss-poor adaptation of season 2 was an underhanded, sadistic marketing ploy. Maybe they thought they could drive manga sales up by making the anime so abhorrently awful, that viewers would feel compelled to buy the manga to get any sort of decent continuation to Season 1.

You know, this show started out fun enough. It was cringey but entertaining, and I think myself and a lot of others watching just wanted something we didn't need to care so much about. And that's what it was for a while. It had my attention because it was silly but had me caring just enough to see where it went. Kazuya as a main character was entertaining in the first half. Although he was clearly trash as displayed through his actions, he at least had some relatability in terms of how he felt. And that relatability did make you kinda want to see him ... redeem himself at some point.

Then episode 8 hit. My God did episode 8 hit. There had been cringey moments in the show prior, but this one hit different for me. I just shut the TV off about 15 minutes through the episode. I couldn't handle it. The main character's degeneracy--which was sad but at least entertaining before--managed to overload me in a single episode. I've thought about going back and finishing it, but I keep remembering how uncomfortable I felt watching that episode and change my mind really quick.

If there's anything I can give this show credit for its the art, oddly enough. This show clearly had a low budget so a lot of things aren't very detailed, but the show looks good for what it is. The character writing work deserves props, largely due to just how hated Kazuya is among viewers. Intentional or not, the hatred towards his character is truly a testament to how well he's written.

This anime was never going to be much more than a fun watch. The show gets more hate than it should probably because of the main character, but that's clearly intentional to some degree. I can't say I hated it, but at some point I just couldn't stomach the cringe. If your tolerance is higher than mine, I'm sure you'll have a decent enough time.

This review may be a bit premature considering the first season is only halfway through airing, but I simply do not understand the hype around this show. Maybe it was overhyped, or maybe it's just genuinely mediocre. Maybe I'll go and binge the rest once it's done airing and see if my opinion changes. But for now, I don't get it.

It's quite a shame, considering I do actually find everything about Jujutsu Kaisen--at a glance--extremely appealing. The premise itself is very "anime" but has something very refreshing that I can't quite put my finger on. Likewise, the monster designs strike me as oddly western but ... in a good way. Their appeal is in their simplistic and somewhat uninspired nature, not unlike Titans in AoT (albeit not nearly as unsettling).

For a show like this, the first episode actually does a really great job of intriguing the viewer. Despite being insanely generic, the whole thing still felt good to watch and had me wanting to see where it could go. That said, the whole "protagonist discovers his courage" moment had to have been one of the most canned things I've seen in recent memory. It felt extremely forced, which is a shame considering the actual catalyst for said motivation--his grandfather's passing--is handled decently enough.

Post episode 1, it really seems like things start falling apart. Jujutsu Kaisen feels like it's trying to speed run its way through character development and "boring stuff" so that it can get to heavier plot points faster and hopefully before people start losing interest. But this inadvertently makes almost everything happening in the show have almost no meaning or weight. Why should I care about Kugisaki's motivation for being a sorcerer? She's been on screen for 5 minutes. I know nothing about her character other than that she's a temperamental seesaw, and her shoe-horned backstory doesn't even do anything to address that singular character trait. The same can be said for Megumi, although his is at least presented with better timing. But the problem still remains in that how it is presented is incredibly weak. These characters and their motivations feel extremely shallow and one-dimensional. Even if there is still more about their upbringing that will flesh them out later, the story feels as though it's telling you that these flashbacks are definitive character identifiers. As if you should just "get" the character now. Which is a shame because their personalities, despite being pretty run of the mill, are pretty likable and interact well with one another. But the attempts to make them seem much deeper so early in the narrative actually cheapens who they are, in my opinion. To put it bluntly, you are being given answers to questions that the story didn't even make you want to ask yet.

My primary gripes with JJK are with the overall writing and execution of an otherwise promising concept. However, I do take some issues with MAPPAs action directing and animation. This series has got to have some of the most uncomfortable action sequences I've ever seen in anime. What exactly do I mean by "uncomfortable?" It means that my eyes and brain find it very difficult to process what's happening on screen, and I actually find it relieving when things stop moving. The fight in episode 2 is a great example. While I find the animation itself to be a bit sloppy to watch, I can't actually find anything "technically" wrong with it on a frame-by-frame basis. Although I think the over-exaggeration of Sukuna's speed could have been toned down a bit to make him feel a bit more solid in the frame. But what really ruins this sequence for me (and almost all other fights later in the series) is the camera movement. My God, who ever decides some of these angles and movement decisions needs to be fired. These low to the ground shots and the incessant frame shakes are very cheap attempts to make the sequences appear more lively than they actually are. The problem is that in later episodes, there isn't any sakuga to at least match the hectic nature of the camera movements. What MAPPA seems to like doing is framing the shot from floor level, so that they don't have to animate the ground. They'll then just loop the backdrop and any foreground objects such as railing to give the illusion of fast-paced action (even though it doesn't make any sense), and then lazily animate the characters on screen and hope the background is enough to trick you into liking the scene. Apparently "MAPPA haters" are thing? I guess I'm one of those, even though this is the first MAPPA produced anime that I've watched, at least to my knowledge. The one thing I can give MAPPA props on is their art. It's never stellar, but I've yet to notice a bad drawing in the frame. None of that cross-eyed nonsense on background characters that you often see in other shows.

I guess if this is one of your first anime, you might find it to be pretty good. And there's nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of bad anime I used to like, and still kind of do now, even though I can objectively admit they're bad. But I do find it bizarre how much praise this series is getting from people who should have enough context see this as little more than another edgy shounen. The only reason I haven't completely written it off is because of my experience with My Hero Academia. A show I love today but almost didn't. The first season of MHA is extremely generic and uninspiring for me, and it wasn't until season 2 that it really clicked with me. Had the second season not been out and almost finished when I started the series, I probably would never have come back to it after season 1. So I'm hoping that Jujutsu Kaisen can achieve something similar, and lift itself up by the end of the season to change my impression.