This kind of apocalyptic scenario holds a lot of potential: The struggle of mankind against the nearly unbeatable foe, can we uphold humane acts at the brink of extinction?, can we fight the seemingly unavoidable?.
A story of despair, tragedy and drama is about to unfold.
But it does not quite work. The promising setting gets ruined by its realization.
First of the way of animating seems pretty outdated, everytime a character is supposed to look sad,concerned,serious or angry there are black stripes above his eyes and on his forehead. This does not amplify the impression the situation is supposed to present or depicts a realistic facial feature it just looks bad. In addition to that the supposedly looking nemesis of mankind, the titans, that are meant to look scary and frightening look godawful. One looks like Santa Claus, the other runs like a mentally disabled and so on, rarely any titan fulfills its purpose of being scary, they act more as comic relief and are so destroying the mood that is supposed to be generated.
Next up are the characters and i had a problem with the protagonist Eren Jaeger. He wants to kill every titan and is not afraid of telling everyone but when it actually comes to killing one he is from being capable of doing so but still insists he would be able to. Other than that the characters are okay, some are better developed and implemented some are worse but I missed "special" characters, most of the presented ones are shallow and pretty simple designed with not much of character development.
The story is a tricky point; I really liked the idea behind it but it starts incredibly slow. With "only" 25 episodes at hand there is no time for a slow start like you see in longer anime. This way a lot of the tension, which the scenario and setting in this series heavily relies on, disappears and it gets dull and sadly this happens for me. This results in the real action only starting at the end of this anime leaving you with a lot of unanswered questions and a barely progressed plot. The story also lacks authenticity at some points, i can not go too much into detail because of spoilers but the military strategies and political actions are highly questionable and, in my opinion, irrealistic for this situation the acting persons are in.
I need to praise the soundstrack and openings though, they are fitting perfectly into the mood at the perfect time with the perfect sound, what the story tries to depict gets perfectly presented by the audial effects.
TL;DR: Great idea with great potential but not well enough executed, story has too many flaws and plot does not answer enough questions or has not even really started, perfect soundtrack, pathetic giants totally not presenting what they are supposed to, average charater, mediocre or worse artistic depiction.
I do think though that a secound season with the plot really picking up steam could score a perfect 10, this season/series merely fulfills the role of an exposition.
