Story
Yeah, well, you probably know the story by now.
Characters
The characters are pretty much standard fare anime characters. We have the whiny, powerful main character who does almost absolutely nothing during the entire show except for cry and wonder why he is so weak without bothering to try to make himself stronger. The only hero who bugged me even more than the brilliantly named 'Kaneki Ken-kun' was Yuuki from Mirai Nikki. If you can even call that guy a hero. But it hurts more in Tokyo Ghoul because Kaneki has so much potential, and can easily be one of the strongest Ghouls around, but decides to spend 95% of the anime wailing. The last ten minutes give him credit though. And he looks freaking awesome with that mask.
Rize has far less screen time than most other characters, but is more important than most of them. It is because her organs are transplanted into Kaneki that he develops his ghoul powers, his kagemune, and becomes a one eyed ghoul. She appears time to time, usually seducing our main hero while trying to convince him to accept his ghoul powers and use them.
Touka is kind of a mix of two characters. On one count, she reminds me of Mikasa Ackerman of SHingeki no Kyojin because of her attitude and her raw power, besides her latent arrogance. I mean, the moment I saw her, I thought 'Mikasa'. There's one huge difference though. Touka is a tsundere, while Mikasa is a partial yandere. Not Yuno level, but she is obsessed with Eren.
The second one, and I realized this immediately too, is her appearence resembles Mei Misaki from Another. They both have navy-blue hair that covers one of their eyes. I don't know, it just popped into my mind.
She's probably the most interesting of all the characters anyhow.
We then have a bunch of characters who, as usual, I didn't really care much for. There's the painfully and blatantly evil Mado (I think that's his name), the heroic Amos who has a couple of minutes wondering about the morality of what he's doing, the cooking guy who is basically the Orochimaru of this anime (pedophilic, continuously licking his lips). Not to mention that white haired kid who looks kinda like a girl, and a bunch of police guys. I mean, I don't even remember hearing their names. And there's Jason, a sadistic and overly-violent ghoul.
Another character is Hide, who is basically Kaneki's best friend, but his importance basically diminished as the show went on.
Unfortunately, I didn't really like many of the characters of the show, and I kept feeling like I saw all of them somewhere else.
Presentation
On the animation front, I have absolutely no problems. I don't think I've paused the video in order to absorb in the beauty of the animation this much for any other show. And this is remarkable, because Tokyo Ghoul entirely takes place in a mundane metropolitan background. They don't even get chances to render stunning vistas like Sword Art Online did, but it impressed me all the same. The sound didn't really stick out much, but the voice actors play their parts well and match the characters. The opening is something to be admired and matches ethereal vocals with beautiful imagery. The animation studio is the same one that took care of Bleach, so they're pretty experienced.
Something I should mention about this show: it's very gory. I mean, not like Corpse Party gore. Or maybe it is. Unfortunately, the anime right now is only available in the censored version, which means your experience will freqeuntly be marred by unnatural black shadows running acorss someone's stomach. But when the uncensored version does come out, you're gonna see lots of graphic imagery. Ghouls eat humans after all, so don't be surprised if you see one bite off a chunk of meat.
As for how the idea is presented...that's what I really wanted to talk about. Once again, Tokyo Ghoul feels like a collection of various ideas that I've seen in various other shows. For example, its moral ambiguity. Throughout the entire show, Tokyo Ghoul wants to make you wonder whether humans are right to kill ghouls as monsters or not. Many anime before this one have tried this idea, but the only other show that has it this fleshed out is Shiki, and I know most people won't agree with me, but I think Shiki did it better. Shiki was more of a mystery, and less intermittently splattered with blood. Because of this, it humanizes (is that the right word here, considering what I'm talking about?) both sides until you actually care for both races. On the other hand, Tokyo Ghoul's viewpoint is primarily from the Ghouls, with humans mostly being depicted as arrogant people who kill ghouls and look down upon them. Throughout the series, you'll be supporting the ghouls without a second thought for mankind. In fact, humans are made so easily hateable that you'll wish all of them were dismembered without a second thought. The only morally grey character is Amos, and he felt to perfect and heroic, and loaded with judgemental ideas to be likeable, so I wanted him to die too.
Another thing is those eyes. Those eyes. Seen them somewhere? Maybe, maybe not. If you have, it just might be Shiki, where black eyes with red irises are used to distinguish the Shiki from humans. Sound familiar? In this anime, it's what is used to differentiate between ghouls and humans.
I can make a vague reference to Lucy's hands in Elfen Lied about Kaneki's kagemune, but that isn't really valid because Kaneki's power looks more like tentacles. Let's hope that doesn't go down the wrong road one day. Just kidding, Tokyo Ghoul is too good to go down the same road that Sword Art Onine went on.
Then, as you approach the final episodes of the show, we get an extended and mostly unnecessary torture scene that brought up memories of RIN: Daughters of Mnemosyne, whose first or second episode features a similarly sadistic antagonist and a similarly fast-regenerating protagonist. Of course, RIN was far more explicit and would probably have to be completely censored (for a good reason this time) but you know what I'm talking about.
The show contains some shounen elements like Kaneki not wanting to hurt anyone, but that gets rectified by the end of the series.
Overall
Tokyo Ghoul feels more like a prologue to something else far more interesting. While the animation was well taken care of, the idea of thrusting 60 chapters into 12 episode is not logically sound, and led to us losing most of the interesting details in the process. It also feels like there were too many arcs in such a short span, and seeing someone who was absolutely hated three episodes earlier helping our heroes is kind of jarring. Besides that, it also feels like an amalgamation of ideas from other anime piled into one. While most others may like the idea, I sat there and throughout the show I thought 'Hey, nice idea. But it was better done in (insert anime name here)'.
Overall, watch it, because it's still pretty good despite its faults. Be prepared for a blood-fest, though. With a lot of black lines.
Story: 7
Art: 8
Sound: 8
Character: 6
Enjoyment: 7
Overall: 7
NOTE: I'm enjoying the second season more, although the opening is now crap.
