My first impression of this anime was; "Wow, this actually could be a decent one". I was right, but I was also wrong at the same time.
I was surprised to see an anime with a dark theme which also was assiciated with the shounen genre, since of the year having lacked such deep, griddy and dark elements in an anime. So I was actually pleased to see something different. Now since it was a shounen, I was expecting no more than a mediocre anime that everyone will forget about in a couple of months, though this anime seems to have left a mark in the community, even if the story progression was not all that great.
I have to say that the first half of Tokyo Ghoul was pleasing to watch, to a certain extent that is. This is because it had a nice progression and didn't rush anything to explain the situation that every character is in. After all the first impression is the most important one. Though I wish I could say the same thing about the second half. The second half seems rushed compared to the first, since it was not as slow paced and well organized as the other one. They introduced many characters that did not play much part in the anime for the rest of the series. This is also the point where I think that the story telling itself got sloppy. The main character, Kaneki Ken, lost almost all of the attention and the position for main character seemed to have switched off the the secondary characters. I have to say though that the last episode did make the first half justice.
The story is very tragic and the way the studio presented it with the art complimented the story accurately. It had a lot of shadows but not too many to keep one confused (this is, of course, if you ignore the constant censoring). The character designs, were pretty down to earth. No one had insanely unnatural aspects about them, ignoring the hair colors chosen. The way the characters are drawn were to be expected from a modern shounen.
They had different variants of characters, though they were mostly stereotypes or copy paste characters from different shows.
Since I have a kind of love/hate relationship with this anime I could not let it go even if my brain told me to. It was mediocre at best and will never rise above mediocrity. That is why I am rating this anime 5/10
