Story: The world in this anime is amazing. A weird Middle Ages-type world, weird humanoid things running around eating people, weird cord-type devices used to move around like Spiderman? It's immersive from the start. The explicit material is insane and puts you on the edge of your seat--I gasped plenty times throughout the show, just for how brutal and insane the gore was. Also, this anime deals with an extremely mature storyline that seems to come out of left field (**SPOILER:** Mikasa's backstory), which I thought was a nice touch. Every episode of this show is completely interesting--perfect for a binge watch, though it moves kind of slowly towards the end. The underlying themes of corruption brought into this show at the end, which will (probably) be expanded on next season, made the show just that more interesting to me. Only one bad note--the military formation stuff got really confusing to me, but without going back to try to understand much of it I could still decipher what was going on.
Characters: The characters in this show are mostly one-note and can be identified by one or two characteristics that they stick to in each episode: Eren is determined, Mikasa likes to save Eren a lot, says "EREN!" all the time, and is badass, Sasha likes food and is nervous, etc. I don't think this anime really *needs* a ton of character development, THERE ARE GIANT SKINNED HUMANOIDS EATING PEOPLE EVERYWHERE. This is a story-driven anime, though I will admit if there were complex characters it would push a wonderful anime into "best anime I've ever seen" territory.
Overall: Immersive story, gore and twists that will make you gasp and/or scream expletives at the top of your lungs, but one-note characters and some slow episodes.
Overall 9
