The show is nice. The animation is good and it's very entertaining. I'll give it that. However it has a lot of flaws, and this season, while it's in some aspects more interesting than the previous ones, it's also lacking a bit.
My biggest probleme with this anime is more of an adaptation issue. I may criticise some aspects of the story itself, but what I find specially disappointing is the narrative structure of the animation.
The narration style tries to make the plot more mysterious by giving small fragments of information here and there instead of going for the big punctual revelations, and that's supposed to be original, but the truth is that once you start to put all the pieces together, it feels like they are doing it so they can hide the weaknesses of the plot. When you put the pieces together, you can see that the story has many incoherences. During the previous seasons I expected those incoherences to be fixed with deep and surprising answers, but as the show progresses, the answers never seem to come, and when they do, they are always partial and disconnected. Basic narrative rule: If your plot is lacking something (as it seems to be the case) at least try to compensate it with a good hype. First mistake: Fragmenting the revelations is the death of hype.
In this season, now that we know more about what is going on, we can see that the story is not that deep, and the reasons behind the action are not that plausible, maybe because, at a psychological level, the characters are not fully developed either. Their personalities are very basic and random, they don't learn or evolve, and so their actions are lacking of meaningful purpose.
When watching this show, I always feel like something huge and awesome is going to happen right around the corner, but it never actually does. All the supposed important information the main characters have gotten and all they have achieved... truth is, I don't care... They drop a plot twist about a random character that has had almost no screen time at all until then. How are we supposed to get effectively empathetic with characters we don't know? Basic narrative rule number two: When you drop a bomb about something, make sure your public actually knows something about that, otherwise the impact will be completely pointless. That happens when the distribution of information is poorly done.
Besides, for a show that relies so strongly on the "emotions of the sacrifices made in war" most of the conversations are pretty empty and lacking deep insight of human emotions. They use so many words to give so little information. The characters almost never say anything that may help to grasp their personality or the basis of their actions any better. Even when they talk about something important, they never let the conversation completely flow towards what the audience actually needs to hear in order to empathize or be effectively amazed by the plot twists, and while that's a narrative resource that can be nice to use now and then to create intrigue, it's almost impossible to build 3 seasons systematically using that resource.
This might not be a problem for people who already read the manga, but it may make it frustrating for someone who hasn't. I guess it might work if you are watching it merely for the action. The story almost never stops, they are always on the move and there's always something going on, so it's overall entertaining, even though at a deeper level it has flaws.
I've watched it because honestly, it's very easy to watch, but I think for a full experience with the story, it might be a better idea to read the manga. Again, this is my personal opinion and it's ok if you watch the show and think otherwise. I respect that. But just know that not everybody thinks that this is the ultimate show and that's to be respected as well.
