Tokyo Ghoul has one of the most pretentious stories I've ever seen. It's so high on the smell of it's own farts that there will still be people out here defending it simply because it tries to be "deep" so it must be good. This is a huge trend I've noticed with shows targeted at the Seinen audience. They think they need to be dark and mysterious and edgier than a razor blade factory in order to draw in the brooding, angsty demographic of autistic chuunis who still read manga into their late teens. What you get is a story that's all edge with no substance.
There were a handful of moments in this final season that I actually enjoyed. They were emotional payoffs to things that had been setup as early as the first season. Everything else was a fluffy, confusing mess of "what if the real bad guys were the humans all along" and "racism bad," mixed with fight scenes where you don't know who any of the characters involved were or what side they were on much less their motivations, all of which played out in the same way as every fight scene on this show since season 2: flashy but ultimately boring displays of tentacles whipping all over the place breaking stuff. There are main characters I couldn't tell you the names of because the show just goes that far to make you not care about them.
New characters are introduced and then killed off so quickly it's impossible to care to the point that when one of them comes back from the dead later on, because apparently this is Dragon Ball or Naruto now, the only feeling you can muster up is a mildly annoyed "who was he again?" The main villain's motivation was stupid and unclear until the very end when you realize it was probably just the horny because he wanted to bring Rize back from the dead even if it meant her being a giant centipede monster the size of Tokyo. That had potential to make for an actually interesting villain if he wasn't also the worst, pretty hard to pretend to make a villain sympathetic after all that.
I want to give this a really bad grade but I can't ignore the parts I actually did enjoy. There were some emotional moments that resonated with me that made watching some of the middle episodes a little more bearable, but you had to slog through so much to get to them it was almost not worth it. So I think a balanced score of about 6/10 sounds about right. That's a passing grade in most American high schools just to compare the bar of quality we're talking about here.
