In essence, mankind is on the verge of extinction and the reason is kabane, the mix of zombies/ghouls/titans/legion. Humans now only live in cities surrounded by rampart and use trains to move between them. The setting is grandiose but it's an anime-original and it has only one cour and a movie. You can write a good story with that runtime but, again, by shifting focus, but it didn't do that and the story ended up half-baked. The first arc is pretty straightforward: one city gets overrun by kabane and the survivals leave for another city by train with our two main characters on board: Ikoma and Mumei. Also they are Kabaneri: half-human, half-kabane, but it's not important for the plot. This arc is pretty decent and I don't have complaints. But everything after the evacuation arc is a complete mess and I can't find better words to describe it. The story here is terribly structured to make a proper breakdown, the tone completely shifts pulling the later seasons of Attack on Titan, I guess, and the main characters loose any sliver of personality. Ikoma's motivation is to liberate humanity but he doesn't enroll some military organization nor he continues to work as an engineer to mass produce the weapon he invented to effectively annihilate kabane; so he decides to hang out with Mumei instead. Mumei seems to have some depth at first, but ends up docilely obeying her "Onee-sama", she basically becomes a pawn. The villain of this arc has a single digit IQ, they want people to fight kabane, but they destroy cities they live in. Like, dude, if people only fought kabane who would make weapons to fight them.
The world building is more consistent than the story, because it consistently sucks. If you want to know the origins of kabane, the current status of the world, why Mumei uses a stopwatch, or how kabaneri are able to keep the human nature having kabane's strength, just forget about it. The world here has no name, and the only information that this is Japan is from the opening and I don't know if it's intentional or someone's oversight. No information about how many cities there are or if other countries are destroyed by kabane either. There's also no feeling of "humanity is on the verge of collapse" and the whole tone is rather there are few runaway animals from a zoo. Every city including the capital has some sand castle level of defense, so it's enough just a bunch of soldiers to open the main gate and let a train or kabane inside. Kabane themselves can run at cheetah's speed but most of the time move at a crawl, they also can turn people in kabane but sometimes decide to simply kill them.
I could probably tear into the technical part because no one would protect this show anyway, but it's actually excellent. I don't know who was responsible for writing but animation, music, direction, and storytelling weren't affected by that abomination. The direction and the storytelling is actually better than in AoT but they are totally useless when the story is this bad. And maybe if the technical aspect was much worse Kabaneri would have been at least considered a guilty pleasure show by some.
It was 2016 and the Attack on Titan hype was gradually declining, so Wit decided to utilize what remained, but so obvious clone wouldn't have been as popular and the writing wasn't improved, quite the opposite. Mom can we have Attack on Titan, no we have Attack on Titan at home.
