Review - Shingeki no Kyojin: The Final Season

 

I will keep this relatively brief.

I absolutely adored the first 3 seasons of Attack on Titan. I thought it had a lot of spirit and atmosphere, and it made waves among the anime world, and justifiably so. However starting at the final season things really just started to go down hill. The art style was completely changed because of a change in companies and instead of keeping things faithful they decided to abandon it for something that was worse quality. This include worse usage of CGI than in prior seasons. Similarly, the animation quality dropped off between the third and final seasons. The soundtrack fails to have some of the subtly and variety of the previous shows and prefers to be more "In your face" almost all the time. The OP and Endings at this point have tried to copy the success of the first to the point where they are not really at this point "Unique" or particularly different, just more of a worse copy.

Between season 3 and the final season there is a time skip. One which completely changes character motivations and personas. Most egregiously is how Eren is changed from being a protagonist to an antagonist and with it his character is shifted to become "What an optimist thinks a nihilist's views are". Because of the timeskip, we don't get to see any gradual change or indication that he is changing to be this way. We also don't have really any hints that this would happen in the previous 3 seasons. It just does.

The series also both rewrites old characters, and introduces new characters that pale in comparison to the third-dimensionality of the characters in season 3 and prior. Gabi for instance is probably the worst character to be introduced in the show. And just as she kills Sasha it represents the shift of this series into a worse direction. I Dislike Gabi for the same reason I disliked Yuki and Yuno from Mirrai Nikki and dislike Shinji from the Evangelion movies. Any character that is merely meant to be a pathetic piece of shit with no redeeming qualities and doesn't have more than one or two motivations is boring.

Finally, this series has one of the more egregious mishandlings of the topics of genocide that I've seen (which conveniently also only begins in the final season), probably only topped by a show like 86.

So my suggestion is that if you want to watch AoT, only watch the first 3 seasons. It's similar to watching the second season of One Punch man, or the second season of Promised Neverland after that, just full of disappointment.

Rating: 4/10