Attack on Titan The Final Season

vudujuju Mar 31, 2021

2

N.B. I’m gonna assume you watched seasons 1-3 so please do that if you don’t want to be spoiled. Onto the review! Have you ever been perplexed about a question as a kid and then when you asked an adult never got a straight answer? That’s how I feel about AoT S4. The first arc establishes a new setting, new characters, even arguably a new protagonist in Reiner… And then re-introduces our protagonist whose personality has completely changed with no explanation. Am I expected to take this complete transformation and accept it as “development”? Now I’m newly perplexed about the missing pieces that formed Eren that way. This show loves to divert for as long as possible, and then slap on new material when they need to answer questions. If you’re wondering about anything in the show, just expect a new titan mechanic to pop up, because the twists are impossible to predict based on the presented material. The magnitude of this cast is insane. You cannot tell a story about a fictional military drama with nontrivial politics AND have slice-of-life moments between the corps members AND try to build a strong shounen-esque trio opposing some “villainous” characters… and expect me to care about all of them. The show seems to require motivations for every character… but it becomes so dragged out. The simplistic message of “There’s another side to the story” is established very quickly and repeated ad nauseum. Reiner is the tortured character who has lived on both sides of the war. Gabi's personality and motivations are identical to season 1 Eren…. Just seen from the other side. But Falco is entirely useless. He’s merely another generic “hero” who has nothing to add to the already simplistic message. I’ve seen a lot of people complain about MAPPA’s adaptation, but personally it made little difference since I never liked the art in the first place. In terms of the animation, sure there was some janky rotoscoping and uncanny CGI, but those were only brief moments that broke immersion for me. The soundtrack was also a slight drop from the previous seasons. I love Sawano, and his specialty seems to be building up instrumental tracks towards an epic moment with a vocal song. But there weren’t any show-stopping tracks like that this season. Actually I wish this was rotoscoped... I understand that this series will be concluded in a few months. So while I understand some of my questions may be answered in the Final Part (hopefully) of this Final Season...I can’t say I care.

JunoSchantel Feb 1, 2021

10

The story is brilliant. Although it starts from a time skip to the future from season 3, the story is still easy to catch up  on and understand and it compensates for the missing parts of the storyline (I would prefer that the missing parts stayed since they are also relevant. But doing this timeskip allowed us to have so many surprises.)  The animation is great! I almost did not notice that the titan transformations were CGI until I looked at it the second time. It doesn't really matter if it's CGI as long as you enjoy the anime and the story itself. Don't listen to hate comments. The animation here might be different compared to the previous seasons, but MAPPA did a great job doing it on their own style!  The sound is just chef's kiss. The opening song and the ending song is stuck in my head these days on replay. Not to mention, the sound effects are on point, the voice acting is as great as it was in last season. The emotions you can have just by listening to the emotional or suspenseful music is amazing!  The characters are portrayed so well. We are given a glimpse, or if not, episodes about the side of the Marleyans. I love how we are still able to have fun even if we didn't know these new characters in previous seasons. I love the dope new designs and the way MAPPA made our favorite boys and girls look amazing! Don't listen to hate posts or comments in the internet. Nothing is bad about MAPPA's animation for this season unless you believe the haters' usual hating shenanigans. 

moonIiqht Mar 28, 2021

10

I really love this final season, although I'm not looking forward to the wait until part 2. I just want to warn everyone that there will be a TON of spoilers everywhere so just avoid anything that involves aot in general.