Tokyo Ghoul:re (Season 3 First Half) Series Review

When Tokyo Ghoul:re was about to come out, so many people were telling me to read the manga before watching the series, something that I didn’t do and that I honestly regret up to this day. Even though Tokyo Ghoul:re managed to get all the plot essentials straight this time and didn’t differentiate from the original plot, unlike Root A, the series overall was a bloody mess.

Synopsis

If you have watched the two previous seasons, you know what the setting of Tokyo Ghoul is all about. Tokyo Ghoul:re takes place two years after the CCG’s raid on Anteiku. The Aogiri Tree is growing stronger than ever and the ghouls still continue to pose a huge problem for CCG. In an attempt to exterminate the ghouls, CCG creates a special team called the Quinx Squad where humans have undergone surgery and have gained special ghoul powers. The leader of the group, Haise Sasaki, is a half-ghoul, half human who has been trained by the special class Investigator Arima Kishou and who seems to be missing memories of his past or more likely of the person he used to be.

Plot & Story

This time, Studio Pierrot decided to stick to the original story of the manga much more closely, which was a pleasant surprise for everyone. But even though the plot was more faithful to the manga, it’s like they didn’t even bother to capture the essence of the story. Everything was poorly executed and overly rushed and it gave you the impression that you were watching the summary of something really good. The pacing of the plot was too fast and didn’t give you time to grasp the core of things that were happening or all the new characters that were appearing, making everything so damn confusing, especially for anime-only fans. I think the biggest problem of the anime was that it was assuming that we have already read the manga, making the overall plot really hard to follow. The characters were presented to us so briefly, with no in-depth backstory, no relationship build-up between them and that made the viewers ignore their existence and not really care about their development whatsoever. It took away our chance to immerse of the original story, and that’s a damn shame if you ask me, since Ishida puts a lot of weight to the story through his well-thought-out characters.

Art & Music

Oh boy, where should I start with this… I haven’t been this disappointed with an animation in a while: there was a lack of impact in all the fighting scenes; no momentum, no weight of action. It felt like you were watching a bunch of still frames put together. For an anime that has so much gore and action, everything felt so dead. There was no emotion, no pain from the characters. The physics were absolutely ignored, making the scenes look all goofy and terrible. In the beginning, I thought that the budget must have been small and that they must have kept the best animation cuts for the final episode, but no, the last episode was as bad as the rest of the anime. The scene of Kaneki fighting Eto should have had much more power and action, as well as Kaneki’s awakening, but honestly they were so mediocre. There were some parts that were really well done with beautiful detailing but they were not enough to save the day.

Another huge let-down was the music and the sound of the anime. A lot of the scenes had mismatched sounds based on what was happening. For example: the last scene of the final episode where the happy ending song was playing in the background and all the sad stuff kept on happening. In scenes of great emotional and physical impact, the sound effects were non-existent or the volume was just too low. The music failed to enhance the drama of each moment. The opening and ending song were okay but they couldn’t match the greatness of Unravel.

Themes & Trivia

For the confused fans: If Tokyo Ghoul:re left you really confused with all the characters that were showing up one after the other, here is a full guide that will help you clear up who is who and what’s his role in the overall plot.

Why is everything so bad? According to Twitter, one fan tried to lay out the schedule for Tokyo Ghoul:re episodes, and if the information is correct, then all the episodes from number 7 to 10 were storyboarded by only one artist, Toshinori Watanabe. Not only is he overseeing the artistic side of them but he will direct two of them with animators at Studio PIerrot and the other two episodes are outsourced to a studio in South Korea. If the studio was not in a position to produce the anime, it would probably have been better to delay it for one more year or so in order to give to the fans something that was really worth it and not overly rushed crap.

Comments

Disappointing. There is no other word to describe Tokyo Ghoul:re. Its plot could have been amazing and engaging but was so poorly directed and animated that was just sad to watch. People will think that I have read the manga and I am just ranting because I know how good it could have been, but guys no, I haven’t read the manga, only bits and parts, and I am really mad about the outcome of the anime. Yes, it can be enjoyable at some levels, but generally, I am not a fan of confusing, cringey and badly produced shows that give you an occasional laugh every now and then, especially when the plot is so intriguing. It honestly frustrates me. The standards were just really low, and for a show that has such a huge following, I just expected something much better.

Once you become what you fear, fear goes away.

Plus:

Nice humor
Interesting characters with occasional beautiful detailing
Overall interesting plot

Minus:

Unpolished animation
Disappointing action
Sound effects were unsynchronous in many scenes
Rushed and badly executed storytelling

After watching this season of Tokyo Ghoul, it looked like a bad advertisement aimed to make you want to read the manga, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it would have been great to see a good anime adaptation that would hype and satisfy the fans. Studio Pierrot announced a continuation of Tokyo Ghoul:re in October 2018. I really hope that with this they will at least make an effort to make it look good because otherwise, the fans will be enraged to a horrifying level.

You can read more about the upcoming season of Tokyo Ghoul:re here.