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

Tokyo Ghoul:re can act as an example why fans should pay more attention to the original work and not just watch the anime adaptations of every manga out there. For those familiar with the Tokyo Ghoul manga, you have already witnessed its greatness and what the amazing storytelling and artistic skills of Sui Ishida can really do. For those that have no idea, then do yourself a favour and get your hands on the manga to experience a far superior version of what the anime presented to you.

Synopsis

Kaneki is no longer Haise. After regaining his memories, he seeks to get out of CCG and ends up battling Arima and assisting the Cochlea raid. Furuta becomes the next head of the CCG and leads endless slaughters that make even his men question his motives. In his attempt to bring humans and ghouls together Kaneki creates the Goat organization in order to fight back, but after an intense fight with the CCG, he ends up transforming into the Dragon, a big dangerous monster that spreads all over Tokyo. While CCG and ghouls decide to work together against Furuta, Kaneki will need to fight against his inner beast once more in order to save everyone.

Plot & Story

The second half of the third season of Tokyo Ghoul:re includes the ‘Third Cochlea Raid’, the ‘Goat Wipe-out Operation’ and the ‘Dragon’ arcs. These three have probably the juiciest details and plot progression in the whole manga and trying to fit them in only 12 episodes would have been an incredibly hard task. As it turned out (no surprises there), the production of Tokyo Ghoul:re continued to be as dreadful as the first half of the season. Characters that you might know (or not) pop out with no introduction whatsoever (only writing their name on the screen), some are presented to us without any additional information, others die like random animals, and some even appear and immediately die. People who were supposedly dead end up being alive and in any other case that would make the viewer amazed, but instead it makes them feel plain anger and frustration. The action and fighting sequences are dreadful, with no impact and no connection to the previous events and the story just jumps from one scene to another without sense and without explanation, confusing the hell out of the viewer. Even if you have read the manga, the show feels so rushed and badly paced that you end up being so disappointed. It’s probably the first time in my life that I had to actually pause maybe 10 times per episode in order to understand who are the characters shown in front of me and read more about their deal. What saddens me most is that the original work of Sui Ishida is very profound, well-made, and philosophical and the only thing that the anime ended up doing is killing it by senseless combat. Long story short, this is a poorly made anime with a butchered story that literally slaughtered the Tokyo Ghoul world.

Art & Music

It feels bad criticizing the work of so many people so badly, but honestly I have no words for how much the art and animation of the show has declined. Studio Pierrot ruined the show. There you go, I said it. With basic animation that is borderline static, generic art style that doesn’t reflect the manga’s great artistic value, and indifferent color palettes, this anime looks more like a slideshow than an actual animated production. Still frame shots in every action and fighting scene (which should have been the main focus of the show) are just so bad that it’s actually a shame to see the good plot and gore wasted like this. Everything resulted in messy and tensionless action with half-hearted attempts to bring emotion to the characters and the viewers. I’m sorry but this was just appalling.

Now, on the far opposite the music and the voice acting of the show are superb. Even though the sound effects are not that great either (like the scene of Kaneki swimming in water but not water effects are used whatsoever) the soundtrack is really well made. The opening song ‘Katharsis’ by TK from Ling Tosite Sigure is just amazing and acts as a great successor to ‘Unravel’ that made this show extremely popular. Another thing that is worth mentioning is the acting of the seiyuus: everyone did such a remarkable job portraying their characters and gave so much emotion in their performances.

Themes & Trivia

Dear Kafka: The title of Eto’s book is referring to Franz Kafka, a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.

The fandom’s reaction over the sex scene: When the volume of the manga that contained the scene came out, the fans demanded that Sui Ishida should commit suicide after what he ‘has done’. The reason for that demand was because there is a dedicated segment of fans that want Kaneki and his male best friend Hide ending up as a couple and they ended up having their ship destroyed by Sui Ishida. Honesty, no words can describe the awfulness of this situation without insulting anybody so I am just going to pass on this. You can have a look at their comments here.

Comments

Tokyo Ghoul:re was a huge disappointment for me and I strongly believe that it’s the same for all the fans out there. I do not agree with reinforcing awfully produced anime and I really hope that Studio Pierrot learned their lesson with this and that expectantly they will stop being greedy and take upon less work in order to provide the fans with better results. God damn it, I want the whole anime industry to have the same turnover that the animation studio in Shirobako did, is this too much to ask for? Less anime per year (with higher budgets), more quality content so everyone can be happy.

Everything will have been for naught

Plus:

Great voice action
Good humor
Deep messages about life (that didn’t have the impact that I was hoping for but whatever)

Minus:

Bad and poorly executed animation
Introduction of characters with no further explanations
Disappointing action and some really lame anime clichés (Furuta screaming DIE DIE DIE DIE or MORE MORE MORE MORE)

Honestly, if you liked the first season of Tokyo Ghoul and were intrigued by its storyline and premises then just completely skip the existence of Tokyo Ghoul:re and go on with reading the manga. Trust me on this, you will value the story so much more and you won’t waste your time being upset with the poor execution of everything.