Tokyo Ghoul:re - Reviews

It is interesting reading some reviews on this adaptation that signal to the manga being better, because it isnt. The issues with pacing and the storyline come from the manga itself, and the anime does not do much to better this to make it easier for anime only viewers to understand, as they are coming from Root A that went a different direction than the manga itself.  This first season animates up to the middle of volume 6 of Toyko Ghoul:Re so it isnt a crazy amount being adapted with a chunk of that being pages of fighting.  

Story

The introduction to Hase and his team is just as awkward in the manga, you are left with a lot of questions of what happened as the tranisition from Kaneki to Hase happened off screen. This makes you as the viewer experience the frustration that the ghouls must have while watching Kaneki be just not himself for a while, as you see that he is on the edge of remembering his past. I believe most people are into this show for him, so seeing him not be quite the same is jarring for viewers. 

Most of the plot ends up being either the Doves using Hase's group to fight against the ghouls while simultaneously talking about how dangerous they are, or the ghouls realizing Kaneki is still around and wanting to reawaken him with their own plots. The stuff cut out from the manga its mostly small character development and its up to you to decide if you care to know more about these new characters and if that was a good choice there. It was nice to see more about Toru's transness and a bit of their past, but it also changes the tone to include all of that isntead of keep to the darker elements in effort to streamline. 

Animation

The quality of animation varies per episode. It seems clear that they put a lot of their budget into some of the more action packed scene and so the rest suffers for it. There is a lot of darkness in the scenes which is an attempt to animate less. You can also see it with the still images in a few scenes that the animation budget ran up, a common tactic to try to animate less. Big scens I saw that in was their celebratory dinner and then part of episode 11 during the end of the fight scene. Its a shame since the series by now should have enough budget to go forward without the need for tricks. 

Sound

The soundtrack of the season is still pretty good. The opening song fits really well for the series, and has a slight paprika vibe to it. Ending song feels lighter in tone which is a change in pace from the events of the series. It makes you wish you could spend more time with the group without the fighting. The use of the previous op in the episode when there is a hint of Kaneki showing up is also a nice touch to the idea of that each opening song is connected to each personality. 

Characters

New characters introduced feel replacable, you dont really get any time to build an emotional connection to them. Seeing the growth in old characters both human and ghoul makes you want to see what they are all doing, but the series intentionally doesnt focus on the ghouls anymore with the doves being the main focus of this part of the series. 

Overall

Not amazing but not bad. The direction this series is going is a bit murky now that they have switched the point of view to the other side. It is still engaging and you know that the eventual interactions with former friends will lead to a good time. It would have been better if they did put more effort into the new characters so they had more a connection to the viewer and could have pushed this to be 14 episodes and still keep the pacing as the manga did but fleshed it out more. 

In my heart tokyo ghoul ends at season 2, this was shit. The show went from one of my favourites to what the actual fuck am I watching. We went from a cool war with ghouls and ghoul investigators to let's send emotionally troubled teenager's into battle. Of course all the teenagers had to be your typical boring charcters, the arrogant one, the psyco one, the lazy one, and the one everybody forget's about. They somehow managed to take peak material and make crap out of it. Why tf does a ghoul who can completely regenerate severed limbs get brain damage and then they decide, well why not make him a ghoul inspector, we have a million other inspectors but we need this ghoul, he could be a real asset to ghoul killing force. Honestly a complete dissapointment, if you haven't watched it yet, watch the first 2 seasons and forget this shit exists. 

It is not bad but I think it gets futher away from the original story?

(SPOILER)

It was a little bit confusing at first who he was because they look the same but acts different and have a different name so I searched on it and got it confirmed that they were one and the same person! (Lucky!)

The second season of Tokyo Ghoul has is a very fast paced anime that focuses on the main character of Haise who is the leader of the Qs squad which is a half breed collection of teenagers who fight off the enemy; ghouls. The anime itself is incredibly fast paced and lacking in many places, while the first season seemed more like a full set this seems to feel rather empty. It's missing some star qualities in it's story that should have been addressed. If they took it slower instead of trying to rush through the whole arc then perhaps it would have been better. Instead they rushed it through what seems to be a very large arch in only 12 episodes which is doing the source material a huge injustice.

While the story itself looks wonderful on paper it's portrayal was lacking. While I feel like reading a manga might get you more information anime is an adaption for a reason. If you cannot portray the manga to it's full int he anime then it should not be done. I did not read the manga so I was left with a ton of questions that for the most part later were answered albeit really quickly and without much explanation. While the story was lacking in depth it gave us new characters to love.

I loved the dynamic between characters and they all really did seem like a close knit family with their issues and all. While Urie gave the most issues I did not come to hate him though there was a twinge of dislike on how cruel he could be it wasn't as offly put as Touka in the first season. It seemed to fit in perfectly than stick out like a sore thumb.

One thing I was not partial to is them not being as clear as the age of Saiko. The rest you can guess they are teenagers but Saiko looks like an eight year old with the chest of a twenty year old. She also acted like a child as well, not pouting and never leaving the room, her mentality was that of a child. The animation was once again wonderful other than that little detail that I wasn't overly fond of. The fight scenes were great and like the first season it was action packed. Through out you see Haise learn who he is and learn more about himself and, watching him be torn in between two factions of life and wanting to have both.

Overall the anime isn't horrible but it isn't good. You shouldn't have to read the manga to understand what is going on in the anime. While it's not as gory as the last and it seems to be more action froward and more sci fi forward with a huge focus on weapons and investigators it lacks in so much else. There are parts that are great but then there are parts that make no sense at all and it leaves you wondering what they are leaving out. i think the anime would have done much better if this arc or well half arc went over two seasons instead. Really digging into the world that sounds great and people want to know more about. Instead if flashed over it in an attempt to move quickly whereas it did not need to. If you want to continue watching Tokyo Ghoul then I say you will be disappointed, it's nothing like the first season, but if you like to continue their story and not read the manga it's better than nothing.

This contains spoilers

     The animations were mostly standard and casual, visuals were pretty standard, I think the story did fine but the whole season went by really fast with seeming like not too much was done. I really think if they would actually show more punches andmore kagune attacks between the stronger characters the fights would be WAY better and not seem to just end with a single descisive blow as they killed off strong characters very easily such as Hairu, Kijima, then Haise getting his ass kicked all over, switching personas, then just taking out the strongest ghoul to exist in the entire story in a one slice (though she's probably still alive). The one fight I think they did an outstanding job was in the first season of Kaneki versus Jason. I don't know what really happened to the guy saiko and the others were fighting in the last episode, like if he actually died or not. Karren could've probably saved themself just as easily as they saved Shu when they were falling lol but whatever. I hope we don't have to wait years again for the fourth season.