Attack On Titan, perhaps may be the greatest anime, next to Hunter X Hunter and Steins;Gate. The show was just great in many aspects, and it was just always keeping me interested. While I consider AOT to not be the best anime I’ve personally watched, I can safely say it should be in the Big Three, with HxH and S;G.
Attack On Titan is just so well constructed, I don’t even know where to start. Let’s start with the story.

Story
Season 1 started off full of wholesomeness. Kids standing up for each other, a kid has his goals set, and a happy family, really. Perhaps they’re just surrounded by walls, which isn’t that bad.
We had the plot twist, and suddenly we were brought about by a bunch of lives being taken by man eating creatures. The story progressed more or less normally.
Being a shounen, you would just expect the main character to have a strengthened will and the next thing you know, a training arc. Now what makes AOT different from a normal shounen is that it suddenly kills of a bunch of characters left and right. However, it’s still mainly a normal shounen. Main character has plot conveniences, they have that one cool character and some other shounen tropes.

It’s not bad, but I found the first season to be disappointing. It wasn’t as epic as I thought it’d be, but it was still – from a certain perspective – a uniquely and amazingly written story.
Season 2 was when I started having the hype, as the pacing was nearly perfect; it was more or less fast whilst giving us time to connect with the characters. Though it lacked enough events and there was hardly any plot progression besides revealing who the Colossal and Armoured Titan was.
What made this season stand out was focusing on characters rather than all the fights.

Once you reach the third season, things start to progress again and I consider this the current peak of the series. It solely focused on the mystery element and many things were discovered and plot twists left and right were happening with events all tied together. What made it better was the slow build-up into one of the greatest arcs in all of anime.

Season 3 Part 2. This season was as good as Steins;Gate at as a whole, and could’ve surpassed it even if it stayed consistently good, but the previous seasons weren’t that good.
This season had the basement reveal, which stood out as one of the biggest plot twists without feeling large. This season was the starter point of depression, as loss and sadness occurred everywhere, including one of my favourite scenes, the choice of who will gain the powers between two people.
The build-up that we had been waiting for has finally all lead up to one basement with the journey to get there being a long one. All the plot points were introduced into merely 10 episodes, with the last 3 being the peak of the show. The conclusion to this season turned the entire show around making the entire story feel different.

The Final Season was massively spoiled by everyone, so I didn’t fully enjoy it. However, it should go down as one of greatest build-ups, (as I’m a manga reader, I should know what’s about to go down in the final part.)
What made the Final Season unique, was the fact that it focused more on the enemies’ perspectives, which made us unable to pick which side was in the wrong. Ultimately, of course fans would side with the wall citizens, as we’ve been with them for about 3 seasons.
AOT consists of a crazy amount of plot points, covering most of the plot holes, and its writing is nearly on par with Steins;Gate.
10/10

Sound
Attack On Titan has more or less fine openings. They aren’t the best, but they contain hype. It also focuses more on patriotic and war related themes, some even containing german. The Final Season’s first opening was really well done. Even hiding potential spoilers in the lyrics. It’s not generic either, so it’s actually quite beautiful. It even has some amazing symbolism.
When it comes to the endings, it’s disappointing. Season 1’s ending themes were not memorable, but the seasons after that, it’s fine. Season 2 specifically was amazing, as it contained spoilers regarding the manga. All the previous seasons’ music wasn’t really the best, music-wise, but the Final Season, had by far, the most beautiful ending. (Which also contains spoilers).

The soundtrack is on a different level. All of them are memorable, from ‘Apple Seed’, to ‘YouSeeBigGirl’ to the OST where Levi fought the Beast Titan – all of them left a big mark on me, making me memorize some of them. And sometimes its not just the OST that can properly fully bring out AOT; it’s the scenes too. As the OST can be misplaced in certain areas.

The voice acting is on another level. Though 90% of the time it’s full of screaming. This one anime made a ton of iconic lines like, “Tatakae”, “KEEEENNNNYYYYYEEAAHHH”, and of course, “Shinzou wo Sasageyo”. The voice actors that voice Eren, Levi, Armin and others did a fantastic job capturing the characters. It’s hard to believe Eren voices Todoroki (My Hero).

8.8/10

Art
Attack On Titan has some of the best animation I’ve ever seen. Preferably over ufotable’s works. AOT is full of hand drawn scenes and lacks CGI, and when they do use CGI, it’s horrible. (No offence, studio WIT and MAPPA).
The fight scenes are well made but they aren’t exactly ones to hype you up. WIT animates amazing fight scenes, but not ones that can hype you up to the max. On another note, we have MAPPA, a studio that animates horrible fight scenes with it being covered with CGI everywhere.
Unfortunately, AOT is a hard project, so studio WIT even had to drop it. And if you’ve seen Season 3 Part 2, you’d know how crazy the animators were for that season. On average, a still image for WIT takes about 3 days.

The character designs are amazing, too. They have unrealistic large eyes, but they have so much detail. On another note, they have noses that look more realistic than the average anime.
The visuals are perhaps the most underrated aspect of WIT’s animation. (MAPPA messed up most of the visuals in the Final Season). If you see certain scenes, you’d see that WIT uses all of their skills even if it’s one scene, and they use a bunch of special effects that make the entirety of the animation better.
It’s like eye candy.

Besides the horrible CG, AOT conquers the animation industry. And I hope their animators get paid more as WIT is a small studio. Get them more animators and they wouldn’t have dropped AOT.
9.8/10

Characters
The characters in AOT are probably the worst aspect of the anime. Mainly, most of the characters have average writing, such as Mikasa and Armin. Though I love Armin. Including Eren, for 3 seasons. Eren, however, got character development that could make him one of the greatest main characters of all time.
Their motivations however, are amazingly written. It’s amazing how much work the author puts to make people seem more realistic than the avergae character.
Most of the characters lack character development, and besides making us connect to the characters more, it failed to show enough character interactions between one and another, which made one of the build-ups to the betrayal less impactful than it was.
Aside from the characters being more or less bland, this is merely from a perspective. For others, most characters are actually well written. Though contradictory, I’d say, that most of the characters did contribute.
8/10

Enjoyment – 8.7/10
Among the animes I have seen, AOT is pretty epic. A masterpiece in many aspects, but if I think about it enough, I realize AOT wasn’t that good in this aspect. Enjoyment.
I liked a lot of characters in this show, and I loved the animation, but at the end of the day, it could’ve been better, and mainly, it feels too fast. And there were many scenes where I was confused at.

But nonetheless, AOT was a good anime. Surely, may be the greatest anime, but not personally mine.