WARNING: This review covers major spoilers for Attack on Titan: Final Season Parts 1 and 2 (which makes sense, considering the majority of this review covers the second half of an ongoing story). Also, I forgot that the minimum requirement for writing a review here was 2,200 characters, and not 2,200 words. So buckle up.
Whoever said that Studio MAPPA’s Attack on Titan was inferior to what we got from Studio WIT can eat their words (and eat my shorts). At the time I’m writing this review, not only are Final Season Parts 1 and 2 the exact same average rating, but their ratings surpass those of Seasons 1, 2, and 3 Part 1. And that’s just looking at the hard facts on the site. The show proper speaks for itself. Final Season has basically flipped the genre of the show on its head, and yet, it works so well with what was revealed at the end of Season 3. It may have been a complete mental whiplash at the beginning of Part 1, and I suppose it’s only fitting for Part 2 to end with some more mindbending.
I watched the last episode with my brother and, I’ll be completely honest, the idea that it was a flashback never crossed my mind until they basically spelled it out for us. To be fair, they ended the penultimate episode with the gang on a boat, so starting the next episode with the gang on a similar boat, wearing completely different clothes, and adding back characters who are either dead or gravely injured seems like a strange choice from a continuity perspective. That would really be my only major gripe with Part 2, and even then, I wasn’t having a bad time even though I was thoroughly confused. I’m used to the sensation after having watched four whole seasons of this show. One thing I wasn’t used to, however, was watching the show weekly. I had watched Season 1 when it had initially aired, and I had only caught up to Final Season Part 1 in late 2021, binging Season 2 and onward like a madman. I only realized after the first episode how fortunate I was to have been able to simply move onto the next episode, especially after the insane cliffhangers. But watching it weekly only fueled my hype and made me look forward to next week so much more.
Remember when Floch was just a coward and an annoyance? Now he’s been developed to be one of, if not the most hateable character in the entire show’s history. Granted, most of the development happened offscreen between Seasons 3 and 4, but it was the natural direction his character was going. And you can see these sorts of developments in every character. Armin is more confident in himself, Mikasa thinks for herself now instead of being Eren’s de facto bodyguard, and Eren is grappling with the realization that he must reject his own humanity in order to fulfill his mission. Heck, even Connie, who has been kind of a one-note character for most of the show up to Season 4, has been concocting a plan to get close to someone who has a titan power so he can feed them to his mom! And he shows his true loyalty when he is forced to make hard decisions. The character writing is so good; even though a lot of it stems from the fact that most of the main characters are viewed as traitors, they regularly have to make choices in the face of certain death, and these choices, big or small, show us something about them and further develop their character. This is the kind of thing that Attack on Titan has been doing since Season 1, and using the constant threat of their own death or the deaths of people they care about to further character development is the equivalent of playing Grand Theft Auto with cheats enabled. But it does wonders in forming lasting and compelling character arcs for nearly every character in the show.
After I had watched Season 1, there was a short period of time where I found a site to read the manga, and oh my goodness it was tough. The artstyle was definitely not my thing, and the pacing was rough. I only managed to get a handful of chapters ahead of the anime before deciding to wait for the next season (and we all know how that turned out). But despite my gripes with the manga, the show is a testament to the fact that the anime only succeeds where it does because of the source material. The story is gripping in each and every episode. Even in the quieter moments, or the in-between episodes (specifically episodes 6-9), I found myself completely engrossed. It wasn’t a matter of IF something important to the plot would happen in these moments, it was a matter of WHEN. You always get the sense that something big is around the corner. Even after something huge happens, you always think, “What’s going to happen now?”
I may not have been a fan of the artsyle of the manga, but the animation in the anime is top notch, as always. Since I didn’t write a review for Final Season Part 1, I’ll just say (for both parts) that the change in animation studio, and the resulting change in artstyle, works perfectly for this chapter of Attack on Titan. If anything, I consider it a little ironic that I enjoyed the look of Final Season despite the fact that the rougher lines are closer to the look of the manga than Studio WIT’s smoother style. Both styles look absolutely amazing, but I feel like a more gritty styling fits this climatic and extremely different time period in the world of the show.
I guess one more small gripe I have with this part of the season is that we never really got any ‘sakuga’ moments, no stand-out-amazing animation, until the second-to-last episode. Granted, that episode was insanely good, but I just wish we had gotten at least one more burst of sakuga in there somewhere.
And now that Attack on Titan: Final Season Part 3 has been announced, I guess I’ll just transfer my end-of-the-show hype onto that one. Here’s hoping they don’t draw the ending out with a Part 4.
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