Attack on Titan

Attack on titan (Shingeki no Kyojin)

This will be my first review of many that I plan to do, so I decided to start out with a big one.

If you have spent any amount of time at all in the world of anime you probably have heard of this show in some sense. When it began airing in April 2013, it immediately became the "The best anime ever" within hours of its release. It got a lot of hype really fast and nobody talked about anything else for a very long time.

Now, this can be both a good thing and a bad thing for any show, the good thing is that after hearing all this hype it is very hard for a anime fan to escape watching this show, this makes money for the anime. On the other hand many people watch this show with super high expectations which at the slightest fault get easily disappointed. If that same person watched the show without hearing anything about it, they might have enjoyed it more. The anime may also just be amazing and worth all the hype it got, but that is considerably rarer.

To find out which one Attack on titan is you will just have to read on.

I watched the first season of the show after it stopped airing in 2013, after hearing all about it in the months previous. I began watching not really sure whether it would blow my mind or just be another let down.

Who made it?

Attack on Titan was based on the manga written by Hajime Isayama. It was directed by Tetsuro Araki and produced by a relatively small company called Wit Studio. Araki has also directed other well known anime like Death Note, Gungrave, Black Lagoon and Sword art Online to name a few.

Summary

Attack on Titan is set in an alternate universe where humanity is on the brink of extinction. A hundred years ago humanity was living much like we were in medieval times when suddenly hundreds of huge beings the size of buildings, which the humans called "Titans" appeared without any warning on Earth. The Titans immediately started trying to eat any humans they could find. Humanity was no match for the Titans and had no truly effective way of fighting them, so they were mostly wiped out. Their only refuge was behind three huge Titan proof walls, that protected them from their predators outside.

We jump forward a hundred years into the future and humans have mostly forgotten the threat that lay just outside their walls. Then one day a Titan even bigger than the walls appeared and knocked one down. All hell breaks loose. The story is basically about humanity's fight for survival when their only refuge is breached.  

Characters

The cast in this show is huge and I would be here writing forever if I went into a detailed description of all of them, so I going to refrain from that and only talk about two of the main three. Eren and Armin.

I found that the characters are not the best part about this show, plus they do fall into certain stereotypes which makes them very predictable at times. Despite this I came to realize that they are more complex than the two dimensional characters that I originally saw them as.

Armin Arlert is placed into the role of the easily scared friend that doesn't really want to be fighting the Titans but gets dragged along by his friends anyway. He is the most down to Earth of the three and was used on a regular basis to make any dangerous situation seem hopeless with no chance of success throughout the start of the series. He was portrayed with no self confidence whatsoever and there was never a happy moment with him. Because of this I disliked Armin at the beginning, the constant whinging got annoying very quickly and I couldn't see any sign of him developing for at least the first quarter of the series. After this point though, his character begun to change. When his plans worked he began to gain confidence and he started to realize that he wasn't a burden on humanity and that his friends actually relied on him. He was still a whiny kid by the end, but at least I didn't feel like punching my monitor whenever he came onto the screen, which is an improvement..... I guess?

Eren Yeagar is what kept this anime moving, as most of the story is centered around him. We as viewers discover really quickly that Eren is very protective over his friends and mother as he is seen protecting Armin from bullies before the Titans attacked. So when His mother killed brutally in the first episode, you can imagine that he doesn't take it very well. To cope with the loss of his mother and home, he puts all the despair and sadness that he feels into fuelling his unstoppable hatred for Titans and his need to kill every one of them that he sees. It's this hatred that moves the plot forward and without it Eren would have never got to where did. He wasn't the most skilled fighter or the best tactician, but he had the determination to win and the ability to lead people through any situation. It was these skills that made him invaluable to humanity. Without Eren most of the other characters, mainly Mikasa (the third main character) who only fought to protect Eren wouldn't have had any purpose and would have given up fighting much earlier.  Eren was for me, the most entertaining character to watch in this show, even though his personality as a whole was fairly simple.

Not all of the characters in this anime were amazing but most of them were interesting enough to make it enjoyable to watch.

Animation/Soundtrack

The animation was done by Wit Studio and in my opinion was the best part about this show. The character designs were new and interesting, lovely to look at. The animators did an unusual thing, where they outlined all the characters in a fairly thick black line separating them from the background behind them. I had never seen this done before but I thought it worked really well. The animation held a good quality throughout the season, particularly shining in the epic fight scenes between both humans and Titans.

The soundtrack was composed by Hiroyuki Sawano.                                                                                      In comparison to other anime it was small, with many tracks being repeated regularly. This didn't make the soundtrack bad though. The tracks that were played again and again were great and each time they managed add what was needed to the scene. I particularly enjoyed the first opening song that got me pumped every time for the episode that came after it.

At the time that I first watched Attack on Titan there was no English dub. Since then it has been licensed by Funimation, which have given the show one. The dub is fairly good but I personally prefer the original Japanese, though this may be because I watched it first.

Conclusion

After hearing all the great things about this show, I was surprised to find that Attack on Titan held up to the praise as well as it did.

There was one major problem I had with the ending of this anime. During the course of the season questions arose that I think should have been answered more clearly, some weren't even answered at all. There was this whole build up towards the end which made you think they were going to tell you, but then it just ended. I felt that I knew less at the end of the series then I did after the end of the first episode. But there has been an announcement for a second season, so maybe then I will get my answers.

The plot was original and kept my attention. The characters were interesting, if a little predictable. But there was always new characters being introduced to help me forget about that. The soundtrack was small but memorable, with a respectable dub and the animation was freaking amazing.

My overall rating for this show is 8.5/10

I think this show deserved the hype that it got and I recommend it to everybody who is looking for an intense action drama.

I hope that you enjoyed my review of Attack on Titan and I hope that you will read my other reviews when they come in the near future.