Review of Attack on Titan: Final Season - The Final Chapters

This review doesn't contain spoilers for the last two episodes, but there will possibly be spoilers for previous seasons. So, the most popular anime of our time just ended. And unfortunately it ended in a way I wouldn't exactly describe as great. This series introduced me, like many others, to the medium of anime and as a whole, it is still among my favorites. So of course I wanted the ending to be great. But it just wasn't. I don't hate it per se, it's not the worst ending ever, and I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it, but given how great thisseries once was, it might just be one of the most disappointings ending ever.

But I want to be as fair as possible here. There's a lot to love in these episodes. I actually think the first of the two is genuinely great, it has one of the most powerful death scenes in the series and really feels like it could be the beginning of a great final battle. But then the actual battle starts... and it's not very good. I mean, it looks great, MAPPA did the best they could with what they had to work with and the final episode has some of the best animation in the entire series, but the actual content of the scenes is just not good. And that's primarily due to the insane amounts of plot armor our main characters have. I mean, this is supposed to be the final battle of a series that was once known for the fact that no character is safe. Anyone could die. But it really feels like Isayama just didn't want to kill off anyone, no matter how unrealistic or anticlimactic the finale would be as a result. And I hate that. There are so many opportunities for emotional and meaningful scenes, but they're totally wasted.

And at the end of the day, I really don't even know what Isayama was going for with this ending. And I don't think he did either. Sometimes it feels like a happy ending, sometimes it feels like a tragedy, but it never fully commits to being either. The final product is a pretty but lukewarm conclusion to a series that deserved so much better. Oh well, at least we got something new from Linked Horizon, they never disappoint.