Review of Seraph of the End: Battle in Nagoya
I decided to watch Seraph of the End after I read a decent portion of the manga, for reference, I'm at about chapter 110. The first season ends at about chapter 22, and the second ends at about chapter 100... I haven't seen an adaptation this bad since The Promised Neverland season 2!!! For this to work, they had to cut out a lot of the manga's plot, characters, and back stories. This made the anime shallow, boring, and confusing... I genuinely thought I was losing it watching this stupid anime, like I was imagining the manga. Based on my memory, they cut Ky Luc, Urd Geales,Sika Madu, and Saitou, 4 very important vampire characters, and I'm sure they cut more than that. These characters are involved in important plots. Lest Karr is at least in the anime, but he's only shown like once or twice!! In the manga, he plays a more important part in the dethoning of Krul.
Nothing gets explained either, in the manga, you learn Krul's and Ashuramaru's back story, Ferid's back story, his vampire family too, how demons can to be, how vampire society works, how vampires get turned, and how that determains their level of power, how Mahiru became a demon, and how she created Cursed Gear, and they explain what a seraph/angel is. Honestly, everybody's back story gets cut, it makes the characters so shallow...
I understand that sometimes things get cut because they're unnecessary, but most, if not all, of these were necessary. These changes make the anime feel rushed, and the viewers feel confused. The vampires are a major part of Seraph of the End, but the anime chooses to ignore that fact and cuts like over 30 chapters. As a manga reader, I'm enraged. I have no idea who thought this was a good idea????
The last 2 episodes are the worst offenders by far, nothing follows the manga. This is to the anime's detriment. The final fight of the anime doesn't adapt like anything from the manga... I don't know what they were adapting??? It's laughable, I'm guessing it's anime original? The fights that happen around that point in the manga involve Saitou too much, so I'm guessing they had to mash 3 different fights together to continue the anime.
The time skip killed me... why would they do that?? There is no time skip in the manga; they cut like 10 chapters because of the skip.
Don't even get me started on the treatment of Mirai Kimizuki. The way her scenes get cut from the anime is criminal!!!! This results in the mischaracterization of Shihou Kimizuk. He would never leave his sister behind, but in the anime, he would????
I get that a lot of people want a season 2, but one can't exist unless this anime gets remade, seriously. The manga only has about 150 chapters right now, and those chapters will make no sense because of the cut material. I really liked Seraph of the End it wasn't the best, but it wasn't the worst, it was a solid 8 (7 if you don't like the genres/themes). I wanted this adaptation to be great, yet it was such a letdown. This anime adaptation was sooo frustrating, I just needed to vent lol.