Okay just a warning, much like the title indicates, Tokyo Ghoul is not really my thing. I tend to like comedies, light dramas, and shoujo style anime. And happy endings, I love happy endings! So this review isn’t going to be a rave about how impossibly awesome Tokyo Ghoul is. The only reason I even tried it was because so many people said that it was “so good”, I “had to try it”, “it was the best anime ever!”.
Okay, a quick summery of what Tokyo Ghoul is about. Main character is a nice guy takes a pretty lady out on a date. He walks her home because he’s a gentleman, and it turns out that she is a people eating monster called a ghoul. Ghouls are well known by the general public in this world. So she almost kills him before being killed herself. At the hospital, for some reason, a doctor decides without consent to save the main character’s life by putting the pretty lady’s ghoul organs in the main character. Now the main character is half ghoul and kinda wants to eat people. Thankfully some quasi-nice people that work at a ghoul coffee shop take the hapless main character in and try to train him to be a nice ghoul. Throughout the first season the main character gets beaten up and kidnapped a lot, a bunch of innocent people get killed because some bad guy felt like it, and a lot of blood gets thrown around. If you like blood splatter, than this is your anime!
I watched the whole first season and the first two episodes of the second season, and I have to admit, there are a lot of things that are pretty good about this anime. Like, I loved the opening and closing songs for the first season. The song “Unravel” by Toru Kitajima just fit the intense feel of the anime so well. I also really liked that the ending song sounded so different, yet also fit the anime. The opening and closing songs for the second season, I’m not a huge fan of. I don’t know why, but they just sound a bit off.
I also really liked the character designs and the animation. I thought having ghouls be a kind of tentacle monster was kind of cool, and I also liked how each character looked so unique. I liked how they designed the main character to be one of the most plain looking characters in the series. It really emphasized how he was an outsider and there really was a difference between him and the other ghoul characters. I don’t know, I really love having a down to earth main character, it just makes me want to root for the under dog. I also want to give a kudos to the animation quality, it didn’t seem to decline in later episodes, which can happen sometimes in action focused anime.
Okay, now for the stuff I didn’t like. The big thing for me was the character development and the story progression. At the beginning of the series I really liked the main character (Keneki). He was a honest, hard working, nice guy. But, as the story moved on, Keneki just kept making one wrong decision after another. After a while I really started to lose faith in his nice guy character. And then at the beginning of the second season, he decides to side with the bad guys! The same people that literally had just gotten done with kidnapping and torturing him. At the same time, he ditches his friends who had just risked their lives to save Keneki. I mean, Seriously?!
It wasn’t just the main character, there was also this agent for the Commission of Counter Ghoul (Amon) who different characters around him kept talking about how he is all about justice and fighting the good fight. The characters act as if he is an honest, straight laced, by the book guy. But when he is paired up with a veteran agent that ends up being basically a serial killer, Amon is totally okay with the serial killer agent’s tactics. And, Yeah, you could argue that the ghouls they are hunting are also serial killers and are the bad guys, but if you use the same tactics as the bad guys to catch the bad guys, then you are also a bad guy. And Amon, who is supposed to be focused on justice, didn’t seem to notice this.
So by the end of the first season, there really wasn’t any good guys, there was just different shades of bad guys. I’m just not into that sort of thing. So I dropped it.
Hey, what do you think about Tokyo Ghoul? Did you love it? Hate it? What about the series stood out the most to you? Leave a comment!
I’m currently watching:
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Anime Hanabi 
I like Tokyo Ghoul, although I much prefer the manga to the anime and also think that the series gets ‘worse’ as it continues (I couldn’t even watch the anime past S2 I wasn’t enjoying it). I think you’ve already mentioned the main reasons why people like Tokyo Ghoul, as I personally like the soundtrack, designs, fights and concepts etc.
It’s interesting that you bought up how Amon didn’t mind killing ghouls and Mado, as this does become something he explores for himself as the series progresses. I personally think he doesn’t question Mado because Mado is his first mentor and because he doesn’t really have any positive role models in his life or anyone he could trust etc. so he doesn’t WANT to question it because that means questioning all his beliefs which he’s not ready to do. He’s currently just fighting out of fear and anger. But as the series progresses, people like Kaneki prompt him to reflect and he later comes to his own conclusions.
As you also said, if you don’t like having any good guys in a show then Tokyo Ghoul won’t be your thing – which is totally fine! 🙂 It’s interesting that you mentioned not liking Kaneki joining Aogiri as MANGA SPOILERS AHEAD
Kankei joining Aogiri to protect Anteiku is actually an anime only thing that happened. In the manga Kaneki went and formed his own group of Banjo, the ghouls who were also with Banjo, Tsukiyama, and Hinami. They did things like investigate Rize’s origins and more.
The anime diverged from the manga in Root A, so the anime has an adapted story line. Although the major plot points are pretty much the same in RE: there’s different things that get the stories to these points.
Sorry for the long comment, there’s just so much to talk about with Tokyo Ghoul hahah and your post brings up a lot of good points and questions 🙂
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No apologies needed, I liked your long comment. And what you said about the differences between the anime and the manga made me really curious. Now I want to go and read the manga! Thank you for highlighting some good points about the manga. But, I think the first season of the anime is probably going to be enough for me. I think it’s great if other people like Tokyo Ghoul it has a lot of good qualities that I absolutely respect, but it’s just not the kind of thing I’m into. I just cant imagine it ending with everyone hugging it out and becoming friends. Though, it would be pretty funny if it did.
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The first season of the anime is definitely enough for pretty much everyone hahah. And totally understandable that it’s not your thing, everyone has different tastes! 🙂 Wow that would be funny, I’m just imaging the CCG being forced to have an awkward annual ‘friendship’ morning tea with ghouls 😂
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