So I was told to watch a show called "Attack on Titan," acontexually by good friends of mine who don't watch a ton of anime, about seven months ago. Given the name, I assumed it was some kind of sci-fi thing, Titan being the moon of Saturn, and the fact that I hadn't seen the name anywhere else led me to dismiss it. Completely unrelatedly, the anime blogs I follow were completely abuzz with images and praise for this show "Shingeki no Kyojin," but I didn't pick it up at the time. Fast forward a month or two and due to clicking a link on Wikipedia about Shingeki no Kyojin, I learn that Attack on Titan is its english title, and that it's being nearly simultaneously released in the US. Whoopsie me. I downloaded what I could get of it (most of it had already broadcast at the time) and watched the first episode, which, not to spoil, involves our protagonist watching his mother get eaten alive.
At which point I put it back down and said to myself "Right, I'll watch that when I'm in the mood for something that horrific." Fast forward seven months to two days ago when I think "You know, I should watch Attack on Titan sometime soon." At which point I sat down and watched it practically in one sitting.
Attack on Titan is a very even-handed and mature series about fear, war and sacrifice in the face of annihilation. As such, it actually shares many similarities with other apocalyptic scenarios, I personally saw a lot of parallels to Evangelion and 28 Days Later. The artwork is a different style than 'standard' anime, one better suited to the dozens and hundreds of haunted, tortured and terrified eyes that populate a world living in fear. The animation is very smooth, even in the exciting, absurdly high-velocity action sequences and expressive during the periods of intense emotion that I was usually sold on.
The concept is solid and the execution is excellent; the writing, while it has a body count that even George RR Martin might raise an eyebrow at, is overall very good. I have a few points of criticism, though. Pacing is good but entire episodes are often spent providing the background for a single decision, more than once an entire 20-minute episode takes place within 2 or 3 minutes of in-world time. While something important happens every episode there are a couple points where it feels like things have slowed down before we go back to breakneck action. I personally foresaw most of the twists (though I also called at least one twist which wasn't there), which is a pretty minor criticism, really, because it meant that there was enough complexity to the plot to be worth guessing, it just didn't make guessing very hard.
The big complaint though, and this is the reason for that ugly asterisk after Attack on Titan's otherwise perfect grade, is that it doesn't end. It ends at a good pausing point, but if I didn't know that there's going to be a second season (sometime in 2015), I would probably give the series a B+, maybe even lower. The show does an excellent job of engaging us, you really care, maybe not about the characters specifically, but about the very morally ambiguous situation and how it's going to resolve, and the show doesn't have that for you yet.
If you want to watch a show dealing with heavy, emotional and ambiguous themes, imaginatively constructed, laden with action, mystery and visceral horror, a story of a maimed and crippled humanity struggling forward toward the faintest sliver of hope, Attack on Titan is a your mind-blowing, gut-wrenching half-masterpiece. If skinless people, gore, pointless deaths or haunted eyes bother you, I guess you can skip it.
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