Talk:Ken Kaneki/@comment-108.73.109.146-20150513214742/@comment-25047329-20150513220951

I watched the anime first purposely to avoid biase as much as possible, so as someone who came in through the anime first trying to judge it as objectively as possible, I thought it was kind of...eh. I didn't dislike it was much as others did and thought the first season was alright in particular, but over all I thought it was just, eh.

Even without reading the manga the story felt kind of shallow. You can tell there were holes in the story, like I waited the entirety of season one for them to explain what a Kagune was (which they never did, even in season two). Then it did this weird thing where it sort of tried to play off the ghouls as supernature beings like with Rize "haunting" Kaneki, Kaneki magically knowing kung fu because ghoul power I guess, and his pseudo "magical boy" transformation towards the end. The Kagune and nature of the ghouls led to confusion because it's supposed to be a light sci-fi story, but these elements of world building weren't properly explained. This is just to name a few problems. Season one was nothing to write home about, but if I watched it pretending that it was a generic action shounen, it's an alright watch.

Season two was even more confusing because there was even less effort to explain things on top of what wasn't explained in season one. Some weird mustache dude beats up Kaneki for no reason, creepy twins try to beat up Kaneki for no reason, Tsukiyama has a break down for no reason, Yomo lets Touka run around a war zone for no reason, Eto kidnaps her dad and is interested in Kaneki for...reasons.

It was just a big mess, even when not comparing it to the manga. There were parts of it that I enjoyed, even things exclusive to the anime, like Yoshimura's and Shimohara's conversation before the raid to give an example, but over all it was pretty sloppy.