I am disappoint.
Impression
Is that how it ends? Are you seriously shitting me? There were so many ways Studio Pierrot could have done this, and yet they chose to back out of putting in any coherent effort with the episode. The majority of it consisted of silent stand-offs, poor Touka running and Kaneki walking. Is Ishida really affiliated with this project? The only part of the episode I liked was when Ayato secretly saved Touka from the burning debris. Everything else was shit. I don’t even get to complain about not getting all my favourite lines from the Kaneki vs Arima fight, because they decided to make it happen off-screen. Actually, Arima said hardly anything throughout the adaptation in general, let alone the significant lines that raised a commotion in the fandom, like “No ‘ghoul’ can pass V14”, “You’re good, Kaneki Ken” or “I’m going to need a new quinque”, which was the very last line of the fight. Instead, it was all replaced with a long walk through the snow, which they tried to justify by playing Unravel and with the vague assertion that Kaneki was heading ‘home’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I’m sure it’s possible to think up with some deep symbolic meaning as to his trek through all the doves while unmasked, as well as his alternating black and white hair – but come on, it’s just laziness really. This was supposed to be the finale, and yet nothing happened. Didn’t Kaneki have a burning desire to save Yoshimura merely one episode ago? And I’m sure ‘home’ is not where hundreds of doves are lying in wait. Touka and Yomo managed to leave safely after all, and they were right next to Kaneki at one point.
The meeting between Hide and Kaneki was just really odd. There was more silent staring, and I’m pretty sure Kaneki should have been more injured than he was, even if it turned out to be Hide dripping all that blood. Is Hide even dead? I think it was supposed to have been… sad, but I don’t really get the significance of them spending almost five minutes just having Kaneki carry Hide – in the end, that was the person under the cloth. I get that he’s sad, and that he’s part of his humanity or something, but there’s been almost no scenes between Kaneki and Hide, and it’s very hard to care as a result. In fact, they messed up the key moment in their meeting, when Kaneki covers his kakugan in shock – he doesn’t say anything. What they should have done was have him say or think this:
I actually can’t believe they had the gall to give us a sequel hook by showing an older-looking Touka opening :re. It won’t work, and the current anime storyline is already too much of a mess for them to cope with some of the stuff that’s happened in :re. You’re wonderful, Touka-chan, but I never want to see you animated again.
Overall Thoughts
It’s well known that sequels usually suck. But this one sucked donkey balls, because it had so much potential and failed to live up to it. When I first heard it’d be an anime-original take on the latter half of the Tokyo Ghoul story, supervised by Ishida, I was excited – because Ishida’s given us some great twists, and a plot about Kaneki in Aogiri would open up the possibility of a new plot whilst developing characters that we may not have known much about before. But in the end, that potential was wasted – we largely followed a heavily redacted manga plot, that was pretty much identical to it in every aspect save for Kaneki joining Aogiri and the five-minute walking scene we had this episode. The changes they made were such that all the stuff with Kuro and Shiro turned out to be redundant. There was hardly anything on Shachi, Arima or any follow-up with Eto. The existence of the Clowns was mentioned once in passing. And the major change to the Anteiku raid arc that I was worried about -that Touka escaped Yomo and had gone to the battle- was only designed so that she could suffer more by seeing Anteiku burn.
This was not as bad as the last travesty I blogged, which was Glasslip. But if you were to draw a graph of my opinion of both that and Tokyo Ghoul √A, with the scale representing my interest and approval, the two curves would largely follow the same pattern. That is, excitement to begin with, that starts falling gradually and eventually plummets. Admittedly with √A, the plummeting happened this week. After I’d accepted that there wouldn’t be anime-original content and they’d follow the manga, I contented myself with watching animated versions of some of the manga scenes I’d enjoyed, like the fight scenes featuring Eto, Koma and Irimi. But skipping out Kaneki vs Arima? It’s not even that it didn’t happen. That’s one thing. Instead, it did happen, but it happened off-screen. I’m sorry, but why would you do that?
tl;dr – Read the manga
Don’t forget about Ghoul healing, and Kaneki didn’t get to Anteiku by himself since he passed out. Hide probably dragged him there and likely fed him anything he could find at Anteiku if he didn’t just give him the blood that was already gushing out of himself.
Despite not having too many scenes, there was clearly a bond between Hide and Kaneki. Hide spent the entire season doing what he could to finde Kaneki and learning all he can at CCG, and he was the only good thing about Kaneki’s human life that wasn’t eating normal food. Otherwise he would have killed himself after his mom died.
Unravel at least as I saw it was a song trying to convey Kaneki’s feelings about the situation and HIde, and I’ve heard Glassy Sky is likely Touka’s feelings towards Kaneki. I do admit it dragged at the end where he kept walking even as the song ended. That was a bit much.
From I’ve heard what was mostly used was Ishida’s drafts from his original idea for the manga, and that he only really did any supervising on the last episode.
Look on the bright side of things! There will be a Tokyo Ghoul Jack OVA which will induce in all of us Arimapathy!
There was a bond, but I felt it was overemphasised and far too drawn out. There were other plot threads that could have benefited from being fleshed out or given some closure somehow.
Ah yes, they’re doing Jack as well. I wonder if it’ll be any good… they don’t seem to like giving Arima screen time.
Holy crap, our opinions on this are like on the opposite ends of the spectrum, hahaha. I actually dropped Root A at about episode 4 or so (but read the manga up to the end of the first series, and uhh I didn’t really like the manga much either but whatever), I was getting tired of characters just coming in with no real purpose except to like fight one battle that’s supposed to be important and call it day, and not actually focusing on the best part of the narrative which was Kaneki dealing with his identity. I vastly enjoyed the finale though – I feel like the episode was really one of the very best finales I’ve had the opportunity to witness as a fan of the medium (this was the case for the first season’s finale too).
I prefer Tokyo Ghoul in its quieter, more intimate moments, and I feel like Root A sacrificing a more traditional approach to the narrative (that of basically a big conclusive fight to /end things/) worked vastly in the series’ favor, and the narrative has basically implied that all the violence between the Ghouls and the humans are at the end of the day; needless bloodshed for both sides. Completely excluding Arima/Kaneki is to me the best decision the series has made, since it really reflects what Tokyo Ghoul’s basic message is, and what Kaneki’s transformation is about.
Even if you don’t agree with me on the narrative side of things though, you gotta agree that this episode looked and sounded flipping gorgeous on all fronts right? The direction of this episode had me completely floored – the amazing visual misdirection throughout the scenes with Hide and Kaneki, the EXCELLENT (and I mean EXCELLENT) lighting and framing (I really like how the lighting both acted as a transition, as well as a visual metaphor for Hide slowly dying), great usage of silence (ok you obviously don’t agree with me there but I’ll just leave this here anyway), and finally Kaneki’s long walk in the snow (with a little shaky cam effect that actually doesn’t look like shit and is very appropriate)- they all looked brilliant, and I believe they reflected the tone of the finale more than perfectly.
Sorry for the long comment, I just feel like this episode deserves a lot of love for what I think it has managed to pull off. I believe our contrasting opinions basically reflect our varying perspectives of what the story stood for as well :p (I also don’t think Root A would have been able to pull off a satisfying traditional conclusion either, considering how the manga is technically still ongoing in the first place…)
I agree this finale reflected Tokyo Ghoul’s basic message, but I just don’t feel that Kaneki’s identity was supposed to be an issue any more. The ending of the first season had him accept his ghoul side through conversing with ‘Rize’, and he got a sense of closure through actually meeting Rize once more with Yomo’s help. That’s what we all thought the body under the cloth was – the ‘old Kaneki’ who was very much conflicted about who he was. Any further identity issues should have been explored through the Dr Kanou arc, which the anime decided to omit entirely. I guess this was one of the more subtle changes made by the anime, as it did have Kaneki not kill anyone at all and only use his kakuja a single time in battle (deciding to suppress it against Amon instead of freely relying on it in the manga when needed). So maybe it’s not the same Kaneki. The changes made to his meeting with Hide suggests as much – he met Hide while in kakuja form in the manga (i.e. having ‘given in’ to his ghoul urges), and it’s heavily implied he ate Hide to recover his strength.
But if the anime wanted to continue making his humanity an issue, then it’s hard to say joining Aogiri was a good move – although it’s not like he particularly did anything while he was with them. Going back to Hide to end things is, I suppose, a good way to touch base with the first few episodes of the series, but he’s hardly been relevant at all in the wider scheme of things. Cutting down on some Hide time and replacing it with his ‘This world is wrong’ monologue in the manga would have better reinforced the basic message you speak of, while showing all the casualties and consequences of the raid.
I do get what you mean by its more intimate moments, but for me it was taken too far. The silence this episode was the last straw in a long list of other ill-used moments of silence, where we learnt nothing about Kaneki and his time at Aogiri as he sat by himself, staring pensively in silence.
It’s true the episode looked and sounded great though. I think in general, the OST is one of Root A’s strongest points. I loved both the OP and ED, although it took a few episodes for the OP to grow on me. And Glassy Sky was brilliant. The original manga and :re are separated by a sizeable time-skip, so it could have just ended things in the way the manga did, given that it followed 90% of its storyline to begin with. A more explicit tragedy as demonstrated with Kaneki vs Arima would have gone back to the start of the series too, where he says that any story written about him would most definitely be a tragedy.