Tokyo Ghoul Review

The first twelve episodes work. Kaneki's forced diet, the Anteiku cafe as a functioning community and the torture arc give the show a clean escalation and one genuinely memorable transformation, and the body horror is staged well enough to be uncomfortable. The problems begin immediately afterwards. The second season abandons the manga for an original route that nobody could make coherent, cutting arcs the source needed, and the two seasons that follow compress an enormous amount of story into episodes that assume you have read it.

Character motivation stops surviving the edit. Pierrot's production is inconsistent throughout, with censored broadcast violence, flat compositing and a visible drop in quality after the first season ends. What survives all of it is the sound. Yutaka Yamada's score and an opening theme that outgrew the series entirely are why people still bring the show up, and they are doing an unreasonable amount of the remembering. As a complete adaptation this is a failure, and the first cour is worth watching anyway.