Attack on Titan (Season 1)
What I liked:
- The titan designs, which manage to be consistently bizarre and terrifying in a way that I really appreciate (and also abhor)
- A sense of legitimate narrative propulsion and danger; nobody (besides the protagonists) is safe, nobody (besides the protagonists) can really be trusted. I don't have a good sense of where the plot is going besides "the Titans are more than they seem and probably created by the humans in a Xenoblade Chronicles-esque sense".
What I don't like:
- A lot of people make obviously poor decisions for no reason other than "it serves the plot"
- I don't really have a good sense of what the power levels are at play here; Titans very quickly go from being a world-beater threat to being something of which multiple humans have multi-hundred body counts; any given conflict, like the above bullet point, seems to be decided more by what serves the plot than what realistically would happen in a combat scenario
- There is a lot of filler and monologuing in the stereotypical shonen sense
I'm enjoying the story enough to want to continue; I wish the story was delivered with more speed and grace.