God Eater First Impressions Ep 1-4

One of the most hyped up shows of Summer 2015, but does it live up to expectations? 

The show is about a group of hunters called God Eaters who hunt monsters called Aragami. The concept is fairly simple and quite frankly generic by today’s standards. It’s the classic theme of mankind bringing it’s own ruin via technology. In terms of setting Attack on Titan comes to mind, where a walled city is protected by an eclectic band of heros from monsters. You have the protagonist who wants to save everybody, the mysterious european beauty with an excessively long name, the new recruit, a carefree leader, the bad boy and a strict commanding officer. Nothing in this series in terms of plot and characters screams unique. This is completely fine by me, being generic doesn’t mean it’s bad, it all depends on execution.

The biggest issue with this series is pacing. A comparable series from a previous season is Terra Formars. It was a show many had high hopes for, besides the awful sensors, one of my biggest complaint was the pacing. The show felt extremely slow, this largely had to do with the amount of exposition even though it was an action show. God eaters has been known to have some production issues, with change of hands in production, episodes getting delayed etc. The slow pace of this series so far is reflective of the production problems this show has been having. It is as though the producers had to slow down the pace in order to keep up with production. Like Terra Formars, screens seem to take a few seconds too long, you have times when no one is talking and the camera is set at a particular character posing or staring off into empty space. As a personal preference action anime should be fairly fast paced; heavy exposition, slow plot progression, long setup are all unwanted.

The saving grace of this series is the beautiful art and animation. The cell shaded art style can be polarizing at first but there are certain scenes where it all seems worth it. A scene that comes to mind is when the protagonist is aboard a plane and sees a gigantic aragami emerging from sun kissed clouds and diving back in like a whale emerging from the waters of the ocean. Also the action sequences are gorgeous, you can perfectly see how the sequences work, what is going on, everything seems crisp and clear. The 2 main types of weapons are swords and guns, what I hope is that new weapons are introduced or existing ones evolve to bring more diversity in terms of action.

Taking everything into account, I would say the show is very average at the moment. Setup up to this point has taken too long making the pacing seem too slow. I think i’m going to start liking the series more as the action starts to pick up. The only value of this series so far is it’s art and animation which again is polarizing and takes some time to get used to.