Attack on Titan, known in Japanese as Shingeki no Kyojin, is Hajime Isayama’s dark fantasy epic that ran from 2009 to 2021 in manga form and concluded its anime adaptation in November 2023 after an extraordinary ten-year journey. What started as a seemingly straightforward tale of humanity trapped behind walls, hunted by grotesque man-eating Titans, transformed into one of the most ambitious, gut-wrenching, and philosophically brutal stories ever told in anime or manga. With ninety-four manga chapters and eighty-nine anime episodes split across four seasons, produced first by Wit Studio and finished by MAPPA, it became a global phenomenon that dominated conversation, broke streaming records, and left an entire generation of fans emotionally scarred.
The story begins in the year 845. Humanity has lived caged inside three enormous concentric walls for over a century, believing itself the last remnant of civilization after the Titans nearly wiped them out. Eren Yeager, a hot-blooded boy with dreams of seeing the outside world, watches in horror as the Colossal Titan kicks a hole in Wall Maria and his mother is devoured right in front of him. Swearing revenge, Eren enlists in the military alongside his childhood friends Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert, joining the Survey Corps to fight back against the monsters. Season one, animated by Wit Studio in 2013, is pure visceral terror and adrenaline. The 3D maneuver gear battles are breathtaking, Levi Ackerman slices through Titans like a whirlwind of death, and the mid-season twist that Eren himself can transform into a Titan detonates everything the audience thought they knew.
From there the series never looks back. What begins as a monster-of-the-week survival horror slowly peels away layers of mystery. The Female Titan arc, the Uprising arc, the Return to Shiganshina, each season escalates the stakes and reveals deeper conspiracies. By the time the basement reveal arrives at the end of season three, the entire premise has been obliterated. The walls were never hiding humanity from Titans. They were hiding a nation of people who can turn into Titans, exiled and oppressed by the rest of the world. The story leaves the walls behind and becomes a full-scale war between nations, ideologies, and cycles of hatred that have lasted two thousand years.
Season four, handled by MAPPA after Wit Studio stepped away, takes the biggest gamble in anime history. The perspective shifts to Marley, the nation that has been oppressing Eldians for generations. Suddenly the heroes we rooted for become the villains in the eyes of the world. Reiner, Annie, and Bertholdt, once hated antagonists, are revealed as traumatized child soldiers brainwashed into destroying Paradis. Gabi, a young Marleyan warrior, mirrors early Eren perfectly. And Eren himself, once the screaming symbol of freedom, becomes the story’s final antagonist, inheriting the Founding Titan and launching the Rumbling to exterminate the entire planet outside the island.
This is where Attack on Titan separates itself from every other shonen. It asks questions no mainstream series dares to ask. Is genocide ever justified to protect your people? Can a cycle of hatred ever truly be broken? Are heroes and villains just two sides of the same traumatized coin? The final season is unrelenting. Entire cities are flattened under colossal footsteps. Characters we loved for years die horribly. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin are forced into choices that destroy them no matter what they pick.
Visually, the series is a triumph from start to finish. Wit Studio’s first three seasons remain some of the most beautifully animated action ever created. The fluid choreography of the ODM gear, the raw brutality of Titan fights, and the quiet beauty of moments like Erwin’s charge will be studied for decades. MAPPA’s takeover sparked controversy over the art style shift, but they delivered some of the most technically ambitious sequences in anime history. The War for Paradis, Eren’s Founding Titan form crawling across the ocean, and the apocalyptic scale of the Rumbling are jaw-dropping achievements that pushed CG integration to new heights. Hiroyuki Sawano’s soundtrack is inseparable from the experience. Tracks like YouSeeBIGGIRL/T:T, Ashes on The Hills, and The Rumbling itself are emotional weapons that hit harder with every rewatch.
The characters are the soul of the series. Eren Yeager evolves from a rage-filled child into a cold, broken ideologue carrying the weight of two thousand years of memory. Mikasa Ackerman, defined by loyalty, faces the ultimate test when that loyalty is turned against the person she loves most. Armin, the gentle dreamer, inherits the burden of being the world’s only hope for peace. Reiner Braun, Gabi, Zeke Yeager, every single character is shaped by propaganda, trauma, and impossible choices. There are no pure heroes or villains, only people trying to survive a world that keeps proving survival comes at an unbearable cost.
The ending remains one of the most divisive conclusions in anime history. Eren completes eighty percent of the Rumbling, wipes out eighty percent of humanity, then orchestrates his own death at Mikasa’s hands so his friends can become the world’s saviors. Paradis survives, but the final panels show the cycle of hatred beginning again centuries later. Some fans called it a betrayal of everything the series stood for. Others saw it as the only honest conclusion to a story that never promised happy endings. The truth is that Attack on Titan refused to give easy answers because there are none. It forced the audience to sit in the same moral abyss as its characters.
Flaws exist. Season four’s pacing occasionally buckles under the weight of its revelations, some dialogue becomes exposition-heavy, and the epilogue left millions of fans screaming. But none of that erases the monumental achievement. Attack on Titan is the defining anime of its era. It raised the bar for storytelling ambition, emotional devastation, and willingness to challenge its audience so high that few series will ever reach it again. Love it or hate it, you cannot deny its impact.
Final Score: 9.8/10 – A flawed masterpiece that will be remembered, debated, and rewatched for generations.
Stream it legally on Crunchyroll or Netflix. And when you finish, rewatch it. The foreshadowing will break you all over again.
Attack on Titan didn’t just end a story. It carved its name into anime history with blood, tears, and thunder.