DangerMouse

That last shot before the to be continued was hype. Levi's coming for ya Jaw Titan!

Yeah they've very good. Probably that combined with WIT either turning them down after heads down so long on both parts of S3 or more likely saying they'd need an extra year to do it. Like I said though, while it's more the manga's style than the previous character designer would have done (since yeah he gave them a bit more of an attractive touch), I do still feel like the new designs do at least still have some of the anime's extra flair compared to the manga like seeing Connie and Sasha this time (and carrying over the WIT anime's detailed shading and shadow style), and especially like Levi to me still favors his anime version a bit compared to what I've seen of his manga one (he looked more like his manga one in that first S4 teaser trailer than in this episode where he looked sharper more like WIT's design).

No idea, we'll see. I'm curious since it sounds like there's still a nice amount of stuff still left to come and like ben said the manga isn't finishing until April. Either way Saturday's ep was packed as hell, it flew by. The wait for next weekend already feels long lol.

Yeah I think it'll need to be a split season like S3 was.

Nice, looking forward to it when it releases. I've just started it, it seems very promising so far. Didn't realize it was getting dubbed so quickly, thought I was just going to sample a few eps subbed and then wait. Once I finally looked up the director I had a good feeling about the show's action chops since I really liked his previous show Garo: Vanishing Line.

Yeah lol, I agree it'll probably be a while before we get any calm again since we just finished that big tense build up to all this and kicked off the battle. Yeah, we could have ended up with a shift much more noticeable than this, and the time skip helps.

Yup exactly, at least it was at a relatively good time to fit the story and overall despite such a different staff they've still carried a good amount of the style and shading to where I still feel like it's from the same production so it still mostly looks very similar despite the shift in details. I think she was 15 for most of the show so close to 16 when they reached the sea, since the wiki says she's 19 now after the time skip. So it's a decent age difference since we last saw her. I guess we'll see as we get more shots of her of face in future episodes and outside of combat or how she looks in daylight without all these night time shadows and perhaps in casual clothes again between missions.

I don't think her body type's all that different beyond being older (and taller). I think the art style adjustment basically boils down to two reasons, firstly the 4 year time skip was always going to age them up quite a bit, so they were always going to be different, but especially when the studio changed and MAPPA took it on the whole primary staff changed, so there's a totally new character designer now, Tomohiro Kishi. Like others have said, at least it happened at an appropriate time. But yeah like I said, we've been watching the anime designs all this time and not the manga designs so I would be curious to have seen what the character designer of the previous seasons would have done to tweak these designs a bit further since I don't think he ever used the manga designs in the first three seasons as closely as the new character designer has adapted most of these. I don't think we've ever heard officially why the change had to happen, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that'll ever get reported on, other than people deducing that WIT seems very busy short term with original shows they'll actually own, like Great Pretender, unlike an adaptation they're hired for like AoT. I think there were also some rumors that the Production Committee wasn't willing to wait and had this aggressive timetable for when season 4 would air so WIT said they couldn't do it on that timetable at the quality they'd hold themselves to after the immense workload of season 3 especially at the same time as their existing commitments to their own projects. I actually really thought WIT would just suck it up in the end despite all those rumors about them leaving after S3 Part 2 and that they'd just figure out a way to do this last season after getting so close to the end of such a huge show that really gave them their fame, but at least MAPPA is an excellent studio as well that does great animation and action and we didn't get stuck with a OPM situation. MAPPA's still doing an impressive job and the show still looks fantastic so far. I was worried with them having so many shows coming out so closely together including the big new shonen, but so far the season has looked fantastic if they can keep it up since this arc reportedly has a ton of big action. Here's the manga page that came up when I was looking for that group shot with Mikasa. Yeah, be very careful when searching due to spoilers. For me, there's just one more spoiler I've been spoiled on since a while ago so I've been pretty lucky.

Mikasa making her epic return and beating down the War Hammer Titan to this epic action music (also fittingly used when Levi rescued Eren from the Female Titan way back in season one). Great little touch with how Pieck got all "oh shit, no way" panicked from the sound and glimpse of the Scouts flying past them.

I think if they manage to get S2 relatively "close" to premieres, like that last season of SAO we just finished got on Toonami relatively quick, it'd pay off in the ratings coming off of the word of mouth of S1. Even if it won't be dubbed as fast as AoT (and now Dr. Stone) since they don't really simuldub like Funi so they probably can't dub only a few weeks behind like those.

Sooner than I thought too.

Yesssssss! Sooner than I expected too. Now we just need Aniplex + Funi to work out getting us the movie for those of us without theaters due to the current situation before S2 starts.

I think it's a little exaggerated in this particular shot due to how the animator happened to draw her at that angle (maybe it'll be touched up in the blu-ray? or maybe not since it's more like the manga), but yeah the others have it too, Sasha's got a bit wider jaw than before as well in the new style. Like here in the promo shot Mikasa's is a little more thin and pointed and less wide: I feel like there's still a bit of the anime look in there, particularly for Levi, but even though I like the designs I can still say I think they went a little too far toward favoring the manga look in some of the small details. Meanwhile we haven't been watching the manga all these years, we've been watching WIT's anime designs. That said, I think they still look very good even though I would have liked to have seen Kyoji Asano's take on these aged up versions of everyone since I think he would have found a way to tweak an even better middle ground like he always did in the past seasons.

oh yeah

Love it.

yeah i've done that too a couple of times. Oh, btw, it looks like that Hero Mask netflix anime you mentioned a long time ago is finally getting a blu-ray release so I'll finally get to see it.

yeah the anime always did a good job with the designs.

Hype!

FOUND YOU! Impressive Inosuke, most impressive.

How the hell did you not get high enough Inosuke?

Oh yeah, this asshole.

She sure evil laughs a lot given what we learn later about her.

Zombie slayers

LOL Zenitsu. And he enters so late he ends up in a totally different fight than them.