It's been over 10 years since Tokyo Ghoul first came onto the anime scene, and in that time, it has managed to leave a strong impression. Sui Ishida's original manga has been a critical and commercial success domestically and abroad. While it hasn't stayed in the public consciousness like some other series have, it's still managed to retain a pretty solid level of popularity and cemented a legacy. On the other hand, the anime is a lot more of a mixed bag in terms of quality and reputation. While it also enjoyed a pretty high level of success in its heyday, the time has been much less kind to it, and its legacy has been riddled with production woes and diminishing returns. Despite this, the anime has at least retained enough audience to warrant a brand new anniversary boxset containing all three seasons. The question now is: is this set worth the investment?

Let's answer that by starting with the show itself, beginning with its first season. The series follows a college student named Kaneki who falls in love with another college student named Rize due to their shared love of books. Unbeknownst to Kaneki, though, Rize is a Ghoul that can only survive by consuming human flesh and blends into human society to make humans their prey. However when she attempts to eat Kaneki, they get involved in a terrible accident, Kaneki ends up having Rize's organs transplanted into him and becomes a half-ghoul hybrid. Much of the first season involves Kaneki getting thrust into the jaws of Ghoul society as he learns how ghouls work to prey on humans and how some try to lead ordinary lives. Eventually, he finds himself entangled with the members of a coffee shop called Anteiku, who work to avoid conflict with humans and fellow Ghouls and help Kaneki learn to survive as a Ghoul. It all moves at a pretty brisk pace and makes for some solid television, but not a very 1:1 adaptation. This season plows through over six volumes worth of the manga within the span of its 12-episode run and trims down a lot of the manga's worldbuilding in favor of an adaptation that feels less like the manga's urban action horror, and more like a procedural action drama. On paper, this sounds like something that shouldn't have made for a functional show, much less a popular one, and yet it had a couple of big things going for it that managed to help it pull that off.

The first is the strength of Sui Ishida's original work. While the anime does trim down a lot of material from the manga, what it does keep is still pretty compelling. We see Kaneki form relationships with various ghouls like Touka, a high schooler who wants nothing more than to blend in despite the harsh life she's led, or Nishi, a rogue Ghoul who initially has no trouble preying on humans, but ends up forming a romantic relationship with one who accepts him for what he is. It also explores the cycle of violence that forms between the Ghouls and the CCG, a government organization that specializes in hunting them. When Kaneki gets close to a young Ghoul named Hinami only to watch her mother get ruthlessly killed by a CCG member, he starts to see that the division between the two species isn't as black and white as he thought, and resolves to do what he can to protect both the Ghouls and humans who are close to him.

The second of this season's strengths is its director: Shuhei Morita. At the time, Morita had come onto the Tokyo Ghoul anime, shortly following his Oscar-nominated short film, Possessions, and his skills as a director shine in this first season. Scenes like the moment Kaneki realizes he's become a Ghoul or seeing Rize battling a psychopathic Ghoul named Jason across a skyscraper are incredibly well-directed and make for some of the most visually striking scenes in the whole show. Similarly, while little in the show is ever outright horrifying, the heavy use of contrasting color shades in portraying the nighttime ambiance of Tokyo does a lot to help elevate the mood and add to its setting. Most importantly, for as much material as the show trims down to get there, it still does a good job of handling the initial leg of Kaneki's character arc as he goes from being a bystander to choosing to embrace his nature as a ghoul and it still manages to hit pretty well. Plus, while it changes him for the worse, I'd be hard-pressed to deny that Kaneki's decision to embrace his nature as a Ghoul throughout episode 12 is some outright incredible television, and the strength of its execution is ultimately why I still hold the first season in high regard overall, despite its pacing.

This brings us to Tokyo Ghoul Root A, a bizarre saga unto itself. Root A was initially conceived as a departure from the manga, as the staff wanted to go in their own direction for the remainder of the anime, and asked Sui Ishida to pen an original script for them to work off of. However, a later interview by Sui Ishida indicated that his version of the draft wasn't used. The exact reason behind this has never been made clear, and what we ended up with instead was something more akin to a condensed version of the existing back half of the first manga, with a few tweaks and anime original scenes. Regardless of what went on behind the scenes, it's clear even at a glance that the product that was initially conceived wasn't the same as what we ended up with, and the show that we did get was pretty messy.

With all that going against it, it should be easy for me to sit here and tell you that Root A is an unwatchable mess that isn't worth your time, but honestly…I had a pretty good time revisiting it. Structurally, it's a bit all over the place, as its handful of changes from the manga (notably having Kaneki briefly joining the violent Ghoul organization, Aogiri, after breaking off from his friends at Anteiku, as opposed to him going rogue and gradually more insane), don't end up going anywhere. Despite Kaneki being set to become more proactive at the cost of his humanity, we don't get to see much of that as much of the focus goes to other characters. Perhaps because of that shift in perspective, I found myself getting pretty invested in the relationships of some of the CCG investigators, like Mado (a straight-laced investigator who serves as Kaneki's biggest foil) and his new partner Akira, whose romantic entanglements are made more complicated by her being the daughter of his old partner who died during the first season. Or the one between Juzo, a sociopathic investigator who an abusive Ghoul raised, and his partner Shinohara, the only person who makes any real effort to sympathize with him. Yutaka Yamada's musical score for the series also shoots up in quality during this season, as it combines the haunting melodies of the first season with some memorable insert songs like “Glassy Sky” and works in tandem with the show's direction to help elevate the mood of individual scenes.

Speaking of direction, despite this season's messy script, Shuhei Morita's strength as a director is still pretty visible. Despite how much it's trying to juggle at once, the season still manages to deliver cinematic action sequences, and there are still a lot of individual developments, like Kaneki learning how Anteiku's owner, Yoshimura, once had a child that was a hybrid like himself, that still came off as genuinely compelling, even when they don't always tie together the way they should. Additionally, for as much as this season sidelines Kaneki in ways that feel at odds with his character progression, the sequence in the final episode where Kaneki symbolically regains his humanity, while simultaneously losing the one human friend he still had, still looks incredible, and has remained stuck in my mind, even across the past decade. Ultimately, any real problems I have with Root A primarily come down to the fact that it was simply trying to do too many things at once for only having 12 episodes to work on. While it's plenty watchable, it suffers under the weight of its unfilled ambitions. Despite its transparent flaws, it has enough strengths that is genuinely worth experiencing at least once.

As forgiving as I'm willing to be about Root A's transgressions, though, I can't bring myself to do the same for the anime of Tokyo Ghoul:re, which is a disaster of a different variety. The : Re manga served as a direct sequel to the first Tokyo Ghoul series, following Kaneki after he lost his memories in the final battle of the first series, and found himself working as a CCG investigator under the alias of Haisei Sasaki. While the Root A anime did loosely adapt that battle and dropped a couple of scenes that could have made it possible to do its own variation of Tokyo Ghoul:re, it had deviated from the manga just enough that there was no way of cleanly reconciling the differences between the two when it came to important plot threads and the fates of certain characters. As such, the : Re anime decided to stick with the manga's continuity, meaning that any anime-only viewers coming into it would gradually find themselves lost, and that confusion only gets worse the further you get into this sequel.

That's not the only caveat with the : Re anime, though, as the production also underwent a couple of core staff changes. Shuhei Morita's role as director (with Root A notably being the last TV anime project he directed) was replaced by Toshinori Watanabe, whose most notable credit at the time was serving as director for the action ecchi series, Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid. Similarly, Atsuko Nakajima replaced Kazuhiro Miwa's role as character designer and chief animation director. : Re's production ended up split between Pierrot's main studio and their sub-studio, Pierrot Plus. Those are pretty hefty changes in the production, and unfortunately, they're entirely for the worse. A more grey and muddy color palette replaced the nighttime color scheme that helped to give the first two seasons a sense of atmosphere. The character designs also look a lot more plastic, and they not only barely resemble anything from the first season but also cause the show to look nearly indistinguishable from any other mid-budget show of its era. It also takes a pretty visible nosedive in animation quality, as while the first two seasons had some good action sequences, and were able to hide some of their shortcomings through good direction, the animation shortcuts here are a lot more obvious with lots of speed lines and close-up shots, in an attempt to keep the characters moving as minimally as possible. None of it ever outright melts, but it's enough of a downgrade that anyone coming off of the look of the first two seasons, or even just hoping to see the manga's artwork done justice, is in for a world of disappointment.

Some of these flaws would be easy to reconcile if the show still felt compelling, but despite retaining the same scriptwriter as the first two seasons, the approach to : Re's adaptation feels much sloppier. While the first two seasons of Tokyo Ghoul burned through plenty of manga material, its approach at least felt like the result of conscious creative choices from the staff, and even at their worst, they retained enough connecting plot threads to at least function as standalone pieces of television. Comparatively, the Tokyo Ghoul:re anime blazes through its material with only one goal in mind: getting to the end of the manga by any means necessary. There are a couple of episodes, in the beginning, to help establish the new team of half-ghoul investigators that Kaneki has working under him while he functions as Haisei, and the show does resolve Kaneki's character arc when his memories eventually return, but much of what we get in between feels outright incomprehensible. The show jumps from plot point to plot point with little rhyme or reason. It only ever explains enough to allow it to get to its next story beat, with several characters outright vanishing once they are no longer immediately relevant. Despite cramming in all 24 episodes of : Re throughout a couple of weeks, I honestly could not give you a decent explanation of its overarching plot without actively looking at a wiki page, and even the final antagonists of the series largely come and go without the show ever taking the time to adequately explain their motivations or goals.

That's not to say this sequel is entirely unpleasant, as there were a few individual pieces I liked. Despite not initially caring much for Tsukiyama (a self-proclaimed ghoul “gourmet” who wants to make Kaneki into a 5-star meal) in the first two seasons, I was drawn to the arc where his family is outed as Ghouls, and he tries to enlist Kaneki's help to keep them from getting caught by the CCG, as it did a lot to help humanize him. I also liked the brief confrontation between Touka and Akira towards the back half of the season, as they come to a mutual understanding regarding how each has lost someone important to them by the other. It's the most satisfying this season when it comes to addressing the show's previous themes. While later parts of the season see the Ghouls and the CCG coming together to deal with a greater threat, this scene felt like a much stronger moment of reconciliation. As good as some of these parts are, they felt more like they were leaning off the strengths of Sui Ishida's work in the manga, rather than having the anime itself doing anything that felt well executed. Somehow, the closest this season ever comes to having a memorably directed scene is where Kaneki and Touka reconcile and make love. It's also somehow the only scene in which the musical score ever returns to the highs of Root A, as it's otherwise considerably more muted than before. On the whole, when compared to the first two seasons, which feel like a more earnest adaptation of Tokyo Ghoul's story and still function on their own merits despite their flaws, the : Re anime feels like it was made purely to capitalize on the growing popularity of the manga, and feels like a much more cynical product as a result. This would be tolerable if that cynicism resulted in an even halfway decent adaptation. The execution is so terrible that I honestly can't think of a single reason not to just read the manga instead.

All that finally brings us to the anniversary set itself, which, despite its title, feels like a fairly budgeted release. While it does come in a new art box, and features some new slipcovers and disc art that feature the anniversary logo, the content of the discs is very clearly the same as what was on the Funimation releases, down to the subtitles and the staff credits. As such, these discs also feature all of the same extras that were on the Funimation releases, with most of those extras consisting of episode commentaries or interviews with the dub staff. They're nice to have, and provide some interesting bits about the dub's recording process and what the actors thought of how their characters changed throughout each season, but that also means there isn't much here that's new. The only real new addition to these releases including the OVAs, Tokyo Ghoul: Jack and Tokyo Ghoul: Pinto, which features the backstories of Tsukiyama's human companion Chie, and a CCG investigator named Arima. Notably, this is the first time they've been physically released, as their availability has been limited to streaming. While they make for a nice addition, I have a couple of minor gripes with how they were included in the release. In particular, it's a little annoying that these OVAs were slapped onto one of the discs for the end of season 1, as the first season ends well before either character is properly introduced in the anime. These are also the only parts of this release to lack credits for the dub actors. It's a shame, too, because the dub for the series is fantastic, and I was impressed with how consistent the performances were, even when the show surrounding them wasn't. The relatively low price for owning all four seasons does at least make this a decent investment for first-time buyers. If you've owned any of the previous releases, there's not much reason to upgrade beyond being able to own those OVAs. Even if you are picking this up blind though, it's hard to recommend this set in good faith when only half of the show feels worth owning.

Although I expected mixed feelings after revisiting Tokyo Ghoul all these years later, the experience was much more polarizing. While they certainly aren't flawless, season 1 and Root A are at least good complementary pieces to the original manga, and are still worth watching. I can't say the same for the : Re anime, as it not only feels like a disservice to its source material but is such a horrendously bad piece of media that I'm largely just happy I'll never have to see it again. Because of all that, it's a bit tough to recommend this set to any but the most dedicated of Tokyo Ghoul fans, despite its affordable price. Even if you are such a fan, though, unless you already own the manga box sets for both series and are simply looking to add the anime to your collection, you'd almost certainly do better just plucking down for those instead.