Attack On Titan Final Season Part 3 Will Be Split In Two Parts

Well, "Attack on Titan" fans, we have some good news and some bad news. The good news is we won't have to wait very long for the new episode, as we finally got a release date for the return of everyone's favorite war criminal turned literal apocalyptic monster. The bad news is that we'll still have to wait longer for the final, final episode.

That's right, it finally happened. The meme has become a reality, and "Attack on Titan" is once again being split, with the "Final Season" now having as many parts as the show has actual seasons. The official Twitter page for the anime has announced that "Attack on Titan Final Season The Final Edition" (that is the literal title, really) will premiere on Friday, March 4, 2023 as "Part 1," with "Attack on Titan Final Season The Final Edition Part 2" airing later in 2023. 

At this point, the title makes absolutely no sense, with a naming convention with about as much logic as the save file of a college student's term paper.

In the meantime, there is also a first look at the final, definite, for real last season (part one) available — sans subtitles — right here. The teaser shows the effects of the Rumbling reaching Marley, with the Colossal Titans just plain incinerating and flattening everything in their path. The only question remaining is who will perform the new opening theme?

The thing is, don't expect this last season to last very long, because the news may be a bit more complicated. Shortly after the news dropped, some Japanese fans noticed (via Reddit) that the announcement doesn't refer to the splitting of the season as two "cours" — which tends to refer to a half-season of TV, usually 12 or 13 episodes — but two "parts." 

This implies, according to fans, that the new season is in reality just one very long episode, potentially even a feature-length episode, which is being split in two and released separately. The announcement for the new season mentions not a premiere episode, but a "special broadcast" on March 4, 2023, while a separate Tweet from Studio MAPPA mentions that the studio was hoping to broadcast the entire "Final Season" on that date, before the scale of production forced the studio to split it. It wouldn't make sense for this to be a regular, multi-episode season if they hoped to release the entire thing on a single day, but a longer episode? Maybe.

A longer episode, rather than a conventional season, makes sense since there is little story left to adapt. There are only nine manga chapters remaining, based on where the last episode ended, and most of those are just fight scenes.

Whatever the case may be, it is exciting to finally have "Attack on Titan" back, and with how big the final chapters are, they need all the production time they can get to deliver a worthy end to this epic story.