Ken Kaneki’s journey with Aogiri continues, with an emotional Touka choosing to focus heavily on exams in order to help take her mind off of his “betrayal”. Meanwhile the CCG gets two new members, while also trying to regroup from the Aogiri invasion.

Tokyo Ghoul root A is an 2015 anime series, it is produced by Studio Pierrot, and licensed by Funimation. It is currently available on streaming websites.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for both Dancing Flowers and the original Tokyo Ghoul manga series. If you haven’t seen either yet, then please avoid this review until doing so, you have been warned folks.

Kaneki seems to be enjoying his stay in Aogiri and has apparently been partnered up with Ayato (irony or coincidence?). In Dancing Flowers we see a lot of canon despite Root A’s confirmed anime only direction, which I think we can safely say it confirms that people overestimated how much canon would be cut from this season, myself being one of those people. This makes me believe that only the ending will be the major deviation from the manga.

Ken Kaneki still remains.

THE GOOD: The focus shifted a bit between the CCG and the human characteristics of the Anteiku crew, which was fun to see as the manga never kept to the violence and gore or heavy ghoul focus. We got to see more of the CCG this episode, and I felt last season they had a limited amount of air time so here’s hoping the CCG becomes a ore frequent setting in Root A.  The introduction of Arima and Hide joining CCG were great to see in animated form. And Eto’s true identity was half-way revealed.

The CCG getting whaled on by the “Owl”.

THE BAD: We still don’t know much of the story behind Kaneki’s reasons for joining Aogiri, in fact we’ve only seen maybe about three or so minutes of Ken on screen during this episode. Hopefully by no later than episode 4 we’ll have a clearer understanding of his motives.

Touka reflecting on Ken’s betrayal.

OVERALL THOUGHTS: Dancing Flowers puts the human element of both the ghouls on CCG into perspective. Touka decides to study in order to take her mind of of Kaneki, while at the same time following his footsteps by choosing his school for exams. We still don’t know why Kaneki has done what he’s done, but hopefully things get clearer as the story progresses. It was good to see more canonical moments get animated here as well. Otaku Dome gives Dancing Flowers an 88 out of 100.