Attack on Titan Final Season Part 3 being split into 2 extra-long episodes

Attack on Titan’s final season is getting yet another weird breakup. NHK announced that Attack on Titan Final Season Part 3 will be split into separate parts, and won’t air in the standard format the show has had up until now. Instead, each half of the season will be shown as its own extra-long episode. The first of these will debut on March 3.

The first half will air as a special one-hour episode on March 3. The second half of the season will then debut as its own separate hour-long episode sometime later this year. This decision condenses Final Season Part 3 into a feature-length runtime, though each half is likely to have its own self-contained story. This is a major departure from the more traditional episodes that previous parts of the final season have had. While many fans speculated and hoped that the show’s last few chapters would end up being adapted into something of feature length, this isn’t really what anyone was expecting.

This latest breakup of the show’s final season should (hopefully) be the last one. Attack on Titan Final Season, the series’ name for what would otherwise be season 4, started in December 2020 with Part 1. The second part debuted in 2022. Fans initially expected each of these to lead to the end of the manga, but instead, each one ended farther away than expected — and with a tease for another part.

For newcomers hoping to get into the series before the story concludes, there will also be a seven-part omnibus collection of episodes that tells the entire story of the series in a very condensed format. It’s set to begin airing on Feb. 25 and will conclude on Feb. 27.