DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionDate A Live III
NOVEL ComedyDate A Live
ANIME ActionDate A Live V

REVIEWS

• 

  JustInCaseD

  70/100
  Well it was a step up from Season 3, but we could've gotten better...

  A lot of pressure was on Geek Toys this season to make up for the mistake J.C Staff made that was Date a Live Season 3. And for the most part: they did a mostly passable job.

  There won't be direct spoilers in this, just enough details to explain what they did good and bad here. So if you're on the fence about giving this season the time after season 3 left a bad taste in your mouth - you can read this without worry for ruining your watch experience and make a decision whether you want to dedicate time watching this from there.

  Story: We pick up right after the speedrun that covered the 12th light novel in the final epsiode of season 3 (no retcon episode for that, sorry for the fans who were hoping for that to be fixed. But it probably was for the best just to keep moving onward instead of wasting time backtracking). Shido goes back on his quest to help more spirits, and it pretty much follows suit on how they series has always gone. The twist in the plot starts to emerge as the first arc ends and we finally learn the intentions of the main villain, Westcott, and what he wants with the spirits after 2 seasons of knowing barely anything about his sinister plot. In the 2nd arc we get to see 2 unexpected characters return for a brief spell, some more information is slipped through, and then it ends in similar DAL fashion. The 3rd arc... is where DAL goes into overdrive: the Kurumi arc. We finally learn the story of Nightmare and how she ended up as a spirit. We learn of the final boss of series, and a twist on par with Kotori's reveal as a spirit in season 1. I won't spoil anything, but all I'll say is: DAL has approached it's Endgame, and with Season 5 now confirmed we now sit on the edge of our seats to see the final act.

  While there were a fair number of distractable slice of life episodes in between all the action, this isn't far off the course that the series has been doing throughout it's runtime. It's just become more noticable now that there's a darker, more interesting theme approaching and its being interrupted by all the s.o.l shenanigans. While I understand it can be bothersome, it didn't derail it enough to be harsher about it.

  Also if you still didn't get enough Love is War in your life even with it's latest season going on then you'll love this last arc in particular - you'll understand why.

  The biggest issue by far was the that the 2nd arc is... quite frustrating, given how they adapted it. They effectively sped up and did 2 novels in 5 episodes. And despite being sped up, they felt so sloooow which is the worst thing they could've done. 1 episode was essentially 1/2 of an info dump on the newest spirit, and the other half sitting around learning Ratatoskr as an organization. Which couldn't be skipped because they had already cut so much of what could've/should've been introduced/integrated in already during previous season - and so they needed to do it now or the future plot/events would make no sense. So they gave it the Slime Isekai table-talk treatment (except without even the benefit of being in depth) and called it a day. And then another was basically a filler episode where Shido and the gang get sucked into fairy tale land for... reasons. Meanwhile the Mukuro arc is going on and this episode genuinely accomplishes effectively nothing going there. I can live with filler episodes if they're placed correctly, this wasn't. It was frustrating to watch this season weekly and on rewatch it honestly felt worse. It was the first (and only personally) time I get bored watching this series.

  The final arc is good enough to not only salvage - but CARRY this season with how incredible it is, but it does require you to go through an extremely testing middle arc that may frustrate and bore you. It is worth it, and this arc isn't all terrible, but it is unquestionable my least favorite in the DAL anime.

  Consensus: solid story that's continuing the escalation setup by last season. While it has a bit of a frustrating middle, it generally kept me interested despite its interruptions and has set the stage for it's next season - which will be the climax of the series.

  Art/Animation: The new art style divided the community to some extent. Of personal opinion, I liked the character remodels and vibrant colors that gave so much more detail and life to the cast and background art. Though I understand why other folks don't, it took a lot of familiarity away from the series and no longer matches the illustrations of the source material. And I admittedly do miss that a bit. But it was universally a step up from last season's trainwreck deviantart level style, so the general impression I've seen is that it's gotten at least a "pass" from most the fanbase.

  Tho there was also the unfortunate factor of some additional censorship sewed into this season. I don't care that some of the echii was diluted down in some scenes (that was mostly expected), but the darker parts of the story were significantly changed to be less gruesome - to the point where it almost changed entire scenes and brought down the weight of the final arc (Nibelcole and Shido's room scene for example). LN readers have been very vocably upset about this particularly, and I agree with them.

  But even without the artstyle debate, a far bigger problem quickly emerged. Moving to the case of contention within this season: The CGI fights. Ima keep it real with you chief: at it's best it wasn't pretty, and at it's worst... it was just awful. The rough transitioning between 3D puppets to still frame 2D action shots as they collided didn't look good. The Origami vs Inverse Tohka fight was supposed to be one of the most action packed moments of the season: it punctuated the OP of this season and from that it looked like it was gonna be great. But after waiting 8 episodes for this promised hyped up fight, we instead got... essentially 2 plastic action figures bashing into each other with only the hands of the kids holding them edited out. The space fights with Mukuro were also very ugly at times when it dipped into the CG for portions of it. The only thing thing that looked fairly good with the CGI was the airship fight between Fraxinus and Goetia.

  It's no exaggeration to say the animation is worse than season 3's, but I'd even go as far and say that the CGI was so horrible it could be on par with the likes of Arifureta season 1 - that's how bad it was. And if you've seen or even vaguely know of Arifureta's reputation regarding it's animation: that should upset you immensely. To clarify, I'm not CGI-phobic - but when you utilize CGI it needs to feel as seemless and naturally a part of the production and scenes its used in, as opposed to feeling so out of place it sticks out and takes you out of the experience. And the CGI this season definitely felt the latter. Going from 2D animations to rough looking Playstation-esq block models for fights looked terrible. It is by far and away the biggest complaint about this season.

  Overall, for the 2nd season running animation was by far the weakest element. Like season 3 it wasn't unpassably bad to kill the anime, but by God it was awful. The eye-capturing action that makes DAL so unique and special from other harems was butchered badly this season. The only thing saving this grade was that the 2D elements looked better than before, and they put a lot of effort into making the background and fine details look much better. But why wasn't the most important elements and action scenes given as much care? Geek Toys needs improvement here: Badly.

  Sound: While it was dissapointing to have the tradition broken and not have Sweet A.R.M.S do the OP, Miyu Tomita did a pretty good job and still gave another equally banging one for this season. As far as background tracks goes, they mostly kept up with properly matching the tone of anime and it's scenes. Now we didn't get many new tracks this season, but tbf they had already been doing Date a Bullet and we heard quite a few of those throughout the Kurumi arc - so I'll give them a pass. My only dissapointment comes from not having an orchestrated version of the OP in the final episode as we've had in the 3 seasons past, but it's basically nitpicking of a hardcore fan at this point.

  Voice acting remains solid, on the original japanese end. I'm not gonna factor this into the grade at all because it would be unfair and is irrelevant to anyone who doesn't watch alternative versions/dubs. But the English dub this season... is a mess.
  It seems that they couldn't secure back all the original VAs when they needed to this season, so there's a pretty messy rotation of different VAs filling in for multiple characters - and its extremely noticable. Shido was voiced by 3 different VAs throughout the first 6 episodes before they manage to secure his original VA back for the 2nd half of the season, and they not that similar sounding in voice. You have whinny sounding Shido, the original Shido (who did 1 episode in the first 6), and really gruff Shido. It's absolutely bizzare. Reine has a different VA for the first 3, as well as many of the other minor characters (but they don't matter as much tbh). They didn't re-record anything with the original VAs for the blu-ray either, so we're eternally stuck with this version. Upon rewatch it really got to me and irk'd me so much that it takes you out of the experience. While I typically am a preferably dub watcher, this has hard converted me to the original sub going forward.

  But back to point: disregarding the dubs problems, overall sound/music was great - still the series' best and most defining aspect.

  Characters: I'm not gonna pretend that DAL doesn't have the problem that most harems have as they keep growing in size of sidelining less relevant characters in favor of the ones that are the focal point of the plot - because we all know it's absolutely guilty of it. Yoshino, the Yamai's, Miku, and Natsumi were benched for the majority of the season, bar a few specific scenes where they got some crumbs for attention. And Kotori remains in the same logistics point of directing the plot she always is in (which isn't bad tho, I like Kotori's role - she just doesn't grow or change here). Some points are gonna be docked from this category inherently. That being said, this isn't a new problem for the series (or the genre in general) so you just learn to go with it and focus on the "main" returning characters to develop or take part in the plot in a notable way. Which were: Shido, Tohka, Origami, Kurumi, Reine, and the villains Westcott and Ellen.

  For the new characters of note from this season: We have our 2 new spirits Nia and Mukuro, the new DEM adaptess Artemisia Ashcroft, Nibelcole, and the final boss of the series... the Origin Spirit.

  Of the 2 new spirits, I liked Nia the most. She broke the mold a little bit being that she wasn't some oblivous, innocent girl that Shido easily charmed into liking him like most of the cast. She's an older women in her 20's who's confidence, lack of a filter, and awareness of exactly what Shido is trying to do put him into uncomfortable, less cliche and more interesting situations - which was very refreshing. It got a few genunine chuckles out of me and I was interested in seeing where her story goes. She does get mostly sidelined sadly after her arc ends, but that is the series for ya.

  Next up is Mukuro, who falls back into the tropey nature that most of the DAL girls fall into: innocent girl that nearly immediately falls for the MC, but with another gimmick. Personally I found her very uninteresting, though I can see why some fans would like her - she is pretty much a cupcake in both looks and in personality. My distate in her could be attributed to her arc feeling... rather boring. It felt like it dragged on and on, but in reality it was being speedran so much that most of the best parts from the light novel had been cut out. Of the 5 episodes from the Mukuro arc, 1 was near completely dedicated towards info dumping on the Fraxinus organization's backstory (because that had been neglected in the prior seasons up till this point, for some reason) and another was spent on the Fairy Tale episodes that was pretty much a filler episode. 2 Light novels essentially essentially condensed into 3 episodes wasn't a great idea, as it made me feel more annoyed with Mukuro as a character than making me like her. We got all her most boring parts and lost most of the good stuff.

  Artemisia takes the place of Mana and Origami as the head AST that follow's DEM's commands. There's apparently a lot more to her, but from what I've been told from light novel readers a good portion of related backstory and scenes involving her have been cut. So for the time being, she left extremely underdeveloped and she kinda drops off from the story after the halfway point. Guess if you want more information on her you'll have to read the light novel... but given that it's expected to be an estimated 2+ years as of writing this before it will get officially brought over in english - it's gonna be awhile unless you go to an unofficial translator. :/

  I guess there's also Maria, the newly named Fraxinus A.I that helps the crew out. And while this isn't anime spoilers, it is a direct reference to the DAL visual novel Arusu Install. If you've played the game you know who "Maria" is. But if you haven't don't worry, it bares no weight on the anime. It's just a neat reference.

  Not gonna explain who Nibelcole is as well as the Origin Spirit, doing that without spoilers would be too much giveaway. All I'll say is that Nibelcole was notably watered down in brutality in the anime, as I've seen some of translations from the light novel about some of the things she was supposed to do in a few scenes... look up at your own discretion.

  Old characters:
  Tohka and Origami get their time in the spotlight in the Mukuro arc, but in an unconventional way. Again, don't want to spoil - this review is intended for folks sitting on the fence after going through season 3. Westcott and Ellen's plot starts to unfold, and they get a lot more screentime.

  Mana is back after being gone for the entirety of season 3, and that's nice - but she doesn't do much in the grand scheme of things here other than show up in a couple of scenes.

  Reine gets more involved in the plot and we see more of her this season. And we're gonna see much more of her next season.

  And Kurumi... is once again, the biggest attraction. Her arc is the reason DAL has skyrocketed to the top of almost every poll in the final weeks of the season - and for good reason. It came at the cost of Mukuro's arc being forcibly speedran so that they could have as much time as they could get to cover Kurumi Refrain, the 16th volume of the light novel. The production team clearly went all-in on Kurumi's popularity to carry the season. And while it might've made Light Novel readers upset, it clearly paid off in most anime watchers opinions.

  And Shido starts becoming more aware of his purpose, starting to ponder the nature of what he's doing and why. Which doesn't really matter much in this season, but will become a big part of the next.

  Section conclusion:
  While many of the harem girls were pretty much sidelined to where they barely exist and Mukuro's arc might've been a bit too speedran to the point where it felt both rushed yet felt slow and boring - the ones that got focused on ranged from fair at its worst to very well written at its peak. Nia's arc, Westcott's intentions finally being revealed, Shido's internal dilemma beginning to be recognized, and especially Kurumi's backstory + development carried this season.

  Overall: I can feel comfortable saying that Date A Live IV was definitively a step up from 3 in terms of it's production. While it definitely still has its issues, the end result was still roughly enjoyable as the ones before it. Subjectively, DAL is one of the best harem series ever made and is still manages to be my favorite guilty pleasure anime of all time. It would've taken a truly awful season to change that and thankfully this wasn't it. I still have my issues with it, but as a whole I still enjoyed it.

  We'll see if Geek Toys breaks the curse of every studio only doing 1 season of DAL before passing it along to the next. But if they do, and you happen to read this Geek Toys: I want to first say I appreciate your work towards adapting this series and picking it up from where J.C Staff abruptly dropped it. But please, Step up your CGI. Every fight made in 3D this season, bar the airship battle, was horrendous and by far the biggest thing that really held this season back.
  This is a very fixable problem that I hope they recognize and put effort into fixing for next season to make a finale worth the years of build up and waiting.

  Overall, Firm 7 out of 10 anime/season. While my opinion on the season is positive as a whole, the biggest issue with me that holds it back is how irritated the Mukuro arc's adaptation made me; it felt so slow despite being sped up so much. But even with that aside, it also would've needed to address some of it's issues listed above in the animation and character sections particularly for it to reach an 8 or higher. A definitively better showing over the previous season from a production standpoint, but not everyone will agree on how it was executed and it certainly had the potential to be so much better.

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• 

  veritasnoai

  65/100
  DAL IV struggles to continue the soul of the previous seasons

  I have some mixed feelings about this season, in a way I don't feel for the previous ones. It struggles in ways that previous seasons haven't, but doesn't really offer an equal compromise. At it's heart, it is still Date A Live, but something feels missing.

  There are mild spoilers but anything seriously specific is kept under spoiler tag.

  Art

  With regards to art, as long as you are a fan of the new style, I'd say the art is excellent. Characters are consistently on model with clean line art coughcoughseason3coughcough and generally every frame looks good.

  I think what feels the most different is the colors and the lighting, a lot of shots are kind of simulating the effect of lighting on a camera lens but it makes the shot a bit more gray or washed out. I thought about this for a while and compared a lot of shots but it's really tough to say, there are a lot of shots where the color is as vibrant as previous seasons.

  This season introduces the use of 3D CG for characters. If you stop the playback, you can tell they really did work hard on these models, they look basically as close as you can get to their 2D counterparts. But that doesn't mean you can't tell the difference when you see them and it's jarring in most shots. More on that in animation.

  EDIT: Hello it is I, veritasnoai from the future. This comparison shot from season 5 demonstrates the problem perfectly.

  

  There are two big changes here, line art and compositing. With the line art, Geek Toys is using a style that is more "modern" (the first anime I saw using this style was The Quintessential Quintuplets S2 but there are a few others as well). I'm personally not a huge fan of it, I prefer the rounder and more innocent depiction of the characters the original style has. This has some room for individual opinion so I'm giving it a very tentative pass.

  What absolutely cannot receive a pass is this color grading. The image is incredibly washed out, to a point where it's actually harder to look at with the eyes. Look at this luminance histogram for both of these images

  Above: A1C Luminance Below: Geek Toys Luminance

  This is a bright scene, but A1C has a far more varied luminance across the image where as Geek Toys tends greatly towards bright. Which is even more apparent on the values graph.

  Above: A1C Luminance Below: Geek Toys Luminance

  As I suspected, most of the colors in Geek Toys' image are clipping in color space which is part of why it's so hard to look at. Whoever is doing compositing at Geek Toys has really poor taste or no idea what they are doing.

  Animation

  It feels like to me like we traded art and animation with season 3. Whereas season 3 had decent animation but iffy art, season 4 has decent art but iffy animation. A show like this does have a lot of standing around and talking, so I'm really talking about the fight scenes, which is when the show has a chance to visually show off. The fight scenes just don't feel very dynamic, they are usually very short (like the end of the Nia arc, which has a lot of standing around for a fight scene), and the longer ones are broken up by the character CGI, which is some of the worst I've seen in a while.

  Episode 8 is probably the best example. You'll have fantastic, expressive shots like this

  But the rest of the fight looks like this

  The close combat looks like two action figures duking it out And has ridiculous posing like this, which makes no attempt to convey the same sense of weightlessness the 2D art does Mukuro dominates Tohka with the classic yet effective A-pose I think what sort of ends up happening is that the action feels broken up by the CG, rather than continued by it, and what would have been an otherwise engaging fight scene becomes an awkward spot-the-CG-model game. I do want to point out that because these models are pretty high quality, there are indeed shots where I think they are acceptable. In shots with many clones of a character or distant shots, I think the 3D models actually help retain more detail than what would have been there if it was drawn, and at a distance it is more difficult to spot them. # Story DAL is one of those things that sounds like a disaster on paper but somehow comes together in execution. There's an amount of variety, from the romcom moments in scenes between Shido and other spirits, the general slice-of-life antics that come out as the ensemble cast plays off each other, the unique and fun designs of each spirit and their powers, and the fight scenes. Date A Live works because of all of this coming together and that mix is important. I think the root cause of the problem is the ambitious attempt to include 3 separate arcs in 12 episodes. Seasons 2 did 3 arcs, and Season 3 did 2 (not counting the final arc that was shoved into one episode) - it became necessary to slow down a bit because of how many characters were now in the cast. I can understand why they didn't do 2 arcs, Mukuro is a fun character but her arc would not be a terribly exciting send-off for the season. Unfortunately, this came at a real cost to the pacing. In order to get through all of the plot of the arcs, screen time for most of the returning cast is reduced. From what I understand from the LN readers, a lot of few short slice-of-life scenes are cut down. For example, apparently the sister of Ellen Mathers was supposed to have a more memorable introduction. But she isn't important right now, so she is skipped for time. This also subdues the development of the overarching plot. DEM's rise to power feels quite sudden, they feel like they largely fight the same, now with a pseudo-spirit instead of robots, but are suddenly too much for the spirits to handle. The first two arcs suffer the most from this, they rarely take a moment to breathe, and only for a short, reduced while when they do. Even though episode 5 "Fairy Tale" was an entire episode just devoted to the established cast, it still felt a bit rushed as it tried to get through each character's moment. With all this, I really felt like the soul of the show was missing in the first half. In the second half with third arc though, things starts to straighten out a bit. The pacing slows down, the slice-of-life antics become more frequent and longer, and the show feels more focused. The third arc also starts a bit of a mystery as the timeline we see starts to have these disconnected pieces and begins to investigate the central bits of lore left by earlier seasons. It is paid off nicely in the last episode, with a welcomed and quite serious increase in stakes. # Music The OP just isn't the same kind of banger without Sweet ARMS but it's alright. I think what really made previous OPs so great was the involvement of the series' main composer, Gou Sakabe, just killing it with the orchestral arrangement. In general, Sakabe is an excellent composer and DAL continues to have a great score. There wasn't anything as uniquely memorable as S3's [AHIH](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKZbwuwXTNY) or S1's [Seirei](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk_SoqOVnsA) but the few new pieces here and there sound excellent. # Conclusion I think something important to remember is that this season was supposed to air in Fall 2021, and was delayed two seasons to Spring 2022. A clear reason was never given, but it is troubling to see that even with extra time, this was the result. Given that this season already ends on a cliff hanger, it might have been possible to move the last episode into season 5, and end on what was originally 11. This could have given an episode's worth of time to the earlier arcs, and maybe that would have made the difference in the pacing. If you have already enjoyed DAL through season 3, then it's likely you will enjoy this season too. But the pacing and CG are two unavoidable issues that might be difficult to swallow for some.
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• 

  Ionliosite2

  70/100
  DAL IV is a sharp improvement over its predecessor

  Date A Live IV, as you may have guessed, is the fourth season of Date A Live, and as always with every new season of this show it also means a new studio. Date A Live has been going for almost a decade now and it’s still one of the most popular harem novels, so how does it fare now with this new installment?

  The story is similar as in other seasons: they find a new Spirit and Shidou has to go on a date with her until she falls in love with him to seal her. This season is divided in 3 arcs that adapted 4 volumes of the light novel. We are still on the point of adding more girls into the series, which many can think is getting stale, although finding all of them has pretty been the whole point of the series since the beginning, at least this is the last time it will happen as the Spirit cast is complete from now on. The best part about the dates is pretty much the funny ways to see Shidou getting the girl’s heart from saying dumb lines, cosplaying, caressing cats and him getting caressed too, etc, so at least the fun aspect of Date A Live is still there and still going strong.

  Not much to say about the older characters, which is a problem if you ask me, they feel even more in the background than in previous seasons, at least Kotori stands a little by helping Shidou in the dates as always, the only old character that gets a lot more to talk about is Kurumi, but we’ll get to her later. The new Spirits this season are Nia and Mukuro. Nia is a mangaka and an otaku who is only interested in 2D people, that’s why we were told that she was very difficult to conquer, while I don’t think that last part was completely true at least we got some fun moments with her quirky personality and Shidou doing cosplay and participating as a dating sim. Mukuro is pretty different, she is a lonely girl found in space, but when her personality was opened again she got a 180 twist and almost became a yandere to have Shidou for herself, and even erased the memories from the other girls and the world about Shidou, with Moegami and Inverse Tohka also appearing again during her arc. Sadly, the thing I said above of the girls being in the background applies to the new ones too once their arcs are done, I cannot remember a scene where Nia was relevant after her arc except for when she was in a babydoll with Miku and Origami, and Mukuro is really just there after her arc.

  And at last we get Kurumi’s arc, we finally get more of her character and her past. Finally Shidou gets in his try to seal Kurumi’s powers, but if he is the one falling for Kurumi then she would be the one taking his powers instead. You can pretty much see that they went their hardest with Kurumi, obviously because she is the most popular girl, this arc finally deepens on her character and her intentions and shows how she turned into a Spirit. This last part definitely starts to lay the groundwork for the stuff that will come later relating to the Spirit of Origin.

  As in every season of DAL, the fourth season is made by a different animation studio than last time. This season’s animation is definitely better than the previous one, the art style also looks nice, however the problem would be the animation during battles, despite this being an action series, the battles this season felt less impactful. I don’t mind much the CGI, although it is pretty notorious when it is being used and sometimes the battles feel as if they were taken out of a videogame; look at the opening for example, if you compare the Origami vs Inverse Tohka battle there, it is much better than the one in the series. Now, I know that an opening is easier than a full fledged episode, however, even the choreography looks better done, it was so difficult to reuse the animation from the opening in the series? Multiple anime do it without problems, and it would have probably been a very noticeable the change of quality. Sadly, this doesn’t apply to only that battle and also goes to the others, at least the animation during other slice-of-life scenes looks more consistent than changing between CGI and regular animation.

  The opening is very good, despite not being made by Sweet Arms this time, I have to say that DAL openings never disappoint, and as said above it also looks very good. The ending is a calmer song, while definitely not the best Sweet Arms song, it is still useful for a closure.

  In terms of adaptation from episodes 1 to 8 it is a little rushed, if you read the novels it is noticeable that some stuff was cut, at the very least most of it isn’t actually important to the plot. However, the arc they gave their best was Kurumi’s, it is noticeable that they did a bet on Kurumi’s popularity, which is a good idea, and it went well.

  Overall, this season has some good points and some bad points that can definitely be corrected for the fifth season, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, despite still not returning to the quality of the first season, Date A Live is heading in a good direction after the messy last season.

  Thank you for reading.

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