Date A Live V

This honestly surprised me in the best way. I’ll admit it, I wasn’t a big fan of the new animation style at first. It felt different, and I was worried it wouldn’t live up to the previous seasons. I went into it a little scared that the magic might be gone. But in the end, it turned out really good. The story delivered, the characters were still amazing, and the emotional moments hit just as hard as before. I actually ended up enjoying it way more than I expected. And now… I’m just hoping we get another season, please. After everything that happened, it feels like there’s still so much more to explore, and I’m not ready to say goodbye to this series yet. For a show that’s been with me for years, Season 5 was a great continuation,even with the animation shift, and I’m crossing my fingers for more.

The fifth season of Date A Live finally hits the endgame on a lot of the overarching plot threads and provides the answers to most of the mysteries that had been accumulating over the course of the series. This is the season where the conflict between Rototoskr and DEM reaches its climax. It’s also the season where the truth behind the Spirit of Origin is revealed and ultimately dealt with. As such, it’s a very different experience from past seasons. There’s very little in terms of romantic fluff or slice of life. It’s heavily plot oriented and overall pretty serious all the way through, for better or worse. It’s difficult to describe without going into spoiler territory, but I view this season as having two phases. The jump from the first to the second will be incredibly obvious once you reach it. The first phase overall has a very epic feel to it. There’s a lot of great large-scale action. I especially liked some of the gimmicks. There are some really strong emotional gut punches in this phase. It becomes clear pretty quickly what’s going to happen, but it still flows well enough to hit pretty hard due to the investment built up in the main cast. Shidou’s growth as a character came through very well in this phase. The rest of the main cast didn’t get as much time to shine but I think everyone got at least one good moment. Mio makes a fantastic and unique villain due to how she genuinely loves and respects all the spirits, but still doesn’t feel any hesitation in massacring them. Other similar betrayals have the villain get tripped up when confronted on whether their relationship and all the fun they had was fake, but Mio fully embraces it as true and thanks them for being such good friends. She’s completely insane to the point she makes Kurumi look normal. The second phase I wasn’t much of a fan of. The focus here is the relationship between Shidou and Mio. The problem is that it’s overtly messy. I feel that there were two ways the story could have gone in this regard and I would have been fine with either, but the writing was constantly flip flopping between the two. I suppose that adds more suspense to things as things are more uncertain, but this isn’t really the type of plot thread where predictability is a problem. The inconsistent flow results in things being thematically inconsistent and both Shidou and Mio end up getting muddled as characters which significantly diminishes both of their character arcs. With that said, there were still some great moments in the second phase as well. The climax was exciting and ultimately it did resolve most everything it needed to other than Mio in a pretty satisfying manner. The epilogue was pretty rushed, but a nice touch to end on. Thus, I still enjoyed this phase and overall am happy with this season. And of course, I would definitely watch more seasons if they were ever made. The art and animation this season unfortunately took a noticeable dive. There’s just way too much bad 3DCG. In season four it was isolated to only the especially active action sequences, but here it was pretty much everywhere. It really dragged things down and made some key moments nowhere near as impressive as they should have been. Though the change in art style that was introduced in the previous season works really well for the tone of this one. The OP and ED are both decent enough, though they also have a pretty different style from previous seasons to reflect the difference in tone. The soundtrack was surprisingly great this season. The use of instrumental versions of the first season’s OP was fantastic. tl;dr: A season with some major issues regarding a core plot thread, but that still manages to hit some really amazing highs.

Story (6) : This season is better than the previous season, the introduction is quite good, then I like the direction of the story. And there are some plot twists too which I think are good to strengthen the story of date a live. the one that is lacking is one flashback that is really flat or ordinary but the reason is like still a child. So the character wants to achieve that goal because of the flashback that is flat. Then every time there is a fight between A and B, but the cut scene is different to the fight between C and D which is very long. Then the fight here is really weak, only fighting for 10 seconds then there is a lot of small talk. Which results in destroying the fighting choreography. However, the last episode looks like they used their fighting budget there. but overall, I quite like the direction this story ends Characters (7) : Compared to the previous season, here all the characters are really involved because this seems like the biggest fight in Date a Live to end the story conflict. I quite like the villain Isaac Wescott, he uses various ways to achieve his goals because he is smart. And I like anime villains that really fight using their intelligence. Then the new character Mio here is very OP, I also like her character and her backstory. Then Tohka & Kurumi are really MVP in the fight. Especially Kurumi because of her intelligence by using her skills Visual (5) : I gave it 5 because, the visuals are already good but what I'm confused about is the 3D CGI. In Date a Live Season 1 - 3 they rarely used CGI, but in Season 4 & 5 there was a lot of 3D CGI, so the visual fights were honestly very disturbing and disgusting to watch. Audio (8) : I quite like the Opening & Ending because it feels relaxing with full of emotion. Then the OST is very suitable for each scene, some are even from Season 1 OST. Then the sound effect is also good, and the Voice Actor also really feels real and passionate with the emotional conditions of the characters that occur