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,

Spoiler, click to view

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

▶ Video

But the rest of the fight looks like this

▶ Video ▶ VideoThe 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,

Spoiler, click to view

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

Spoiler, click to view

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 or S1's Seirei 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

Spoiler, click to view

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.