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.