A nice start to the final season of Dr. Stone.

This cour was very very nice, it concluded on a very satisfying part which really makes you want to continue watching the next few parts; personally, since the first episode I found it to be quite fast, which did impact my understanding of the characters a little bit, as it felt like everything was going a bit fast and not leaving a lot of space for developing some of the characters shown for the first time in this season.

For the content in itself, I found it very fun to watch week-by-week, perhaps because this arc is well-written in the manga, but I think that they adapted it nicely in the anime, some of the flashbacks we got, on top of the new developments between the characters made it a blast to watch, especially compared to some of the older seasons, which dragged on for a little bit too long (such as the second part of season 3).

Now for some of the bad parts - sometimes they rushed over a lot of the things that were happening to get to a "better" part of the arc, this in itself would be fine, but I think they could've handled the earlier episodes a lot better in terms of showing how the characters felt about certain events (

Spoiler, click to view

Like when they were crossing over the pacific and Ryusui was challenging Senku, I think they could've shown a lot more of the crew's overall reactions other than just Gen and Kohaku.

); also, sometimes the animation quality would drop, this isn't VEEERY noticeable except for a few episodes, but it did feel jarring sometimes. The second part of the anime also felt a little bit rushed in a way that it's "in your face" a lot, sometimes you're just watching and suddenly everything is high-stakes out of nowhere, but that can be excused because of how fast the pace was overall.

In the end, this season's shaping up to be very story-based, this doesn't mean that it won't have it's action moments (this is Dr. STONE, after all) but it feels like they're trying to wrap things up neatly and fill in a lot of the holes left in the story, as is the function of a final season, lol.

Compared to some of the past seasons, I enjoyed this one a lot more than the last one, it felt written way better, had way more action parts, the character interactions were fun, the arc is engaging and really makes you want to keep watching, binging this season might become something I do in the future later.

To finalize - This season feels like the "essence" of Dr. STONE, it doesn't take itself TOO seriously, focuses on Senku's development while also giving the rest of the guys like Chrome and the others a chance to shine, which I found fun to see, aswell as being action packed to the brim with content. truly a 9.5/10 Season in my eyes.