It's an awesome anime that with time got lost in what it was trying to do. The first season is awesome. Solid and interesting characters, has ACTUAL detective stuff in a serie which the main cast is from an detective agency, good amount of comedy and seriouness. However, as the seasons progress, it gets crazier and crazier, in a way that makes it seem like they wanted to take lore out of their ass. Literally goes from: "recruting the murder tiger in the detective agency" to "kill god".

The first season? Awesome, some people don't like the slower pace, more episodic vibe. Valid, bungou stray dogs is heavily selled like an shounen and in this kind of genre you expect lots of action. The second season? Ok... It starts introducing a bunch of new characters that later on most won't be used but sure, it's an nice season. Alredy lost the real meaning of being an detective agency and now it only serves to pin point that they're the good side, even if bsd likes to play with the "gray tones". Third season? It's the beggining where things started to go crazy, it's still an good season but definitely the begging of the tragedy. Fourth season. HUH? Ok, in this season it's alredy frenetic crazy, the bunch of POVs are overwhelming, the history starts to feel like the actor lost criativity and was being pressed cause wth is this notebook? Once again put on more characters, adds more lore, gosh what is this. Fifth season... I won't even comment cause i could hardly understand what was going on.

There're so many characters that it is almost impossible to develop, feels like the actor wanted more for us to know the actual writers (cause yea, each character is inspired in a real writer and their works) than caring for them or make them have an solid hole. To make it worse, obviously what keeps the public watching is the characters, their phylosophy, their lore, their constrast, it absolutely isn't the lore. So creating a bunch of characters only to properly develop a few and do an half-baked development attempt for others, is like shooting yourself in the foot for a show like this. Feels a lot like the company was just pointing a gun at the bsd actor saying "make it have more action, make it be longer, make it shounen, add lore, NOW" and he desesperate just kept adding more and more stuff to please them.

Little observation: It's the type of anime where the protagonist don't feel like the protagonist, and that's sad, Atsushi could have been awesome. But yea, it probably is impossible to be the main attraction when there's 50 characters and half of them are interesting too.

Overall, it is an awesome anime that had great potential and got wasted when started doing too much.