Shinmai Maou no Testament Departures

In short, this ‘Shinmai Maou no Keiyakusha Departures’ is highly recommended because of its ecchi harem girls.

That the story has a cliffhanger ending seems to be a significant flaw of this anime, however, the story or plot itself is a minor part of such R15 OVA anime. Being a service anime produced by the energy-saving-ism Japanese animation industry, this anime does its part, which is to provide ecchi scenes and not to make significant logical flaws in the plot, fantastically. The story is a cliche, but characters do not do what they are supposed not to do. Plus, the harem girls are wonderfully cute ... and ecchi. The concentration of ecchi scenes of this anime is high among the R15 (Japan standard) anime.

This episode seems to be a structural segment developed to hold the interest of the audience for a while longer while the third season is coming together, and probably because there were some important story elements that needed to get established that wouldn't fit well into the episode outlines of the next series.

That said, it's a necessary view from a total story point of view, but those that have read the light novel series, as I have, will be disappointed as there seems to have been some unnecessary elements added or at least significantly modified, while other elements were substantially reduced or eliminated from the ... novels. Perhaps I'll create a forum thread to discuss that last issue, this probably isn't the place for comparisons with the novels in any depth. I will say that the conversation between Mio and Yuki was a brilliant edit and very well executed; easily the best and most important part of the 60 minutes.

As a production however, most of this really felt like an afterthought. The artwork lacked smoothness both as cells and as animated. The ink and paint work was very flat with almost no texturing and hard-edged shadows that crushed any feel of dimension. The animation was stiff, stuttery, and overall lacked character, as all the motions seemed so robotic. The sound wasn't much better. The FX were all stock elements, and the VA recording made it difficult to tell one character from another just by the voice. All the work previously put into developing characters with distinct personalities was kind of left behind. Furthermore, the script left out most of the development opportunities that were used in the novels were every character had a chance to grow and establish a possition of agency with the growing family unit; especially Maria and Chisato who each had some very important scenes in the novel that didn't show here at all. Except for the earlier mentioned scene between Mio and Yuki, which raised the whole thing up a notch and a half.

To sum up, generally disappointed, especially as a reader of the novel, but there were a couple of things here that were really well done and important to the overall story line. A need to watch in spite of the shortcomings.

It feels the same as season 1 and 2. There is nothing new about it, I find that the plot are absolute meh, feels generic to me.

My review are the same, it's repetitive ecchi scene that happened inside their daily life, the girl are hot, lewd and thirsty, especially when it come to the school teacher ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). For me I feel that these erotic scene with the school teacher itself carried the whole series/franchise. Even if the plot are fucking boring, the battle are fucking meh, the erotic scene is repetitive but when it comes to the scene on the school teacher ... I would come back for it ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).