Reviews

Dec 24, 2019
Mixed Feelings
Preliminary (12/12 eps)
Welcome to the Fourth season of Food Wars, or better said, Food Fetish. The best culinary school in Japan just had a change in directors and things are facing an impending revolution. Last season, we saw how the new director is gonna revolutionize the gourmet world by snatching the freedom of chefs and making them adhere to strict defined rules of elite cooking. Our heroes strongly value their ability to experiment on food and strive to achieve new heights of culinary greatness. So, in order to protet themselves and their new tsundere comrade from get stripped of their freedom, they form a rebel group. In this verse, everything is decided by a Shokugeki and hence, the Shokugeki tournament in this season.

This season takes everything the anime had built over the past 3 seasons and tarnishes it. For the past 3 seasons, we have been presented with fantastic progress and each event was better or atleast, on par with the previous. However, that set the bar a bit too high. This season, fails to surpass what it had formerly estabilished. It doesn't even try to go high and still, it ends up surprisingly subpar.

Let me elaborate. Until now, we had 3 parts to a Shokugeki: The Preparation, the cooking and the judging. Each part excelled in its own way.
---The preparation helped in showing the character's hardwork and out of the box thinking. We all loved to see Soma rack his brain all night and come up with new, innovative ideas.
---The cooking part lay emphasis on new cooking techniques, be it french, italian or japanese, new technology, sudden pivots to up one's game and ofc, aroma magic. Do not sleep on the aroma factor, aroma defines 50% of taste. Also, we got to see SOma being a sous chef, which is a huge experience in the culinary world. After all, chefs work as a team in restaurants and they properly coordinate their efforts. This is what the internship arc was for.
---The judging part makes food wars one of the most unique anime out there. It is here that we get to see what compliments what, which ingredients change the direction, which ingredient adds extra flair, how arrangement works, how to take atmospheric effects into consideration, etc. And then came the foodgasms; the place where ecchi is so damn delicious. Nearly all the food tastings showed a unique way to please the judges and so many different ecchi postures. Don't get me wrong, the ecchi is food wars is actually enjoyable.
The former seasons gave proper time to these stages and fleshed each of them out carefully. Both the main character and the oppoent got their own screentime, thereby creating a sense of tangibility. Often, they'd interdigit two of these steps and create a seperate, non linear experience. It riled things up and kept everything fresh for the viewers.

Now comes season 4. It is incredibly rushed, mushing in 12 fights in just 8 episodes. Cumulative prep time and cooking time were cut down to nearly less than 8 minutes per episode. So, the positive impact of these got lost. The judging got sufficient time but even then, it fails to impress. The creative ecchi coupled with incredibly delicious sounding, detailed judgments were reduced to bunch of cliched ecchi and ingredient listing/complimenting. They saw that we enjoyed the judging part the most and so, they put all their chips into the judge slot and STILL, lost the bet. As an end result, we got a half assed combination on very short, nearly non existant cook-prep time and another set of longer, still half-assed judge-prep time.
Its a tournament arc but it falls flat. There is no real fear of loss, no proper motivation to win, the battles were completely lacklustre and on top, EVERYTHING is horribly rushed. the first 8 episodes went by in a so quickly that i didnt even realise tht im watching a water down version of what i love. It is at episode 9 when shit slowed down and I got some time to think about what I watched. [If I had watched weekly, I'd have realised sooner. But I binged, so it took me some time.] There is no build up of hype, only milking of former hype. There are only a handful of glory moments. Most fights are lacking in all departments and so, none of them are distinguishable(except 1). I didn't get ANYTHING to cherish. Felt more like a glass of cold water that i gulped down when i excepted hot chocolate to savour.

Lets get to the characters now. A tournament is one of the best methods to flesh out a character. Most of the characters in season 4 are quite developed already. So the anime uses this chance to neglect it. Only 1 character gets decent development, the rest get little to none. Neither sides of the battle are allowed to shine properly, whereas previously, they shined equally. As i mentioned, there is no prep or cook time so the window of further development is very narrow. The antagonists were being built up right from season 1. They were shown as a bunch of legendary figures and boy was I excited to see them. Unfortunately, I got just a teeny tiny portion of what I expected. Their development was simply sidestepped by giving a shallow backstory to each of them that accounted to nothing. None of them were fleshed out properly here. Out of 10, only 3 of them felt somewhat satisfactory because they were already partially developed in the previous seasons. Remember, if the opposition is not good enough, the hero's victory doesn't look half as good as it should.

The animation is still fluid and refreshing to look at but it has lost its dynamic edge. Repetitive shots and unimaginative movements are all over the place. The OP is good, maybe it catches on; i wouldn't know cuz I'm already obsessed with "Toss a coin to your Witcher". Soundtracks weren't bad either, some of them did a remarkable job in compliment the scenes.

In a nutshell, S4 is a big disappointment. The 3 episodes of the stagiare arc had better quality than all 12 episodes of this season. I'd sooner rewatch the first 3 seasons 10 times than rewatch this one.

So that concludes my review. If you feel I'm being biased or wrong in some ways, feel free to comment on my wall. But, before you do anything, try comparing the 5th bout featuring Soma-Erina and Eishi-Rindo with the Triple threat featuring Soma-Hayama-Ryo, you'll probably see why I'm this disappointed.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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