Most of my complaints likely stem from the fact that the series now has a new director. I noticed it in the recent OVAs with the Tokyo qualifiers, but all of the character interactions and action scenes feel choppy now. The series' flow used to be one of its claims to fame for me. Every shot always had some kind of movement going on, or if not, maybe an inner monologue conveying the unseen thought processes on the court. But it all feels disjointed now. We get still shots for multiple seconds in a match where the setter is just waiting for the ball silently. Dialogue will pause uncomfortably long so that a character can make a somewhat poorly animated "funny" face. I'm not getting dragged into the characters' heads and overall world as I once did.
Characters' personalities also feel very odd to me. Asahi for example (6 episodes in) feels completely soulless to me. Nishinoya's "rolling thunder" felt oddly empty as he called it out. Sugawara feels like he's taken on a strange goofball role. I could go on and on and it's hard to explain, but it just generally feels like we're only getting the surface of the characters now as well as some just feeling like they've had a total personality makeover.
Animation is the last gripe I have. Style I don't particularly have a problem with. It's different, but that's fine - I could get used to it. But it's the quality of movement-based scenes that I noticed is really sub-par. Look back at the scene of Mad-Dog rushing the net in season 2 just after being brought in. It's beautifully smooth and stylistic. Compare it to Hoshiumi (little giant from All-Japan camp) in his run-up to a massive spike. It's like his body turns into a gelatinous alien whose face was drawn by a 5-year-old. It's uncomfortably bad.
All of this has genuinely made me want to stop watching the show and just switch to the manga to see if it's better because at this rate, it's just tarnishing the incredible respect I had for the series as a whole. As I said, the staffing change(s) seem to me the most likely culprit, but given how good most reviews are for this season, I regrettably do not think there will be a reform of any kind for the second half of season 4, or any time soon after that.
P.S. Why did Asahi inexplicably abandon the hair band and go back to the bun. The lack of acknowledgment or explanation is irrationally frustrating for me.
