In terms of visuals and sound I didn’t find much differences from the previous season so I don’t bother much with it. The opening has Kanbaru and some other girl acting as friends even when they are enemies, though there’s a part where the vocals change completely and it is nice. The ending has a very creepy and completely different art style so it was cool to watch even though the song itself was more of the same. Some recurring characters has different designs which are good but the most important one isn’t permanent so fuck it.
This season takes two risks. One, coming out at this point even though chronologically is the last, at least when it comes to the anime up until this point, since the novels kept going, as far as I know. This will make any possible tension from future entries to lack any real impact since this one already confirms the outcome.
The second is having Suruga Kanbaru as the protagonist, as was built up in Second Season, since for plot reasons many characters are not around. Up until this point she was a comical type of secondary character, and as previous examples have proven, it’s very rare for a type of spin off or sequel like that to be good or successful or even not ruin the character.
So, is Kanbaru a good enough main character to take the place from the previous ones? Not in the least, or maybe she is, she could be, perhaps, if this anime was about her, but it really isn’t, since for a big portion it focuses on another girl whose name I didn’t bother to learn and who has a very simple and boring backstory compared to the previous main cast.
Said backstory takes one and a half episode to be presented and said presentation is kind of a mixed bag. First, like with Shinobu’s in the previous season, it is told instead of shown, and this time around there aren’t even some cool visuals along with it for its first half, all that’s shown is the character talking and Kanbaru looking at her with a straight face from time to time. Ok, there are some visual metaphors with floating objects but that’s it. The second half goes for something completely different and far more interesting looking for some reason, so it balances out.
As for Kanbaru herself, something important happens to her character wise, but not because of her, it’s something that someone else does for her, without her even noticing it at first. It’s not that she’s explored much either, some backstory of her is told, and she has some conversations with old time characters where she tells them about some of her doubts, they encourage her, and she gets over it rather easily and quickly, that’s it. Plus, it is weird to see her all serious like this, she doesn’t really feel like the character that was shown so far.
Ok, I’m not dumb nor uninterested enough to not notice that the series explicitly draws some parallelisms between the two girls but, Suruga, I don’t care about being TOLD about who you could have been, I want to SEE more of who you are, or how you came to be, or who you can be in the future, and you brought none of that in this show.
The more enjoyable scenes for me where the first and third out the four scenes where old time characters appeared, and even then, one of them undid a death from Second Season, and the other was kind of comical and didn’t have the same melancholic tone of the rest of the season. The second left me indifferent and the fourth was the same old pedophilic and incestuous humor that I made clear that I hate.
As a whole the season continues to have great visuals, serviceable sound, a welcomed different melancholic tone to the most part, and it isn’t really bad to be honest, but also feels like it has very little content and very little or very uninteresting characterization in it. A very passable one and I would say the second worst after Nisemonogatari so far, which doesn’t leaves me wanting to watch any possible sequel.
