I have some mixed feelings about this season in a way I dont feel for the previous ones. It struggles in ways that previous seasons havent but doesnt really offer an equal compromise. At its heart it is still Date A Live but something feels missing. There are mild spoilers but anything seriously specific is kept under spoiler tag. Art With regards to art as long as you are a fan of the new style Id say the art is excellent. Characters are consistently on model with clean line art coughcoughseason3coughcough and generally every frame looks good. I think what feels the most different is the colors and the lighting a lot of shots are kind of simulating the effect of lighting on a camera lens but it makes the shot a bit more gray or washed out. I thought about this for a while and compared a lot of shots but its really tough to say there are a lot of shots where the color is as vibrant as previous seasons. This season introduces the use of 3D CG for characters. If you stop the playback you can tell they really did work hard on these models they look basically as close as you can get to their 2D counterparts. But that doesnt mean you cant tell the difference when you see them and its jarring in most shots. More on that in animation. EDIT: Hello it is I veritasnoai from the future. This comparison shot from season 5 demonstrates the problem perfectly. 500https://preview.redd.it/un8s00lqb4vc1.jpeg?width=683auto=webps=e6ec5a30925f3ff3827e18cdc6b32f04d90048cf There are two big changes here line art and compositing. With the line art Geek Toys is using a style that is more modern the first anime I saw using this style was The Quintessential Quintuplets S2 but there are a few others as well. Im personally not a huge fan of it I prefer the rounder and more innocent depiction of the characters the original style has. This has some room for individual opinion so Im giving it a very tentative pass. What absolutely cannot receive a pass is this color grading. The image is incredibly washed out to a point where its actually harder to look at with the eyes. Look at this luminance histogram for both of these images 400https://i.ur.com/vuNPeHo.png 400https://i.ur.com/YnkN1fX.png Above: A1C Luminance Below: Geek Toys Luminance This is a bright scene but A1C has a far more varied luminance across the image where as Geek Toys tends greatly towards bright. Which is even more apparent on the values graph. 400https://i.ur.com/kpUYndc.png 400https://i.ur.com/EALJHmx.png Above: A1C Luminance Below: Geek Toys Luminance As I suspected most of the colors in Geek Toys image are clipping in color space which is part of why its so hard to look at. Whoever is doing compositing at Geek Toys has really poor taste or no idea what they are doing. Animation It feels like to me like we traded art and animation with season 3. Whereas season 3 had decent animation but iffy art season 4 has decent art but iffy animation. A show like this does have a lot of standing around and talking so Im really talking about the fight scenes which is when the show has a chance to visually show off. The fight scenes just dont feel very dynamic they are usually very short like the end of the Nia arc and the longer ones are broken up by the character CGI which is some of the worst Ive seen in a while. Episode 8 is probably the best example. Youll have fantastic expressive shots like this https://i.ur.com/f8c9r0T.mp4 But the rest of the fight looks like this https://i.ur.com/GvtLtPk.mp4 https://i.ur.com/A2lQsSI.mp4The close combat looks like two action figures duking it out And has ridiculous posing like this which makes no attempt to convey the same sense of weightlessness the 2D art does 500https://i.ur.com/OJgZEBT.png Mukuro dominates Tohka with the classic yet effective Apose I think what sort of ends up happening is that the action feels broken up by the CG rather than continued by it and what would have been an otherwise engaging fight scene becomes an awkward spottheCGmodel game. I do want to point out that because these models are pretty high quality there are indeed shots where I think they are acceptable. In shots with many clones of a character or distant shots I think the 3D models actually help retain more detail than what would have been there if it was drawn and at a distance it is more difficult to spot them. 500https://i.ur.com/vXtqZ6H.png Story DAL is one of those things that sounds like a disaster on paper but somehow comes together in execution. Theres an amount of variety from the romcom moments in scenes between Shido and other spirits the general sliceoflife antics that come out as the ensemble cast plays off each other the unique and fun designs of each spirit and their powers and the fight scenes. Date A Live works because of all of this coming together and that mix is important. I think the root cause of the problem is the ambitious attempt to include 3 separate arcs in 12 episodes. Seasons 2 did 3 arcs and Season 3 did 2 not counting the final arc that was shoved into one episode it became necessary to slow down a bit because of how many characters were now in the cast. I can understand why they didnt do 2 arcs Mukuro is a fun character but her arc would not be a terribly exciting sendoff for the season. Unfortunately this came at a real cost to the pacing. In order to get through all of the plot of the arcs screen time for most of the returning cast is reduced. From what I understand from the LN readers a lot of few short sliceoflife scenes are cut down. For example apparently the sister of Ellen Mathers was supposed to have a more memorable introduction. But she isnt important right now so she is skipped for time. This also subdues the development of the overarching plot. DEMs rise to power feels quite sudden they feel like they largely fight the same but are suddenly too much for the spirits to handle. The first two arcs suffer the most from this they rarely take a moment to breathe and only for a short reduced while when they do. Even though episode 5 Fairy Tale was an entire episode just devoted to the established cast it still felt a bit rushed as it tried to get through each characters moment. With all this I really felt like the soul of the show was missing in the first half. In the second half with third arc though things starts to straighten out a bit. The pacing slows down the sliceoflife antics become more frequent and longer and the show feels more focused. The third arc also starts a bit of a mystery as and begins to investigate the central bits of lore left by earlier seasons. It is paid off nicely in the last episode with a welcomed and quite serious increase in stakes. Music The OP just isnt the same kind of banger without Sweet ARMS but its alright. I think what really made previous OPs so great was the involvement of the series main composer Gou Sakabe just killing it with the orchestral arrangement. In general Sakabe is an excellent composer and DAL continues to have a great score. There wasnt anything as uniquely memorable as S3s AHIHhttps://www..com/watch?v=IKZbwuwXTNY or S1s Seireihttps://www..com/watch?v=wkSoqOVnsA but the few new pieces here and there sound excellent. Conclusion I think something important to remember is that this season was supposed to air in Fall 2021 and was delayed two seasons to Spring 2022. A clear reason was never given but it is troubling to see that even with extra time this was the result. Given that this season it might have been possible to move the last episode into season 5 and end on what was originally 11. This could have given an episodes worth of time to the earlier arcs and maybe that would have made the difference in the pacing. If you have already enjoyed DAL through season 3 then its likely you will enjoy this season too. But the pacing and CG are two unavoidable issues that might be difficult to swallow for some.