Not Recommended
Does Kimetsu no Yaiba even need an introduction at this point? The first season blew up like crazy in 2019 to the point it turned into one of the most popular anime series, the movie is the highest grossing anime movie of all times, and this is already the 3rd season. The problem with this season isn’t that it is doing the same thing as the previous one, the problem is that it does that worse than its predecessor. Everything is a downgrade from the characters, presentation, visual effects and yes, animation suffered a downgrade too. This arc focuses on two Pillars, Mitsuri (the energetic pinkhaired girl with big breasts) and Muichiro (the guy who was looking at the clouds instead of paying attention on the first season), and let me tell you this was a terrible idea because it didn’t know how to balance the showing of the characters. Up to some point I could only fake that I cared about Muichiro, and so many episodes where nothing happened centered on him without developing anything about him weren’t helping, I guess you can say that they showed his backstory for a whole episode, but if you have been watching Kimetsu then you already saw his backstory, his parents are dead, someone of his family was killed by demons and then he turned into a demon slayer. Compare him to Uzui, he maybe wasn’t the best character, but he showed personality with his looks alone, he quite literally looked like a star from the glam rock era, and then you see his characterization and it’s actually entertaining to watch unlike 99% of the characters in the series, to the point I can say I liked him. Then you look at Muichiro, he has as much personality as a self-insert MC in an isekai series, and none of his scenes are actually entertaining to watch and some are even painful like his sudden character development after some nice boy words from Tanjiro, what’s worse is that he is the Pillar we spend the most time this season with, I cannot even fake to care about him at all, and I could do that even with Zenitsu.
The other is Mitsuri, when she appears we see her naked in an onsen, which actually surprised me, the series didn’t have so much blatant fanservice, sure there were some revealing outfits like Daki’s but no actual scene was this blatant on it, and not only that but even her breasts going full “boing” in another scene, before you think this is a complaint, it isn’t, I liked that as I’m not one to usually complain about fanservice. Her backstory is nothing special, but she isn’t “oh, my family died by a demon” for a change and I can at least thank for that, even if her backstory is basically “people didn’t want to marry me because I don’t fit with the standards of women”. I have seen people claim this didn’t make sense because of how attractive or sexy Mitsuri is, but it actually makes sense, women stronger than men was obviously not looked well back in the time this series takes place, she was so clearly out of the “norm” of how women should usually behave to get a man. Overall, Mitsuri is pretty to look at I guess, she is a sweetheart, but that’s pretty much it.
Tanjiro and Nezuko stay pretty much how they always were, just that Nezuko for some reason can get into her “adult form” without losing control unlike last time she transformed into it, not much to comment on those two this season. The other companion this season is Bakugo, I mean, Genya, I barely remembered him when he reappeared, so Tanjiro reminding us of stuff we should already know was helpful for once, he also has a sad backstory where his family was killed by demons and his brother is one of the Pillars. Do I care about him? Well, no, he is still as unremarkable as he was before, just that he is at least in battle now to say that he isn’t only a background character anymore, and he has a gun! Because of course someone should have a gun that also slays demons but no one else uses them as far as we have seen, katanas are just better I guess.
Then there are the Upper Moons, these ones were so lame that I cannot even bother to remember their names, when compared to the previous ones that appeared they end up even worse. Akaza was a little memorable, even if his debut was just suddenly appearing and fighting a character I barely cared about and lasted for about 10 minutes or so, as his fight had great visuals and good choreography and he even managed to kill Rengoku. There was Daki and Gyutaro, who also had a great fight that lasted half of the previous season, and they almost killed the main cast, Uzui and his wives. When you see that, it is no surprise why they said that Upper Moons haven’t been killed in 100+ years, everything they showed up to this point being incredibly strong even for the strongest demon slayers. And finally, we have these two who, aside from being completely unmemorable, one has one of the lamest fight scenes in Kimetsu no Yaiba where he is killed easily by 1 SINGLE Pillar, and how did he do this feat previously seen as impossible? Easily, he had a mark, but what’s this mark that served as the key point to one of the most important scenes of this season? Erm, well, we don’t know. You know your writing is extremely subpar when a series over 40 years old did foreshadowing better than you in the same genre, just look at Dragon Ball, we had a whole arc talking about the Super Saiyan, it was “hyped up” for a long time as a big power up that would turn the tides of the battle, and so when the time came where Goku turned into a Super Saiyan, it was actually exciting, because it was a pay-off of what has been built up until that point. Now, what is this mark again? I think it appeared last arc but under no explanation of why or what happened neither there nor on this season. These battles were here, but there is no tension, no excitement, no anything, because even those two Upper Moons Kokushibou and Douma were more memorable with just a couple of scenes under their belt than these two and their whole season.
But I think one of the things that bothers me the most is the obvious false advertisement this season had, apparently the producer Yuma Takahashi said that this season’s animation would “enter in a new level”, and unless he meant a new level of low, you’ll see this is a blatant lie if you have eyes. The animation this season isn’t better than in the previous ones, in fact, it is worse, the example that everyone could have noticed is the CGI used on this season, going from the absolutely ugly looking fishes that were simply laughable, and this is a thing that every Kimetsu no Yaiba season have suffered, because Ufotable cannot hide their CGI, but this looks as bad as the snakes in Mugen Train, and the CGI when Emu turned into a giant larva or whatever he turned into looked hideously bad. Take for example the CGI used last season, Daki’s ribbons were made of CGI but they didn’t look ugly, sure, they were pretty noticeable but they wasn’t a problem in their actual look, here, aside from the fishes that some may argue were intentionally made to look bad, there is also the wood dragons, that are as noticeable as Daki’s ribbons but when people interact with them it looks really bad, like when Tanjiro was holding onto one of them, it almost looked like MAPPA level CGI, and with that I mean that it looked almost like a green screen where the actors were put over and not properly interlayered. I know, Ufotable is mainly known for making their CGI backgrounds and actually making their characters interact with them naturally with their great compositing that still remains for these season’s backgrounds, but when it comes to the attacks that the characters use, the CGI usually looks from meh to bad, and this season unfortunately had to eat up the bad part.
And with this I’ll say that the crowd saying that Kimetsu no Yaiba has the best animation in the industry have always confused me, I cannot even comprehend why anyone would say that, pick literally any anime from Kyoto Animation, ANY OF THEM, and it has better animation. No, I’m not saying that Kimetsu doesn’t have some incredible cuts of animation, including things from the previous seasons, and even this season had a very good one of Tanjiro with the Sun Breathing technique against the fourth moon thanks to Nozomu Abe, but aside from some places, the series has pretty regular animation. No matter what they do while adding the layers upon layers of digital effects, people will eat it up as “the best animation” disregarding anyone who complains about the visuals, but the visuals in Kimetsu no Yaiba aren’t perfect, not even close, and I would like for Ufotable to be more confident in their actual animation and not just in their digital effect spam. And speaking of too many digital effects, this season got definitely the worse treatment, I think the people at Ufotable thought that they weren’t adding enough digital effects and for that they decided to add even more, just look at the first episode with the reunion of the Upper Moons, there was so much exaggeration to the most minimal thing that it looked like an Indian soap opera, you can even see the comparisons on internet about that, it made the scene look funnier than any of the jokes in the series, and I know that’s not a high bar because the humor in this series has always been and will probably keep being terrible in the future, yet this scene was actually funny, and I know this series has never known the concept of being well directed but this is just too much, this is directing that is just damaging the scene instead of helping it.
In my tags about the first season I said that this series puts me to sleep, it is like a sleeping pill, this is a thing I cannot say about many series because as much as I complain about some of them, since they get on my nerves they just bother me more than causing another emotion, but Kimetsu no Yaiba is different, I don’t hate it, it’s just that it puts me to sleep, but while the first season had multiple memorable moments that were actually engaging, the Red District arc also was engaging and what’s more I don’t remember any episode actually putting me to sleep that arc, sadly, this season returned to putting me to sleep, even while watching an episode a person walked close to me and told me that I was falling asleep, that’s mainly why I remember the episode where Tanjiro trained and got that sword. This just puts this series in this very weird situation where I don’t hate it, but when there’s absolutely nothing happening it literally makes me want to sleep because of being so superfluous when there isn’t any of those scenes with good animation. This season isn’t engaging at all and it is a step in the wrong direction.
Thank you for reading.
