Anime 54898 Bungou Stray Dogs 5th Season Reviews Filter Check 2

Disclaimer: Don't let other people's reviews ruin your enjoyment of the show. If you LOVE BSD like a lot of people do then you should love it. This review is just an opinion of someone who likes to write to practice communicating their thoughts. Enjoy what you enjoy don't let other people bring you down :)

When I think of Bungo Stray Dogs I think of the sunk costs fallacy. Every few seasons I see a new season of Bungo Stray Dogs coming out and decide to rewatch it thinking "If it keeps getting renewed I must just be missing something" ... or "Surely this season will tie everything together and this is what people are waiting for." This is never the case.

Dialogue/Story (2/10) It's just People Reading off a Script:
For its entire lifespan, BSD has relied on exposition dumps and flashbacks to tell its story. Every time a decent piece of world building is hinted at, it's always ruined 10 seconds later by a character explaining the minutia of every detail of something. The conversations are so full of cheesy exposition it leaves no room for the viewer to infer or learn anything about the world on their own. It feels fully as if there is a person standing in a recording booth, holding your hand while reading off of a piece of paper that describes the plot of the episode or scene in a cool voice. This kind of exposition ends up undermining the characters themselves because of how unnatural it feels. (No hate to the voice actors. They do a great job. It's just the writing.)

Characters (5/10) Interesting Characters are too Inconsistent:
People like Daiza and Doppo are not poorly written characters. They have clear motivations when we observe their pasts and are willing to risk everything for their convictions. However, these characters are all too often used as empty vessels to convey a piece of exposition or some odd comedic tone that is completely inconsistent with how they would behave normally. Overlooking this lack of character consistency is one thing, but interesting characters in BSD are completely overshadowed by the hundreds of thousands of flat, meaningless characters who's motivations are so recycled it could eliminate the pacific garbage patch. Every villain in the show is a terrorist or politician who's motivations boil down to "Government good" or "Govenrment bad" with no nuance or depth. These terrorists are then killed or put in jail and then the next terrorist pops up and tells us his slightly altered version of "Government bad." Rinse and repeat. Any consistency in these characters is also drowned out by the wildly fluctuating tone in the show.

Tone (3/10) Funny? Serious? Action? Mystery?:
Bungo Stray Dogs constantly jumps from one genera to another on a dime. Some of these switches it does seamlessly, while during others the quality drops so drastically it's impossible not to notice. This leads to a plethora of story beats and otherwise compelling scenes that are washed out by a complete indecision around the tone in this show. A good example is episode 1 of season 5. There is a very compelling scene where a character is depicted going through extreme mental and emotional anguish coming to grips with a reality he cannot bare. The scene ends halfway through and the opening then starts. This sets a good tone for the episode to be perhaps a bit dark and profound. After the opening, there are two minutes of dialogue (unrelated to the previous scene) in which the characters sit in a room and say "What are we going to do" "I don't know what do you think we should do" "I don't know." The first scene resumes and ends in an even more emotionally gripping and dark tone. Directly after this scene, two characters have a comedic dialogue with each other to explain what happened with them in the last season as if neither of them had ever experienced it. In the first 7 minutes of this episode (1:30 of which is the opening) there are three distinct tones which completely clash. It cannot decide what it wants to be. It wants to be fun and goofy while exploring serious, dark pasts while also solving mysteries while being fast paced and action packed. None of these elements compliment, but in fact constantly invalidate each other.

Overall (3/10) Too inconsistent to be Entertaining or Compelling:
Bungo Stray Dogs waters down all of its good elements by adopting every trope in every genera it morphs into. Almost all the villains are 1 dimensional and cheesy. The tone constantly shifts unpredictably creating a feeling of a story that has 3 different teams with 3 different goals writing each episode. The characters are erratic in their behaviors and feel unnatural due to the need to constantly exposition dump in every scene where something isn't exploding.

TLDR, Maybe I'm too old and have seen too much anime but I think BSD is similar to something like SAO. When SAO came out it was really exciting and fun because of its novelty. Now you look back at it and think "Man, Kirito is such a boring character. This story makes no sense. Wait Kayaba killed 4000 people why again?" I thinks BSD is SAO for some people who are experiencing anime for the first time or maybe haven't been chronically online as much as I have.

Bungou Stray Dogs Season 5 also known as the embodiment of Deus Ex Machina, starts to overstay its welcome with the excessive plot twists. On top of giving too much screen time to Atsushi who continues to be 100% irrelevant.


Animation / Art / General Visuals - 9/10
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The show continues to look great. Great scenery art and solid action animations.


Sound / Music / Voice Acting - 9/10
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Top notch stuff. Great music, voice acting, additional sounds.


Story - 7/10
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I'm starting to get tired. S4 was fun, but S5 undoes a lot of the build-up by producing one story twist after another, all of which seem excessively contrived, and full of deus ex machina moments that ruin the narrative cohesion.

Nobody ever dies. Everyone is always found to have been magically saved 2 episodes later, using one excuse after another. The entire season is a never-ending game of "I knew that you knew, that I knew that you knew, that I knew that you knew...". We have Ranpo, Dazai, Ando, Fyodr and others endlessly one-up each-other in ever more unbelievable ways.

It's like watching Code Geass, except instead of following along the gradual planning of Lelouch, we're stuck as an out of loop third party, just watching all the craziness go down without having a clue.

The main villain's motivations are only barely believable thanks to my own imagination, because the show surely hasn't fleshed out the world enough to make me relate to his mindset. We basically have to take his word that his rationale is solid, because there's no real supporting evidence for it. And the way it all played out in the end was absolute confusion. The season ended and I still didn't know who actually "won" and who "lost". Except I have a feeling that it's we, the viewers, who lost hours from our life watching this mess.


Characters - 6/10
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A let down after Season 4. This time around, we have excessive focus on a bunch of fanatics. Most of the Detective Agency and Port Mafia is side-lined. The Guild is basically all absent. Ranpo is stuck carrying a large part of the weight, while Atsushi once again does his best to be the worst anime character ever created.

My god, for the second season in a row, Atsushi continues to be 100% dead weight, with the story being in no way affected whether he existed or not. He still hasn't found any confidence in doing anything. He loses every fight he's in for the second season in a row. Like straight up, he hasn't managed to do anything successfully.

And to make it worse, the show creates a 1 minute cliffhanger scene at the end featuring Atsushi as someone who's gonna be relevant in S6. Even though we already know that he's never gonna do anything because the character is clearly written to be utterly useless until the end of time.

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Total - 7/10

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Bungou Stray Dogs Season 5 is a let down in my book. S4 started building up a fascinating storyline, but it all kinda fell flat because of excessively tangled up deus ex machina filled narrative.

Still, the show looks great, and the characters for the most part are fun. Except Atsushi of course. He should never have existed. Here's me begging god again that S6 finally writes him out of the show. Please god. Make him trip and break his neck or drown in his bathtub or something. That character does not deserve the animation effort.

BONES, once again, fails to include a few 'not-so-important' yet intriguing elements from the manga in the fifth season of Bungou Stray Dogs. It feels like they're rushing to churn out another 12 episodes, resulting in a noticeable budget cut. This budget constraint makes it challenging to enjoy the series; for instance, even when a character is just one meter away from the screen, they lack eyes. A glaring example of this is when Ango takes a photo of Dazai in his hand; they didn't bother to draw his eyes, only depicting a smiling face.
While the story of this season remains engaging, BONES' negligence in ... attending to these 'details' has rendered it (almost) unwatchable for me.
Wacth only if you like the story.

The anime adaptation only gets worse with each season/episode sadly.
Studio Bones excludes so SO many details and even original scenes, and it's so sad how they are not doing the manga justice because, sincerely, I consider the Bsd manga a masterpiece. They don't convey the original story as it is( for example, they didn't make Fukuzawa smile when he reunited with Rampo; they also didn't portay the true emotion when Atsushi reunited with Kunikida; they didn't include the scene when Atushi helped Autagawa walk in the corridor and so many other things were not included).
I don't know, but... it's a shame that the manga and ... the whole story are such great pieces of art and the anime somehow manages to disappoint more and more.
Also, the animation got worse?!? Maybe I'm overanalyzing at this point, and I know I should be grateful that we have an animated adaptation, but still...
I'm not usually the one to be so critical, but it's really a bummer that they aren't even trying. I'm just thinking about the anime-onlys and how much they are missing.