I first started looking at the Yami Shibai series thanks to a new short series running this year, the Ninja Collection. (It had much the same urban legend/ghost story idea but with the addition of a ninja-exorcist coming to save people at the end of each episode). As I started the main series, there are currently seven seasons of anime shorts and a current run of what looks like live-action adaptations of the shorts too. I thought the stilted, animatic-like animation for this series couldn't be more fitting, and I can fit in a full season in roughly an hour before bed. I felt I neededto comment on this season more than the others, though.

The previous couple of seasons had some gimmicks involved. For Yami Shibai 3, I was less impressed with the direction. Each episode featured some creature that was so horrific in design that it actually lost all sense of fear or realism for me to really feel scared by the story. It culminated into an interesting finale, but ultimately I felt that it lessened the overall product.

This season, however... I like what they're doing. We're back to the kind of ghost stories you may expect from the opening seasons, but with some live-action shots mixed in that emphasize and bring to life something otherworldly. I'm feeling this a lot more than those creature designs they tried. At times, it felt genuinely stunning.