Review of Zoku Owarimonogatari
tl;dr: An epilogue that’s mostly just having fun but that manages to end on a pretty powerful note. Zoku Owarimonogatari is an epilogue to Araragi’s story, and thus all of Monogatari so far really. I know that there are quite a few novels after this, but they’re unlikely to get an adaptation, and it isn’t completely clear whether the novels will be translated either, so for now I’m just going to consider this as the ending of Monogatari. Everything that had been building up it had been resolved in the previous arc, and there was no necessity to build up things for the future either, sothis arc is pretty much just a self contained arc that’s playing around.
The premise is simply Araragi in a mirrored world where character’s are very different from how they normally are and Araragi exploring this world looking for a way to return to his world. Thus, the majority of this season is simply him interacting with strange versions of common characters. This is quite a lot of fun because characters were beginning to start feeling overtly familiar and so an arc that changes things up completely was exactly what was needed to keep things interesting. The writing for the majority of the arc is kind of stupid, in that it doesn’t even try to write around plot holes or inconsistencies. Rather, it just sets up the narrative such that such issues are simply allowed to exist and then goes full throttle in just rolling with them. Still, it’s not supposed to be all that deep, and it results in a lot of great humor and comedy, so overall I’d say it was quite enjoyable.
The exception to that is the last episode where it gets to the root of everything and the writing turns out to not be as stupid as it originally seemed, though still kind of stupid, and ultimately it does leave off on a really solid note. The final message isn’t all that complex or deep either, basically being that in the aftermath of the story there will always be regrets, and that’s fine, just keep moving forward. But it’s a message that I think is the perfect thing to end the series on, and the heavy handed way that it was delivered in the end felt absolutely perfect and got me quite a bit more emotional than the ending of the previous arc did. To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed with the previous arc as an ending, but this is a solid enough epilogue to make my final impressions on the series quite positive.
The art and animation aren’t too different from the previous seasons, but it makes good use of the mirror aspect for some interesting effects. The OP is kind of insane and one of those OPs that are trying to be more interesting and artistic than actually good, which I usually hate, but that I thought was pulled off pretty well here. The ED is pretty standard Monogatari and is decently solid but at this point not particularly memorable. The soundtrack was decent enough but also not particularly memorable.